Getting Started with Post-Rock (1991-1998)

The Innovators of a Young and Thriving Genre of Music

May 12, 2009

With epic, suggestive guitars and a pulsating rhythm section, post-rock can be atypically beautiful. This is a guide to the bands at the inception of the genre.

Post-rock may seem like a confusing title, but it’s just a way of saying that a band is using rock instrumentation to create atypical rock music. Instead of chunking out powerchords, the guitars will typically use delay and tremolo to craft atmospheric tones and melodies. The rhythm section focuses more on a hypnotizing effect, doing away with the traditional rock and roll backbeat.

Though post-rock has origins in krautrock, minimalistic classical music, and early spacerock, the safest starting-point for the style is the early 1990s, with bands like Slint and Talk Talk being named as innovators. Listed below are three early songs by three different bands, showing the roots of post-rock as emotional, harsh music capable of creating beautiful layers of sound.

“Washer” by Slint (1991)

With Spiderland, Slint eschewed the majority of their more angular tendencies and developed their penchant for moody, dark tunes. Though Slint introduced the post-rock style to a wider audience, nearly all of their followers did away with the vocals and focused strictly on instrumental music.

The overlapping arpeggios that start “Washer” create confusion right from the start before dropping out, like Alice falling into Wonderland and then hitting bottom. The drums keep a beat, but only barely. The doom-pace is accented now and then by held chords from the bass and guitars, sporadic note-plucking comes through now and then as the vocals waver over the top.

The band teases a release, a full-on build, but instead goes back to its slow spacey section. From there, they do an inconspicuous build-up and then drop it before engaging in the sort of traditional build that thousands would follow. Then, they drop it again, getting closer and closer to the catharsis they’ve made the listener not just expect, but desire.

The pay-off comes seven minutes in. The form is guitars, and loud ones, at that. They don’t linger at the top, and soon enough they’re back to where they started, looping moving guitar lines overtop and through one another, fading out on controlled anarchy.

“New Laws” by Don Caballero (1993)

Of the more aggressive post-rock bands, Don Caballero came onto the scene with For Respect, a chaotic debut that showed a propensity for time-signature changes, vice-tight start/stop rhythms, and what must have been millions of listens to Spiderland. “New Laws” begins with a bassline drenched with that vintage Albini-produced tone. When the guitars come in, they come in with washes of jagged chords, putting the song right in place with the angular material that makes up the majority of the band’s repertoire.

The drums are crisp, and with the solid, simple rhythm juxtaposed against the haggard guitars, there is a sense of disjointed bliss created. The guitars fall over the song like thick, layered blankets of sound, sometimes crafting eerie arpeggios and other times bursts of solid , abrasive noise.

The bass-driven, chunky pull-off riff leads to sliding and gliding in the upper frequencies, but it all builds towards a tasteful math-rock breakdown about a quarter of the way through after alternating the washes with arpeggios and near-dissonant noises. As the song begins to fade, the drums let the listener down easily from the trip.

“The Dead Flag Blues” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor (1998)

In typical GY!BE fashion, F#A#Infinity’s first track is a mere throb of amplifiers with a sample of a man telling a story of desolation. The band shows a strong classical background, and though there are guitars, bass, and drums, there is a string section providing both melody and ambience throughout the first section (nearly seven minutes of the sixteen-and-a-half minutes song, surely an early indication of the epic song lengths and structures of future post-rock music).

The sound of a train and sinking keyboards drop the song lower and lower into depression. Sheets of descending slides move horizontally, giving the notion that all is passed by. There is no traditional blues playing on this song, of course, but in the context of the atmosphere the band has created, the lengthy middle section is as murky as the dirtiest blues bar, as emotional as any electric guitar bend.

When the slide guitar gives way to violins (which, in turn, gives way to lush, deserted chords), there is everything at once, twirling around each other, not dancing the blues away, but dancing with them. The two minute ending section is almost the credits rolling, xylophones and French horns backing up a violin exit.

After surviving an era of popular glam-rock and underground punk and metal, Slint emerged with songs that both brood and cascade. Don Caballero was in a similar vein, but their technicality allowed bands such as Botch and the Dillinger Escape Plan to be successful with their math-rock freakouts. With bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor picking up on post-rocks more heroic qualities, the style began to develop in the mid-to-late-1990s with bands like Mogwai and MONO.

The copyright of the article Getting Started with Post-Rock (1991-1998) in Indie Music is owned by Ryan Werner. Permission to republish Getting Started with Post-Rock (1991-1998) in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.