A post on Post Rock (65 Days Of Static new music download-centric)

65 Days Of Static are back next month with The Distant & Mechanised Glow of Eastern European Dance Parties EP, featuring two re-workings of a previous album track of the same name (taken from their third LP The Destruction Of Small Ideals) and two completely new tracks, one of which they have excellently made available for free to download. Anyone who saw the Sheffield group in their Autumn tour will recognise Goodbye 2007 as their storming set opener. Eschewing their more metal influences in favour of the more electronica-based sounds that hark back from debut album The Fall Of Math, it sets the band up very promisingly for this year, in which they've already played their biggest career dates yet in supporting 80s new wave goths The Cure:

Goodbye 2007

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Post rock is a term that is becoming a looser and looser description for the genre of music it's attempting to portray; indeed many of the pioneering bands of it, such as Scotland's Mogwai openly reject the term. There's a pretty apparent reason for this, namely that as the genre unrelentingly evolves and grows more and more styles are added to it; what started out as "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbre and textures rather than riffs and power chords," (Simon Reynolds reviewing Bark Pyschosis's album Hex for The Wire in 1994) has now come to facilitate as great deal, particularly with the growing influence of dance music on the genre. Post rock now basically seems to categorise anything that's instrumental music- an extremely vague description.

This isn't always the case however; bands like iLiKETRAiNS and the sadly defunct Hope Of The States take aspects from the early advances of post rock like the walls of sound made prominent in the shoegaze era by the likes of My Bloody Valentine as well as the hallmark unorthodox chord progressions and slow gradual build ups of the now recognised pioneers of post rock Mogwai, Black Psychosis et al, and marry it with potent lyrics and vocal delivery. Both remain post rock acts, because as electronica bleeds into drum n bass and dubstep and as R'n'B bleeds into Hip Hop, post rock has become, and arguably has always been a mixture of other types of music. In Britain there's currently somewhat of a post rock renaissance going on: the following few acts are all classed as post rock but vary greatly:

The Hearing- Absent foundations
Coventry-based group, released a mini-album last year; straight ahead indie instrumentals.

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Oceansize- Catalyst (Live)
Manchester group with a heavy industrial edge, formed in 1998.

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Vessels- The Beast (Radio 1 Session)
Up coming Explosions In The Sky-influenced group from the South East. Album expected later this year.

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Youthmovies- If You'd Seen A Battlefield (Live @ ATP 18-05-07)
Hotly tipped Oxford group featuring Andrew Mears (ex-Foals), fantastic debut album Good Nature was released last week.

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Sona Di- Dawn
Newcastle-based group, building a sure but steady fanbase with their American-tinged post rock.

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i Concur- Exits Are Blockades
Leeds-based group heavily influenced by the shoegaze era but with a handy knack for a melody that's all of their own.

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You Slut!- Roofio Shoots Roofio Scores
Derbyshire group who add a sharp, aggressive streak to their instrumentals. Debut album Critical Meat is finally out in the UK after being available in Japan for over a year.

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