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Fearless: The Making Of Post-Rock
‘The best thing about the so-called post-rock thing was it had this brief moment where the concept of it was to make music that came from the indie scene but had no limitations.’
Kieran Hebden, Fridge / Four Tet
‘There was no earthly reason, no logical reason, no pragmatic reason, to function the way that most bands functioned.’
Efrim Menuck, Godspeed You! Black Emperor
‘The main reason we were coming together to try these songs was as an alternative flavour to being in a rock band. Not to replace that experience, but in addition to it.’
Rachel Grimes, Rachel’s
‘We were young and naive.’
Stuart Braithwaite, Mogwai
‘When you don’t know anything, you’re much more fearless about it.’
Graham Sutton, Bark Psychosis
In 1994, the music critic Simon Reynolds coined a new term: post-rock. It was an attempt to give a narrative to music that used the tools of rock but did something utterly different with it, broadening its scope by fusing elements of punk, dub, electronic music, minimalism, and more into something wholly new.
Post-rock is an anti-genre, impossible to fence in. Elevating texture over riff and ambiance over traditional rock hierarchies, its exponents used ideas of space and deconstruction to create music of enormous power. From Slint to Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tortoise to Fridge, Mogwai to Sigur Rós, the pioneers of post-rock are unified by an open-minded ambition that has proven hugely influential on everything from mainstream rock records to Hollywood soundtracks and beyond.
Drawing on dozens of new interviews and packed full of stories never before told, fearless explores how the strands of post-rock entwined, frayed, and created one of the most diverse bodies of music ever to huddle under one name.
Kieran Hebden, Fridge / Four Tet
‘There was no earthly reason, no logical reason, no pragmatic reason, to function the way that most bands functioned.’
Efrim Menuck, Godspeed You! Black Emperor
‘The main reason we were coming together to try these songs was as an alternative flavour to being in a rock band. Not to replace that experience, but in addition to it.’
Rachel Grimes, Rachel’s
‘We were young and naive.’
Stuart Braithwaite, Mogwai
‘When you don’t know anything, you’re much more fearless about it.’
Graham Sutton, Bark Psychosis
In 1994, the music critic Simon Reynolds coined a new term: post-rock. It was an attempt to give a narrative to music that used the tools of rock but did something utterly different with it, broadening its scope by fusing elements of punk, dub, electronic music, minimalism, and more into something wholly new.
Post-rock is an anti-genre, impossible to fence in. Elevating texture over riff and ambiance over traditional rock hierarchies, its exponents used ideas of space and deconstruction to create music of enormous power. From Slint to Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tortoise to Fridge, Mogwai to Sigur Rós, the pioneers of post-rock are unified by an open-minded ambition that has proven hugely influential on everything from mainstream rock records to Hollywood soundtracks and beyond.
Drawing on dozens of new interviews and packed full of stories never before told, fearless explores how the strands of post-rock entwined, frayed, and created one of the most diverse bodies of music ever to huddle under one name.
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400 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2017
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October 8, 2018
In 1994, I was 16-17 years old, growing up in a suburb outside Chicago (NW Indiana to be exact, but connected by train), still in the aftermath of the Nirvana led “indie rock” explosion (more on that in a bit), catching wind of what would eventually become “post-rock.” It was a big deal that when both Ministry’s Filth Pig and Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die came out on the same day in 1996, I bought the Tortoise album – pretty much throwing down the gauntlet of what would dominate my music-listening for the next 6 years, i.e. the music that is the subject of the book.
This is definitely a specialized sub-genre – sure, Sigur Ros and Radiohead were large sellers, but if you (like I could) aren’t into the difference between Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky, or could hear the influence of Talk Talk on Bark Psychosis (or could go further – backed up by some of the interviews in the book- in thinking that Hex and Codename: Dustsucker sound essentially like one long album), or feel that Disco Inferno’s EPs were better than their first album, or appreciate the extremes of Mick Harris, Kevin Martin, Justin Broadrick, and Robert Hampson, then you might want to look elsewhere… I saw Bonnie Prince Billy open up for Godspeed You Black Emperor and was there when the bassline for Mogwai’s “Xmas Steps” came on so loudly the lead ‘gwai dropped his guitar – this was my jam. So essentially my take on the book is preaching to the choir. I loved the stuff.
My gripes with the book are nitpicky – again a lack of a discography (similar to the author’s other book Seasons They Change) – is she against them? There are many strains of what is grouped under “post-rock” (pretty much all of the artists filed under that classification did not like the label!) and the author excellently shows how certain albums/artists influenced the musicians. The usual suspects are very important: Velvet Underground, Bowie (especially Low), Joy Division, early Public Image Ltd, Glenn Branca, Eno, etc. – all of whom pushed “rock” into new arenas whose strains were picked up by Sonic Youth, Slint, Cocteau Twins, Swans, Talk Talk, David Sylvian, Big Black, AR Kane… Some of the bands the author chose to focus on seemed pretty marginal to me – Fridge, Ut especially – and then some aspects of how this music came into “popularity” (for want of a better word) were lacking. I could have used another chapter (or three!) explaining what this led to in the 2010s, why it fell out of vogue, and why it came to fruition in the first place.
The fact that Alternative Press- a pretty mersh-minded magazine that eventually went on to focus on pop punk and other such “alternative” music – would have lengthy, featured reviews on Labradford’s Prazision LP, Disco Inferno’s D.I. Go Pop, and Techno Animal’s Re-Entry (an album completely unmentioned in the text, to my chagrin – it is a mind-bender) calls out for explication. These albums (at the onset of what would become “post-rock”) are WEIRD. The fact that a Midwestern teenager was exposed to these sounds (as well as Main’s Hz EPs, Seefeel’s “Charlotte’s Mouth,” Spectrum’s Soul Kiss Glide Divine, Rachel’s Handwriting, Flying Saucer Attack’s Further, among others) and that others could have been and were strikes me as a very unique chapter in the history of pop music. I wanted more from the author in that respect. What was going on around the music? Sure, there are excellent anecdotes about the Louisville music scene from which Slint, Rodan, Rachel’s, June of 44 and others sprung, and the start of the Too Pure label who put out Mouse on Mars, Stereolab, Seefeel, Pram, Moonshake, PJ Harvey (much about the Kranky label, but nothing about Thrill Jockey???) but what did it all mean? Also, this might be my extremely myopic view of the same story, but I distinctly remember bands like the Coctails and the Denison/Kimball Trio who were in the Chicago orbit contributing immensely to the development of the Chicago strain of “post-rock” – which was a huge chapter in this book. The Coctails (whose members went on to the Sea and Cake as well as Rachel’s) played virtually every genre of music while swapping instruments beyond guitar-bass-drums on virtually every song, not to mention their propensity for releasing odd 7 and 12” singles that were pretty much designed for immediate obscurity; and the Denison/Kimball trio started out by releasing the score to an obscure indie film starring David Yow – which led to “post-rock’s” emphasis on both instrumental music and its links to jazz. Not to mention that this link in the chain – an obscure band consisting of members of much harsher indie rock bands – connects this story to one band sorely missing from the bigger picture of Leech’s already meticulously detailed tome: Nirvana.
Yes, Nirvana was the band that made indie bands popular for a brief moment and led major labels to invest in bands who most likely would have lingered in obscurity. Maybe obscurity would have been more welcome in the end than a flirtation with major label money, AND the book is very specifically about “post-rock” but in my mind, MTV wouldn’t have played a video off Main’s Motion Pool album (!) and Rolling Stone wouldn’t have given Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol 2 a lead-in review (!! Another very important album to the development of the sound described in the book that is sorely missing – Aphex Twin did have a very grating track on Kevin Martin’s Isolationism Virgin Ambient compilation alongside Lull, Main, Disco Inferno, Seefeel, Labradford, Techno Animal, jim O’Rourke, and Thomas Koner) without Nirvana’s popularity. They made it cool to be weird and to listen to the most obscure albums out there. Main would NEVER have released anything on a major label in the 1980s or the 2000s, and if you listen to those Main albums now, they are still WAY WAY OUT THERE. (Full confession, I love Main’s Hz album.) Departed journalist Mark Fisher made an excellent point that music from the 90s played to a 1980s audience would be mind-blowing, whereas 2010s music played to a 90s listener would not. “Post-rock” was concerned with creating the sound of the new, and while Nirvana was not creating that type of sound on this side of the Atlantic, Nirvana’s fearlessness and embrace of the weird allowed that brief moment where mainstream magazines were championing deliberately obscure music. Which then proceeded to warp my impressionable brain.
I also feel a similar parallel could be made with the brief shoegaze fad in the UK. There are definite parallels between Bark Psychosis and MBV, and especially an album like Slowdive’s Pygmalion, but more importantly the spirit of adventure in that first wave of shoegaze bands helped the experimentation evinced in Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno, as much as A.R. Kane and Talk Talk. But where was the context for this experimentation on both sides of the Atlantic? I would hold that two things were occurring: Generation X was coming into its own and wanted to have its own version of the 60s where integrity and depth were again championed as opposed to the soulless corporate 1980s (though what was really going on was that corporations were discovering that there was an untapped mine of commercialism in integrity – the Baby Boomers who sold out led the Xers to see that they could make money and sleep at night at the same time); and America was existing in some sort of decadent phase that was the end of their global dominance that began at the end of World War 2 and ended on September 11th. “Post-rock,” especially American “post-rock,” had an anything goes mentality where a band could open an album with a 20 minute song as a statement. Leech makes the excellent point that NONE of these bands (with the exception of the later iterations in Radiohead and Sigur Ros) went on to sell millions of albums but still…. I completely agree with the author that Radiohead’s Kid A sounds like the ending of something. I associate it with Donnie Darko and September 11th. One chapter was ending and another, far far grimmer chapter was beginning. A band like Godspeed You Black Emperor was a look into that crystal ball, showing that horrible next chapter.
Still another nit-picky aspect of the book was that I feel like she could have gone into where those strains of post-rock (or whatever) led. Loved the chapter on Lull and Techno Animal, but Kevin Martin still puts out records as The Bug and King Midas Sound, Justin Broadrick went from Napalm Death, Godflesh, and Techno Animal to Jesu, Final, Pale Sketcher and a whole slew of collaborations and side-projects. What about Mouse On Mars and Gastr Del Sol leading into Oval, Microstoria who then influenced someone like Fennesz (who then collaborated with David Sylvian)? And what about David Sylvian and Robert Fripp? How about the briefly mentioned hauntology (Burial, Ghost Box Records, Caretaker – and connected to Boards of Canada and Stereolab and Broadcast)? What about the John Carpenter esque synth arpeggios of Zombi, Majeure, Survive, Pye Corner Audio…. I mean, that is probably another book. But one I would like to read!!!
Long story short, I could speak with this author for days. Would love to play records with her as well.
In December of 1994, I went on vacation with my family to Arizona. Went to an independent record store and bought Slint’s Spiderland and Swans’ Children of God. I moved to NYC in 1996. The first album I bought at Other Music was Seefeel’s Quique. That’s how close to home this book hit.
This is definitely a specialized sub-genre – sure, Sigur Ros and Radiohead were large sellers, but if you (like I could) aren’t into the difference between Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky, or could hear the influence of Talk Talk on Bark Psychosis (or could go further – backed up by some of the interviews in the book- in thinking that Hex and Codename: Dustsucker sound essentially like one long album), or feel that Disco Inferno’s EPs were better than their first album, or appreciate the extremes of Mick Harris, Kevin Martin, Justin Broadrick, and Robert Hampson, then you might want to look elsewhere… I saw Bonnie Prince Billy open up for Godspeed You Black Emperor and was there when the bassline for Mogwai’s “Xmas Steps” came on so loudly the lead ‘gwai dropped his guitar – this was my jam. So essentially my take on the book is preaching to the choir. I loved the stuff.
My gripes with the book are nitpicky – again a lack of a discography (similar to the author’s other book Seasons They Change) – is she against them? There are many strains of what is grouped under “post-rock” (pretty much all of the artists filed under that classification did not like the label!) and the author excellently shows how certain albums/artists influenced the musicians. The usual suspects are very important: Velvet Underground, Bowie (especially Low), Joy Division, early Public Image Ltd, Glenn Branca, Eno, etc. – all of whom pushed “rock” into new arenas whose strains were picked up by Sonic Youth, Slint, Cocteau Twins, Swans, Talk Talk, David Sylvian, Big Black, AR Kane… Some of the bands the author chose to focus on seemed pretty marginal to me – Fridge, Ut especially – and then some aspects of how this music came into “popularity” (for want of a better word) were lacking. I could have used another chapter (or three!) explaining what this led to in the 2010s, why it fell out of vogue, and why it came to fruition in the first place.
The fact that Alternative Press- a pretty mersh-minded magazine that eventually went on to focus on pop punk and other such “alternative” music – would have lengthy, featured reviews on Labradford’s Prazision LP, Disco Inferno’s D.I. Go Pop, and Techno Animal’s Re-Entry (an album completely unmentioned in the text, to my chagrin – it is a mind-bender) calls out for explication. These albums (at the onset of what would become “post-rock”) are WEIRD. The fact that a Midwestern teenager was exposed to these sounds (as well as Main’s Hz EPs, Seefeel’s “Charlotte’s Mouth,” Spectrum’s Soul Kiss Glide Divine, Rachel’s Handwriting, Flying Saucer Attack’s Further, among others) and that others could have been and were strikes me as a very unique chapter in the history of pop music. I wanted more from the author in that respect. What was going on around the music? Sure, there are excellent anecdotes about the Louisville music scene from which Slint, Rodan, Rachel’s, June of 44 and others sprung, and the start of the Too Pure label who put out Mouse on Mars, Stereolab, Seefeel, Pram, Moonshake, PJ Harvey (much about the Kranky label, but nothing about Thrill Jockey???) but what did it all mean? Also, this might be my extremely myopic view of the same story, but I distinctly remember bands like the Coctails and the Denison/Kimball Trio who were in the Chicago orbit contributing immensely to the development of the Chicago strain of “post-rock” – which was a huge chapter in this book. The Coctails (whose members went on to the Sea and Cake as well as Rachel’s) played virtually every genre of music while swapping instruments beyond guitar-bass-drums on virtually every song, not to mention their propensity for releasing odd 7 and 12” singles that were pretty much designed for immediate obscurity; and the Denison/Kimball trio started out by releasing the score to an obscure indie film starring David Yow – which led to “post-rock’s” emphasis on both instrumental music and its links to jazz. Not to mention that this link in the chain – an obscure band consisting of members of much harsher indie rock bands – connects this story to one band sorely missing from the bigger picture of Leech’s already meticulously detailed tome: Nirvana.
Yes, Nirvana was the band that made indie bands popular for a brief moment and led major labels to invest in bands who most likely would have lingered in obscurity. Maybe obscurity would have been more welcome in the end than a flirtation with major label money, AND the book is very specifically about “post-rock” but in my mind, MTV wouldn’t have played a video off Main’s Motion Pool album (!) and Rolling Stone wouldn’t have given Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol 2 a lead-in review (!! Another very important album to the development of the sound described in the book that is sorely missing – Aphex Twin did have a very grating track on Kevin Martin’s Isolationism Virgin Ambient compilation alongside Lull, Main, Disco Inferno, Seefeel, Labradford, Techno Animal, jim O’Rourke, and Thomas Koner) without Nirvana’s popularity. They made it cool to be weird and to listen to the most obscure albums out there. Main would NEVER have released anything on a major label in the 1980s or the 2000s, and if you listen to those Main albums now, they are still WAY WAY OUT THERE. (Full confession, I love Main’s Hz album.) Departed journalist Mark Fisher made an excellent point that music from the 90s played to a 1980s audience would be mind-blowing, whereas 2010s music played to a 90s listener would not. “Post-rock” was concerned with creating the sound of the new, and while Nirvana was not creating that type of sound on this side of the Atlantic, Nirvana’s fearlessness and embrace of the weird allowed that brief moment where mainstream magazines were championing deliberately obscure music. Which then proceeded to warp my impressionable brain.
I also feel a similar parallel could be made with the brief shoegaze fad in the UK. There are definite parallels between Bark Psychosis and MBV, and especially an album like Slowdive’s Pygmalion, but more importantly the spirit of adventure in that first wave of shoegaze bands helped the experimentation evinced in Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno, as much as A.R. Kane and Talk Talk. But where was the context for this experimentation on both sides of the Atlantic? I would hold that two things were occurring: Generation X was coming into its own and wanted to have its own version of the 60s where integrity and depth were again championed as opposed to the soulless corporate 1980s (though what was really going on was that corporations were discovering that there was an untapped mine of commercialism in integrity – the Baby Boomers who sold out led the Xers to see that they could make money and sleep at night at the same time); and America was existing in some sort of decadent phase that was the end of their global dominance that began at the end of World War 2 and ended on September 11th. “Post-rock,” especially American “post-rock,” had an anything goes mentality where a band could open an album with a 20 minute song as a statement. Leech makes the excellent point that NONE of these bands (with the exception of the later iterations in Radiohead and Sigur Ros) went on to sell millions of albums but still…. I completely agree with the author that Radiohead’s Kid A sounds like the ending of something. I associate it with Donnie Darko and September 11th. One chapter was ending and another, far far grimmer chapter was beginning. A band like Godspeed You Black Emperor was a look into that crystal ball, showing that horrible next chapter.
Still another nit-picky aspect of the book was that I feel like she could have gone into where those strains of post-rock (or whatever) led. Loved the chapter on Lull and Techno Animal, but Kevin Martin still puts out records as The Bug and King Midas Sound, Justin Broadrick went from Napalm Death, Godflesh, and Techno Animal to Jesu, Final, Pale Sketcher and a whole slew of collaborations and side-projects. What about Mouse On Mars and Gastr Del Sol leading into Oval, Microstoria who then influenced someone like Fennesz (who then collaborated with David Sylvian)? And what about David Sylvian and Robert Fripp? How about the briefly mentioned hauntology (Burial, Ghost Box Records, Caretaker – and connected to Boards of Canada and Stereolab and Broadcast)? What about the John Carpenter esque synth arpeggios of Zombi, Majeure, Survive, Pye Corner Audio…. I mean, that is probably another book. But one I would like to read!!!
Long story short, I could speak with this author for days. Would love to play records with her as well.
In December of 1994, I went on vacation with my family to Arizona. Went to an independent record store and bought Slint’s Spiderland and Swans’ Children of God. I moved to NYC in 1996. The first album I bought at Other Music was Seefeel’s Quique. That’s how close to home this book hit.
November 22, 2017
“Fearless. The Making of Post-Rock” ist keine Entstehungsgeschichte, sondern ein Requiem, ein Rückblick und Abschluss. Das Buch endet nämlich genau an dem Punkt, an dem aus einer experimentellen und immerzu etwas unfassbaren Stilrichtung ein Produkt der Masse wurde, austauschbar und gleichförmig. Denn im Gegensatz zu der verbreiteten und journalistisch immer wiedergekauten Meinung, Post-Rock sei als Genre klar mit instrumentalen Stücken mit aufschwellenden Gitarren und langen Laufzeiten zu definieren, handelt es sich vielmehr um einen Abenteuerritt ohne Konventionen oder Sicherheitsnetze. ...
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Weiterlesen auf Artnoir.ch.
September 10, 2017
Lo califico con cuatro estrellas, pero en verdad son tres y media. El Daniel de 18 años se habría devorado este libro en menos de una semana. Y estaría orgulloso de saber que el Daniel de 31 años (32 en un par de semanas) en el 2017 fue a ver a Sigur Rós y está por ver a Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Esto para decir que este es un libro que me llegó un poco tarde. Aún así, lo disfruté de principio a fin. Aunque, para ser honesto, más todo lo que viene en el último tercio. Tienes que leer el 65% del libro antes de que se empiecen a mencionar nombres como Godspeed, Sigur, Mogwai, Explosions, Do Make Say Think, etc. Todo lo demás es lo que antecedió al post-rock. Desde lo básico (mbv, Sonic Youth, Swans, Slint) hasta muchas otras bandas que jamás había escuchado. Muchas. Tal vez demasiadas, y es eso lo que le resta un poco de calificación para mi. Una persona familiarizada con estos artistas ya sabe lo que aquí plantea. Pero para uno que aún no los conoce tan bien es difícil cerrar el libro y tener claro qué hizo cada quien. Fácil de seguir cuando lo lees, pero difícil de clasificar en retrospectiva.
Recomendado para fans del género.
Esto para decir que este es un libro que me llegó un poco tarde. Aún así, lo disfruté de principio a fin. Aunque, para ser honesto, más todo lo que viene en el último tercio. Tienes que leer el 65% del libro antes de que se empiecen a mencionar nombres como Godspeed, Sigur, Mogwai, Explosions, Do Make Say Think, etc. Todo lo demás es lo que antecedió al post-rock. Desde lo básico (mbv, Sonic Youth, Swans, Slint) hasta muchas otras bandas que jamás había escuchado. Muchas. Tal vez demasiadas, y es eso lo que le resta un poco de calificación para mi. Una persona familiarizada con estos artistas ya sabe lo que aquí plantea. Pero para uno que aún no los conoce tan bien es difícil cerrar el libro y tener claro qué hizo cada quien. Fácil de seguir cuando lo lees, pero difícil de clasificar en retrospectiva.
Recomendado para fans del género.
May 30, 2020
This book is a large collection of interviews and stories that have persisted throughout the genre of Post-Rock and its influences--Krautrock, Hardcore, Dream-pop, Slowcore, etc. etc.
The author does a great job of putting all of the bands, major players--and smaller players--in one book, and attempting to show the relationships between them. What I personally felt though, is that the organization in the book is kinda off, and the topics shift quickly, without transition or warning. At times it even feels like ideas and quotes are just being listed. That being said, when you consider the topic at hand, the author actually does a great job in trying to connect them. I think you can understand the philosophy and attitude that the bands and individuals have while approaching the sort of music they make.
Walking into this book, I was only aware of the more modern, well-known bands--GY!BE, Sigur Ros, Mogwai, and Tortoise. So, as someone particularly new to the genre, I was at first intimidated by the amount of name dropping and detail that the book goes into. Of course, this meant I was introduced labels and bands that I've never heard of--one of the main goals that I had in mind when picking up the book.
Overall, I believe the author was successful in what they sought out to do. When you read the book, you get the gist of the attitudes that this genre encompasses and how the genre evolved, as well as a large list of bands to listen to while you read.
The author does a great job of putting all of the bands, major players--and smaller players--in one book, and attempting to show the relationships between them. What I personally felt though, is that the organization in the book is kinda off, and the topics shift quickly, without transition or warning. At times it even feels like ideas and quotes are just being listed. That being said, when you consider the topic at hand, the author actually does a great job in trying to connect them. I think you can understand the philosophy and attitude that the bands and individuals have while approaching the sort of music they make.
Walking into this book, I was only aware of the more modern, well-known bands--GY!BE, Sigur Ros, Mogwai, and Tortoise. So, as someone particularly new to the genre, I was at first intimidated by the amount of name dropping and detail that the book goes into. Of course, this meant I was introduced labels and bands that I've never heard of--one of the main goals that I had in mind when picking up the book.
Overall, I believe the author was successful in what they sought out to do. When you read the book, you get the gist of the attitudes that this genre encompasses and how the genre evolved, as well as a large list of bands to listen to while you read.
August 10, 2017
The writing's often a bit choppy; subjects can shift between paragraphs with little/no transitions or explanations, and there are a noticeable amount of spelling errors (more than one would expect, though I'm a bit pedantic about that anyway). Leech also spends mot of the novel describing the backgrounds of bands, their influences, their stories, and how they changed/expanded/influenced the/a genre, but--I feel--often doesn't spend enough time really explaining the music itself; how bands really sounded.
Still, though, Fearless: The Making of Post-Rock is crammed full of information about the roots, development, and expansion of the post-rock genre and done so in a very informative way. The writing's fairly good (despite my criticisms), and it was a fun read. There are now on my to-do list about fifty bands of which I'd previously never heard, though, so my take-away from this book is going to last some many months after finishing it. I suppose I'll just have to be Fearless and carry on.
Still, though, Fearless: The Making of Post-Rock is crammed full of information about the roots, development, and expansion of the post-rock genre and done so in a very informative way. The writing's fairly good (despite my criticisms), and it was a fun read. There are now on my to-do list about fifty bands of which I'd previously never heard, though, so my take-away from this book is going to last some many months after finishing it. I suppose I'll just have to be Fearless and carry on.
October 22, 2017
I feel like this argues the case for a very specific possible lineage of post-rock that is... markedly different to the one that the average fan of post 1990s post-rock would suggest. And it's interesting as an alternative history of post-punk off-shoots but it's also strangely judgemental and dismissive of bands and records that are arguably quite crucial to the idea of post-rock as a genre, while focussing attention and praise on stuff that seems like a very tangential influence. On the other hand, this is as far as I know the first major published book on this stuff and it does seem likely that whoever has a go at it next will probably swing the other way and ignore a lot of what's discussed here. So. Idk. Go in knowing that the first third of the book deals with music that isn't really post-rock and the middle third is arguable either way, and you might have a better time with it.
April 29, 2018
The voice of the book is...
The focus can be...
The subjects are often...
The details are where you...
Yes.
The focus can be...
The subjects are often...
The details are where you...
Yes.
November 8, 2022
You're not reading this if you're not into *some* kind of post-rock, and if you are, you'll really, really want this book to succeed, and might be tempted to overlook it's many, many, many flaws, as some of the really good reviews of it do here on GR. The focus here is really more on British, proggy post-punk, and a bunch of bands that, frankly, don't sound very interesting from the descriptions, and/or that I can confirm from recordings do not sound interesting at all. Okay, I can cope with that--the author is/lives in England, and has a different perspective. But it's pretty clear that this book is organized according to who spoke to Jeanette Leech for the longest, which isn't a great way to write a book of cultural history.
And then there's the actual writing, which is more a recording: why do so many books on music just quote musicians verbatim? If you were writing a book about novelists, would you just record them playing the piano? No. The musicians interviewed here are occasionally interesting, sure, but there's way too much "Then Billy asked if we could have icecream in the rider and Jenny said no she didn't want icecream in the rider for some reason I forget and then Billy said okay but compromise is fair so let's have instant pudding at least and Jenny said okay even though instant pudding has dairy in it just like icecream so I guess maybe it was that icecream was too cold." That's not a direct quote, but it's what I *felt* like I was reading.
Someone needs to issue a manifesto for writers on popular music, to the effect that readers would like to actually learn something interesting, rather than trawl through undigested interviews.
And then there's the actual writing, which is more a recording: why do so many books on music just quote musicians verbatim? If you were writing a book about novelists, would you just record them playing the piano? No. The musicians interviewed here are occasionally interesting, sure, but there's way too much "Then Billy asked if we could have icecream in the rider and Jenny said no she didn't want icecream in the rider for some reason I forget and then Billy said okay but compromise is fair so let's have instant pudding at least and Jenny said okay even though instant pudding has dairy in it just like icecream so I guess maybe it was that icecream was too cold." That's not a direct quote, but it's what I *felt* like I was reading.
Someone needs to issue a manifesto for writers on popular music, to the effect that readers would like to actually learn something interesting, rather than trawl through undigested interviews.
December 31, 2020
The last day I went out with friends before self-isolating in the apartment with Anaïs, I was running a bit early (we were getting ramen then watching a free screening of the incredible Tampopo... sigh) so I stopped in at Soundscapes. Maybe unsurprisingly for such a great music store they had an incredible selection of music books as well, and of course this is the one I grabbed.
Given the post-hoc nature of pretty much all genres and the particularly nebulous nature of this one, I honestly appreciated how the line/journey Leech draws hangs together, despite several geographic/sonic/etc disparities. Is this exactly what I would have called post-rock, or even the lineage that led to post-rock? No, but I didn't write the book. It did include pretty much every act I was hoping would make the cut, and introduced me to plenty of bands I now want to check out (my "to listen" note after reading this is... long). But I also don't come to a book like this with a checklist, not really; I want to hear what story the writer is going to tell me, not just assess if it's the same as mine. And I found this story both largely agreeable with my existing take on the genre and its antecedents but more importantly both entertaining and persuasive. There's lots of good information in here and I'd keep it around as reference on that count alone, but I'm actually looking forward to rereading it in the future which is how I know I loved it.
Given the post-hoc nature of pretty much all genres and the particularly nebulous nature of this one, I honestly appreciated how the line/journey Leech draws hangs together, despite several geographic/sonic/etc disparities. Is this exactly what I would have called post-rock, or even the lineage that led to post-rock? No, but I didn't write the book. It did include pretty much every act I was hoping would make the cut, and introduced me to plenty of bands I now want to check out (my "to listen" note after reading this is... long). But I also don't come to a book like this with a checklist, not really; I want to hear what story the writer is going to tell me, not just assess if it's the same as mine. And I found this story both largely agreeable with my existing take on the genre and its antecedents but more importantly both entertaining and persuasive. There's lots of good information in here and I'd keep it around as reference on that count alone, but I'm actually looking forward to rereading it in the future which is how I know I loved it.
January 14, 2019
Post-rock as a genre is really nebulous - bands most critics or listeners would label as post-rock reject the label, and there is not one specific set of characteristics that make a band or its music post-rock. So Ms. Leech certainly had her work cut out for her from the get-go, but she does an excellent job highlighting and profiling all the various cells of post-rock activity around the world. She tackles her daunting task mostly chronologically, which works, as some of the later bands take cues from the earlier bands. The author does a good job mixing various interviews through the years with new interviews of some of the key players involved. With any book about music, I wish there was a recommended listening section at the end of each chapter, but enough specific albums are mentioned that one can follow along as I did, and I enjoyed finding gems by Cul De Sac and Bark Psychosis which I missed the first time around. Like the genre it covers, the book can be challenging to plow and difficult to uncover at times, but totally worth it for the patient and adventurous.
Read
June 27, 2023Ultimately, an interesting read, however even as a post rock fan, there were a lot of acts I wasn't familiar with and to an extent, the book seems to make the assumption that the reader is fairly well-versed in the earlier post rock bands like Bark Psychosis. Fair enough, I need to do some listening.
Aside from that it is only roughly organized in a timeline fashion and kind of tumbles around in a fairly random way through interviews and quotes from the artists in an attempt to tie the musicians together in a kind of loose way. In reflection, it does sort of make a point in that defining artists and bands as "post rock" is maybe more about the vague interconnections in the artists that either fit nicely in that genre or try hard to not be categorized that way.
The book covers a lot of ground quickly, and I kind of feel like I might need to go look at the extensive list of references to maybe do some more deep dives into some of the acts.
The book's conclusion left me a bit unsatisfied, though, admittedly, I'm not sure how one would wrap this topic up better.
Aside from that it is only roughly organized in a timeline fashion and kind of tumbles around in a fairly random way through interviews and quotes from the artists in an attempt to tie the musicians together in a kind of loose way. In reflection, it does sort of make a point in that defining artists and bands as "post rock" is maybe more about the vague interconnections in the artists that either fit nicely in that genre or try hard to not be categorized that way.
The book covers a lot of ground quickly, and I kind of feel like I might need to go look at the extensive list of references to maybe do some more deep dives into some of the acts.
The book's conclusion left me a bit unsatisfied, though, admittedly, I'm not sure how one would wrap this topic up better.
December 31, 2017
Worth it mostly to have all the smaller acts get attention among the larger ones; you're probably not going to read about Bark Psychosis or Flying Saucer Attack anywhere beyond backpages of The Wire. That said, I would've liked a bit more insight in the genre, especially since the UK and US movements had almost entirely different sets of influences. The only insight comes from the lengthy intro that paints pretty much any experimental Rock music as potentially Post Rock (not entirely unfair considering the amount of Can influence, but it muddies the picture a bit.) The occasional dismissal of some artists/releases is questionable too (Mogwai Young Team gets panned; Main (one of the first bands labelled Post Rock) gets as much space as Band of Susans, a band never associated with Post Rock, who is brought up only to make a negative Sonic Youth comparison, etc.)
Otherwise, a decent history of the early years of the genre (until Simon Reynolds decides to write his own version)
Otherwise, a decent history of the early years of the genre (until Simon Reynolds decides to write his own version)
August 15, 2024
Strong focuses on the musical nuclei which surround, basically, the Simon Reynolds post-rock in Britain and post-rock in America articles. The author does everything to focus her energy on these defied forebears of "the genre," or what could otherwise be expressed as "the squatting, bankrupt alternative folks engaged in post-rock when it was a name given to a couple avant-MOR albums, 4AD, the entire British experimental indie movement, and like half of all American post-hardcore artists in the 1990s." Almost every mention of Explosions in the Sky is confined to 2 pages. Outside of Too Pure artists, the period when Dream Pop was a serious thing that Rudy Tambala made up, and the artists who were already covered pretty well by the Slint documentary, there were some dangling threads; but I still feel I loved it, it finally crystallized a desire to see North England and, outside of that, put tracks down somehow.
November 23, 2021
My teenage self really wanted to give this a 5 star review but this ambitious book has a few flaws, especially in the field of writing: the style is choppy, in many pages there are just blocks of different interviews' fragments without much context, the paragraphs sometimes lack connection and there seems to lack a clear structure behind some of the chapters.
It has good moments when the author reflects more on the music itself and that's very interesting and I appreciate the lineage that the author tries to convey for "la naissance" of post-rock, but I feel that for the youngest readers, only from Mogwai on (around page 280) it gets more familiar.
I also want to thank this book for reminding me of the album Music for Egon Schiele by Rachel's, which I had completely forgotten about, and for introducing me to some bands I didn't know about such as Gastr del Sol.
It has good moments when the author reflects more on the music itself and that's very interesting and I appreciate the lineage that the author tries to convey for "la naissance" of post-rock, but I feel that for the youngest readers, only from Mogwai on (around page 280) it gets more familiar.
I also want to thank this book for reminding me of the album Music for Egon Schiele by Rachel's, which I had completely forgotten about, and for introducing me to some bands I didn't know about such as Gastr del Sol.
July 28, 2020
An intelligent, theoretically rich survey of post-rock music, positively bulging with forgotten indie bands, passionate album deconstructions, and enlightening interviews with the genre's most important figureheads. I was so, so, so annoyed though by the fact that IT DIDN'T HAVE A DISCOGRAPHY! (I have this habit of buying music books, then adding their discographies to my Discogs wantlist, y'see...) Still, it's essential reading if you're into your indie, post-rock and ambient music.
December 14, 2017
Postmodern rock overview from the music historian Jeanette Leech. A detailed history of post-rock from The Velvet Underground to Explosions in the Sky, mentioning Public Enemy and Radiohead and including a lot of interesting bands that I’ve never heard of.
September 14, 2019
I'd put this at 3 1/2 if I could. Dense in terms of bands and albums discussed, but that means less reflection on the sound. The earlier chapters dig in a bit more whereas the later give way to the flood. Perhaps that's the best way to define a genre that basically did the same thing.
Want to read
November 21, 2017relating post- rock with punk-rock, hardcore and other genres. one of the few books about post-rock history.
November 21, 2017
relating post- rock with punk-rock, hardcore and other genres. one of the few books about post-rock history.
December 15, 2024
Unlike many of the artists interviewed in Leech’s book on “post rock”, I actually dig the maligned non-genre for its “open-ended but precise” implications. Inspired by Derrida’s ideas of deconstruction, music critic Simon Reynolds came up with the umbrella as a way of connecting independent bands that were doing their part in melting down the rigid, commercialized machine that rock music became, and re-assembling the old signifiers with far-reaching influences (dub, techno, chamber music, improvisation, etc), new technologies (samplers, computers), and inverted musical hierarchies. One of the reason for this eventual maligning is that, by the 2000s, post-rock got pigeonholed as this kind of “crescendo-core” that third-wave groups like Explosions in the Sky and a stream of others were known for. Ironically Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai and Sigur Ros (bands often thought of as quintessential post-rock) actually were not post-rock according to Reynolds nor to the bands themselves, but rather dramatic, (mostly) instrumental rock, without much deconstructive sensibility at all. Even though Leech does discuss these bands in the last few chapters, she does a great job at exploring the diversity of sounds, philosophies, and methodologies that post-rock is capable of encapsulating.
Fearless: The Making of Post-Rock functions as a jagged oral history, utilizing over forty firsthand interviews, as well as deep research into books, blogs, documentaries, and magazines (especially The Wire). Because of its rootlessness, post rock has a difficult lineage to trace, yet Leech draws a convincing narrative through the decades leading up to the post rock blossoming of the 90s. Perhaps surprisingly at first, she starts off in her “Proto-” chapter with Ornette Coleman, whose radical deconstruction of traditional jazz structures demonstrates a strong parallel between the way free jazz and post rock artists strove to create their own languages. The story soon veers through 60s art rock (Velvet Underground, AMM, Red Crayola), Krautrock, Dub Reggae, American Primitivism, Ambient, and punk, also a reaction to the excesses of stadium rock (until its formula almost immediately got co-opted by the corporate machine). In a sense post-rock is kind of an introverted extension of post-punk and No Wave, a way of applying a DIY punk ethos and a raw, elemental approach to more experimental, atmospheric and un-formulaic ends. In the 80s, Leech explores the way early dream pop bands like A.R. Kane and Cocteau Twins directly influenced post rock with their intangible, textural, obscured and somewhat messy music.
Once we get to the original post rock albums (Spirit of Eden and Spiderland) and the depressed, disconnected, accelerated era of the 90s, the chapters begin to hop back and forth between the post-rock scenes in the UK (Bristol, London, Glasgow) and the American midwest (Louisville, Chicago), with a beautiful detour into Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood to dive into the heavily principled, leftist and creative music on Constellation Records. Leech richly investigates these bands’ histories, philosophies, and methods in a way that highlights their connections while celebrating their uniqueness. One band I’m bummed Leech neglected to mention is Tarentel, a definitive post rock group in my opinion, whose discography chronologically embodied the decay and mossification of the rusted rock machine. But it’s hard to complain about a text already covering such a wide breadth of artists, allowing me to peer deeper into some of my favorites, while leaving me with dozens of new discoveries left to explore.
Fearless: The Making of Post-Rock functions as a jagged oral history, utilizing over forty firsthand interviews, as well as deep research into books, blogs, documentaries, and magazines (especially The Wire). Because of its rootlessness, post rock has a difficult lineage to trace, yet Leech draws a convincing narrative through the decades leading up to the post rock blossoming of the 90s. Perhaps surprisingly at first, she starts off in her “Proto-” chapter with Ornette Coleman, whose radical deconstruction of traditional jazz structures demonstrates a strong parallel between the way free jazz and post rock artists strove to create their own languages. The story soon veers through 60s art rock (Velvet Underground, AMM, Red Crayola), Krautrock, Dub Reggae, American Primitivism, Ambient, and punk, also a reaction to the excesses of stadium rock (until its formula almost immediately got co-opted by the corporate machine). In a sense post-rock is kind of an introverted extension of post-punk and No Wave, a way of applying a DIY punk ethos and a raw, elemental approach to more experimental, atmospheric and un-formulaic ends. In the 80s, Leech explores the way early dream pop bands like A.R. Kane and Cocteau Twins directly influenced post rock with their intangible, textural, obscured and somewhat messy music.
Once we get to the original post rock albums (Spirit of Eden and Spiderland) and the depressed, disconnected, accelerated era of the 90s, the chapters begin to hop back and forth between the post-rock scenes in the UK (Bristol, London, Glasgow) and the American midwest (Louisville, Chicago), with a beautiful detour into Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood to dive into the heavily principled, leftist and creative music on Constellation Records. Leech richly investigates these bands’ histories, philosophies, and methods in a way that highlights their connections while celebrating their uniqueness. One band I’m bummed Leech neglected to mention is Tarentel, a definitive post rock group in my opinion, whose discography chronologically embodied the decay and mossification of the rusted rock machine. But it’s hard to complain about a text already covering such a wide breadth of artists, allowing me to peer deeper into some of my favorites, while leaving me with dozens of new discoveries left to explore.
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