Slowly Destroy You

Today I'm highlighting two very slow and lovely post-rock bands, Slow Six and This Will Destroy You.

"Call them post rock, call them chamber music, call them experimental neo-classical. No matter what you choose, understand that broad genre descriptors do little to describe the striking compositions of Brooklyn collective Slow Six." -- Last.fm

When talking about post-rock bands in general, this is how I feel. The "genre" encompasses so many different musical styles and ideas that I often have a hard time placing bands in it. It would be much more descriptive and easier to understand if every thing were labeled "instrumental insert genre here", because as it stands, we're using the post-rock genre for something it wasn't intended for. The post- tag just symbolizes a movement of music in history. From my point of view, it means just using traditional rock instruments for non-rock purposes. Using guitars to create senses of timbre and texture, rather than just riffs and power chords.

Does this mean that bands like Slow Six and Balmorhea aren't post-rock because of their use of non-rock instruments? Are they contemporary classical or ~ambient progressive experimental avant garde~. Or are they -- who gives a shit --? I think the latter is the one that I'm going to go with. I usually just go with whatever labels other people have chosen, just for the sake of convenience and ease of discovery. However you want to interpret the virtual genre naming war that we're going through, don't let it degrade any enjoyment from bands like Slow Six.



And this is This Will Destroy You, and it did. They did... This song did. Anyways, TWDY is crafted with haunting ambiance, and sadly no one on youtube knows how to upload a song with proper quality. There are seriously 5 different versions of this song with their own user-interpreted video on youtube, and they all have awful sound quality. Do you wanna know what the best one is? An AMV for the animated movie Origin: Spirits of the Past. It's actually not a bad AMV (or movie), surprisingly, but the song is truncated to hell, so it's not really worth posting. This song is from their 2006 EP, Young Mountain.

Clever sign-off comment.

Sunlit Dinner

Sunlight Ascending is a young that band formed in Detroit, Michigan, USA around the beginning of 2007. Their music is a mix of Post-rock, Shoegaze and dreamlike soundscapes. Very ambient and mellow stuff.



Dinner is a little known Japanese post-rock band. This album, and... hearing things, is really neat to listen to due to how creative these guys are with their songwriting. The drum beat in this song, for example, really caught my attention. Bits of jazz and funk can be heard in their music, and the whole album flows really well. Their music is really hard to find, and I even had to upload this song myself so that they could be heard. If you're interested at all, you can get a few albums from here and here.

So few listeners!