My Education

• New Day Rising

  My Education puts music to an 83-year-old silent German expressionist touchstone

  BY AUDRA SCHROEDER

• Record Review

  BY RAOUL HERNANDEZ

My Education

ST 37 (Metropolis), Golden Arm Trio (Battleship Potemkin), Brown Whörnet (Nosferatu), and the Friends of Dean Martinez (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari): Austin's DIY film score contingent slays the silents. My Education (Sunrise) now enters that hall of fame. Compressing its live accompaniment to F.W. Murnau's 1927 Oscar triumph, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the heavy instrumentalists ignite the film's riveting melodrama like its prize-winning cinematography. Seven tracks move through three times as many musical chapters, the quintet adding a guesting fourpiece of cello, violin, vibraphone, and French horn. Band member James Alexander's haunting viola gets its gravitas across with the efficacy of a Les Paul. "City Woman" wears a Floydian hook, the song's "Kashmir" accents emerging halfway through to a building crescendo that stops just short of full-blown guitar torching and even then your eyebrows are off. "Lust" admirably keeps its pants fastened a full five minutes, only to then shift, with a shimmering pause, into a naked tangle of strings expressing regrets at the eight-minute mark. "Oars" razes using laser 1970s guitars, while a symphonic hole cut into the fattening Gogol beat of the urgent "Peasant Dance" reveals one of the riffs of 2010. "Sunrise" resolves Murnau's human duet – like daylight after the deluge.