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’. Continue reading
