musing

so i've been into postrock for a while, but you get so you can't even listen to stuff, you've heard it so often, or it just isn't floating your boat.

so i was buyuing some mono:



and i checked out a couple of the bands who were in the "you like this? you'll this then" section, and went to the myspace to check them out. one was god is an astronaut, which is postrock meets Jean Michel Jarre, iow, far too MOR for me. another was Russian Circles. you could describe it as "prog postrock" or "postrock meets metal". it's a more muscular sound than Explosions in the Sky or Mono. have a listen to the myspace and you'll get the picture. i put that chit on my ipod and i just left the world behind:



so i'm loving that, and loving Pelican too, which is a similar, heavy postrock. these bands are as influenced by Tortoise and that whole Chicago thing as they are by metal.

so i moved from that into Isis. i'd heard the name, read the fantastic reviews, but never bothered with it. now i do, in a big way, particularly Oceanic, which features:


and of course Panopticon, which features a longer version of this:



that chit is heavy, but also prog, which i sort of like. strange that i was burning hippies in the late 70s, but now i'm into a lot of that widdly nana stuff myself. well, you change, don't you?

from there, it's a short step to Dillinger Escape Plan, who can be described as heavy metal meets Aphex Twin on a lot of their stuff, but also do a good line in pop metal, for instance Black bubblegum:



and slightly more Jesus Lizard going on in the brilliant Milk lizard:



the album, Ire works, is just fucking brilliant, so inventive, so powerful. i defy you not to like it.

i also jumped from Isis one way to Cult of Luna and Callisto, who are sludgy, and Tool, who are proggy. not so keen on Tool, who tend to the dreary, but this is okay:


Cult of Luna fool you with the doomy vocals but the music is far more postrocky than metal, particularly on Dim, which you could easily play alongside anything by Mono, and even EITS.

as a kid, i was a huge fan of shoegaze, which was deeply uncool, but rather good. top shoegaze was stuff like My Bloody Valentine, and my personal favourites, Ride:



there's a whole new shoegaze thing, and Sennen are my particular favourites:



not an official video, you'll have noted. their myspace features Blackout, which i'm playing very heavily atm.

also shoegazey, but much heavier is Jesu. you may or may not recall a band called Napalm Death, one of whose main men was Justin Broadrick. he formed an "industrial" band called Godflesh:


Jesu have gradually become more shoegazey and less hardedged. this is a bad video but a fairly typical song:


so anyway, that's what i've been into. i've left this one great video for last, for anyone who has bothered wading through all that. it's Mclusky, the best thing ever to come out of Wales. you can't really describe this. it's sort of indie, sort of rawk, sort of madness in a can. it's also a lot of fun:

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:23 am