In posts for this Blog or, even more frequently, when writing reviews for WhisperinandHollerin, I have been guilty of using the term Post-Rock as a shorthand description of a band’s sound.
This term is generally credited to critic Simon Reynolds, who first used it in writing about the album ‘Hex’ by Bark Psychosis in 1994 and soon after wrote an extended essay on the topic for the Village Voice.
Reynolds wrote of bands “using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes” and that the more ‘post’ a band was, the more it was likely to abandon the traditional verse-chorus-verse structure of commercial rock.
The term has been widely used to describe music that draws its influences from other non-rock genres, principally jazz, dub, folk or ambient and often ‘post-rock’ bands will tend to have a group identity rather than being focused on a charismatic front man (or woman!).
Chicago’s Tortoise , Glasgow’s Mogwai and Explosions From The Sky from Texas are regarded as archetypical Post-Rock bands but the , by no means definitive, list on Wikipedia will give an idea of the countless other artists deemed to be equally ‘post’.
I have nothing against Reynolds, who is an intelligent writer, and I can see why he wanted to make a distinction between the straight, mainly macho world of rock and/or heavy metal bands and to identify trend which seemed to reflect a shared disaffection at the way rock music in general was progressing.
But recently, I have come to realise that the limitations of this term are so serious as to make the term either misleading or completely redundant. Often it is used simply to describe bands who have little or no vocals and/or in which ambience is more important than songs. As soon as there’s any hint of a shimmering guitar or a slow building crescendo, they immediately become ‘post’.
One of the problems is that the musical universe is now even vaster than it was in the 1990s. The proliferation of drone-based instrumentals or psychedelic jams are just two examples of styles where vocals are not the main focus and which are by no means straight rock (or straight anything for that matter!). This doesn’t automatically make it Post-Rock.
Reynolds was savvy enough to note that some bands were more ‘post’ than others but, to take some examples from the Wiki list at random, can it really be said that there are meaningful similarities between Swans and Sigur Ros, Califone and Jackie-O-Motherfucker, or Fridge and Talk Talk?
On principle, I resolutely refuse to use the label Avant Rock and, from now on, I resolve to use the term Post-Rock as sparingly as possible. As an alternative, I’ll aim to use to describe less problematic genre labels (pop/rock/jazz/folk etc) along with some good old-fashioned adjectives.
Do you think Post-Rock is still a useful label?
Are there any other music genres you think have run their course?
Related:
Reynoldsretro – Archive of writing by Simon Reynolds
