Tag Archives: post-rock

Dan’s Top 31 Albums of 2020

by Daniel Kuburoglu

A bit late to the party, but here we are, nonetheless.

Let’s get the obvious out the way first. 2020 was a bad year, and this did have a knock-on effect with the amount of music that was released as well. While I personally would not say we had any absolute gamechangers this year, that doesn’t mean the year was an absolute waste. (At least, not in this one regard…) It was enough to bring me back from the dead, after all.

I may not have the same mettle for metal as Matt, nor the same dedication to deathlessly digging … Read more

Autumn Creatures – Funeral Garden

by Dæv Tremblay

The Music

The Words

Autumn Creatures is not a new name, exactly. They’ve been around since at least 2013, but it’s through Funeral Garden that I’ve discovered them. The band is made up of a core of five musicians, and they are joined on this release by a string quartet, which gives a whole new depth to the band’s music.

The band plays an essentially instrumental sort of post-metal with keyboards adding to the usual “metal band” sound. On top of that, the string quartet appears here and there for extended periods of time where atmosphere supersedes riffs. What’s more, … Read more

Built-In Obsolescence – Instar

by Dæv Tremblay

The Music

The Words

The post-metal of Italian band Built-In Obsolescence is one of those that we could qualify as “cinematic”. The compositions on their sophomore album Instar build slowly and leash out gloriously. Usually one or two themes are shyly introduced in the beginning of a song and built upon, brick by brick, until it reaches a climax, then things calm down a bit, and then pick up again into an higher climax, and then again for a final blaze. The way the group plays with different themes and structures makes Instar a very interesting experience. It would have … Read more

Soldat Hans – Es taut

by Matt Matheson

The Words

Soldat Hans is an outlier in their musical setting, lilting tranquilly somewhere in a liminal dimension between post-rock and post-metal. They are an outlier because they do not demand your attention in an immediate way, as most bands in the modern era of streaming and accessibility have to do. If a listener is bored of your track within fifteen seconds, they’re not coming back, so you have to compose songs that hook people with a certain urgency. Soldat Hans are not interested in appealing to those casual listeners; their songs are enormous, expansive, patient meditations on minimal themes. … Read more

Crno dete – Neponovljivo

by Dæv Tremblay

The experimental surf rock duo Crno dete, from Serbia, just released their latest opus: the massive Neponovljivo album. This set is an improvised performance that goes on for about forty minutes; uncut, unedited, and unrepeatable. It has been divided into eight tracks, but the truly uncut version is available as a forty-three-minute single track. The music resembles experimental math rock and post-rock, but the utter flood of reverb on the guitars make me think of surf rock more than anything else, really. From the moment you press play, the guitars and the drums catawompously barge in and don’t stop … Read more