‘post-rock’ is bullshit

not the music, but the actual term. much like how the term ‘avant-garde’ has been thrown around in the last few years as a useless stopgap for actually trying to say what something is.

when you think about it, post-rock, as a term itself, without having heard any of the music, is rather bullshit. it doesn’t tell you anything.

musically, it’s a fucking terrible term. it’s just been thrown around so much, people don’t know what it means anymore. really, it can be split into four different areas: progressive rock, neoclassical (contempary classical), nugaze (new generation of shoegaze) or what i’m going to call for now ’sonica’ (which i will expand on later.)

the one thing that probably pisses me off most about post-rock being used as a musical genre is the fact that you’re getting so much stuff which fits the bill of ‘neoclassical’ or even ambient far better. Ólafur Arnalds, for one, gets described as post-rock, even though the music is pretty much just piano and strings. Not even rock elements. The same goes for Amiina, who are essentially a string quartet who often do a lot of stuff for Sigur Rós – whom along with bands like GY!BE and A Silver Mt. Zion are really more orchestras than bands.

You’re also getting a lot of Ambient stuff thrown in there too. Eluvium and Hammock, both mainly ambient orientated thanks to their lush atmospheres, are often thrown in with Post-rock too. Which makes no sense either. They’re really closer to Boards of Canada than Explosions in the Sky.

Mentioning Explosions in the Sky leads me onto the ‘main group’ of post-rock, the most famous ones. This consists of GY!BE, A Silver Mt. Zion, Sigur Rós, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, and to a lesser extent, God is an Astronaut and This Will Destroy You. The first two are from canada (and share members), and have a similar sort of orchestrated sound, although A Silver Mt. Zion is closer to the other bands. Sigur Rós is from Iceland, and have a very overblown sound where you can barely tell what instrument is being played, and unlike most post-rock bands, uses vocals. Hell, half the vocals are in a language based upon sounds so it can be used more like an instrument in it’s own right, such is the dedication to music. They describe themselves as a Slow Motion Rock Band, and although it’s become a lot more grandiose and evolved, that term still fits them quite well. And then you have The last four, which all have the more conventional post-rock sounds most fans of the genre know, with large amounts of dissonance and sustained sounds – it’s all rather sonic. (hence the above term of sonica – it’s far from perfect, but until a better term is coined, it’ll do for me). And although this last lot have guitars and drums, they’re not really rock. Just because they use two of the stereotypical rock instruments, they’re rock? since when does everything with a guitar and drums some form of rock? Shoegaze was older than post-rock, and it didn’t have a patronizing name that lumps them in with a genre they’re not really affiliated with. Hell, post-metal is also reffered to as sludge, yet that’s just post-rock with metal sounding elements. if that has a real name, why not post-rock?

There’s a lot of work that needs to be done on musical classification. It’s the same with the term Indie – it doesn’t even mean anything anymore or even do the one simple thing that musical classification is meant to do; give you an indication of what the hell a band sounds like.