Five easy masterpieces: an introduction to post-rock
If there’s one thing music journalists like, it’s coining a subgenre label. Since the carefree days of jazz, folk, blues, and classical, musicians have had fun blending the genres, introducing new instruments, and evolving vocal styles. Today, we’re inundated with sounds to the extent that anything in the charts is deemed pop and anything slightly edgy and guitar-based is tagged indie. These labels can’t really be called genres, but to save us all a headache, they just about do the job.
At present, there are 6,000 music genres on Spotify, including the colourful realms of Vaporwave, Deep Filthstep and Charred Death. Whatever these genres refer to, I think we can all agree that there’s a point in genre propagation at which we perhaps should have stopped.
During the 1990s, several popular subgenres cropped up, including shoegaze, grunge, Britpop and trip-hop. However, most of these tags were denounced by their leading proponents. Artists will invariably claim, “Our genre is specific to us; therefore, we have no genre.” This is fair enough, but when describing Portishead’s sound, it was more efficient and profitable for journalists to say, “They emerged from Bristol’s thriving trip-hop scene,” than, “They draw inspiration from jazz, hip-hop, rock, punk and electro.”
With this in mind, I call your grievances and gingerly raise you “post-rock”. I will admit to feeling the same discomfort this label undoubtedly caused some of its victims. Still, it does carry a distinctive sonic thread that I find myself consuming voraciously as a streamer and record collector.
Loosely speaking, as we always must, post-rock is a specific form of experimental rock that usually focuses on textural dynamism over lyrical significance. Post-punk arrived after punk, but “rock” wasn’t such a well-defined movement. Instead, post-rock implies a modern approach to classic guitar-led rock music. While post-rock bands focus on guitar textures, they will also lean heavily on electronic sound production methods. Many proponents of the genre tend to focus on softer tones imbued with jazz and classical influences, often culminating in intense crescendos.
Without further ado, I introduce you to five masterpiece albums of the post-rock subgenre. These albums are just the tip of a rather extraordinary iceberg of music waiting to be discovered. Call it whatever you like, but I’m glad there’s a name to bind these like-minded artists to one another and certify an intriguing movement in music.
Five introductory albums to post-rock:
Bark Psychosis – Hex (1994)
Industrial, electronic, jazzy and minimal, London’s Bark Psychosis is considered the most representative band of the post-rock wave. In fact, the term post-rock was first coined by journalist Simon Reynolds in 1994 in his review of Bark Psychosis’ seminal debut album, Hex.
Sadly, the band dissolved soon after Hex, with frontman Graham Sutton leaving to embrace drum and bass under the Boymerang alias. They had been active for eight years, and although Hex was a hit with the critics, it failed to garner much in the way of commercial success. Like most post-rock albums, Hex is best consumed as a whole, but ‘Absent Friend’ is a stand-out moment, buoyed by shimmering guitars and brooding vocals.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – F#A#∞ (1997)
Post-rock seemed to take flight throughout the 1990s in Talk Talk’s wake. While Kurt Cobain led a resurgence of guitar rock in the global charts following a synth-heavy 1980s, leftfield artists found innovative ways of combining classic and contemporary influences. Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor is dignified to the core. The band has never shown the slightest hint of radio-consciousness, instead opting for albums consisting of epic, often orchestral compositions.
Frankly, everything Godspeed You! Black Emperor have put out is novel and intriguing, but their 1997 debut, F#A#∞, is a true masterpiece and a great place to start. Audaciously, the band began its discography with an album consisting of just three lengthy songs, ‘The Dead Flag Blues’, ‘East Hastings’ and ‘Providence’. Split into chapters, these suites will entertain you for just over an hour with a bleak yet immersive concept.
Mogwai – Happy Songs for Happy People (2003)
Contrary to the title, these are not happy songs for happy people. Instead, a symphony of powerful guitars, synthesisers and effects-ridden vocals bring powerfully introspective and often melancholy emotions to the fore. Anybody lucky enough to have seen this Scottish band’s live show might describe their sound as slow-core since they enjoy ear-splitting decibels despite a very gentle sound between climaxes.
Since forming in 1995, Mogwai has maintained a steady output of instrumentally focused music. However, from time to time, guitarist and bandleader Stuart Braithwaite offers his vocals to mix things up. Again, I recommend a deep dive here, but Happy Songs is considered Mogwai’s masterpiece and Braithwaite himself singles it out as the band at its best.
Talk Talk – Spirit of Eden (1988)
Talk Talk set out in the early 1980s as a synth-wave act but released their most critically acclaimed music in their quieter sunset years. After the transitional synth-pop masterpiece The Colour of Spring, bandleader Mark Hollis led the group towards more experimental pastures for the final two albums, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. Unshackled by radio standards, the band could take its time, developing jazz-infused rock compositions that shimmer elegantly with Hollis’ delicate vocals.
Released in 1988, Spirit of Eden is slightly more accessible than its 1991 follow-up, but I recommend both as essential works of the early post-rock wave. These albums took form during protracted recording sessions, with mostly improvised instrumentals. This beauty was unique to the studio since Hollis felt it would be insincere to replicate the music in the live performance setting. “There is no way that I could ever play again a lot of the stuff I played on this album because I just wouldn’t know how to,” he told Melody Maker in 1988. “To take a part that was done in spontaneity, to write it down and then get someone to play it, would lose the whole point, lose the whole purity of what it was in the first place.”
Tortoise – TNT (1998)
This Chicago collective was formed in 1990 and has since embarked on an eclectic oeuvre of explorative rock music. With fingers in jazz, krautrock, dub, electronica and jazz, they’re no strangers to the post-rock handle but could be described with several ill-fitting labels. With no vocalist, Tortoise rests on the merits of instrumental and compositional virtuosity.
Their catalogue boasts seven studio albums of impressive scope and instrumental nuance. Whilst I urge readers to embrace the band as a whole, their salient post-rock masterpiece is 1998’s TNT. Reminiscent of Bark Psychosis and Talk Talk, the album is notably jazz-infused, with dynamic drumming patterns beautifully adorned by guitars, bassoons, cellos, violins, trombones, cornets and synthesisers.
