VMP Magazine

Regina Spektor’s piano-work and lyricism are brilliant, especially on a song like “Laughing With.” She’s spare and morose with her piano chords, at times resolving the mood with a major chord but mainly relying on the minors, and her lyrics confront religion, devolving God into a temporal being. God is self-effacing, “at a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke”; as well as cunning, “when told he'll give you money if you just pray the right way.” Spektor waters down the abstract into something a little more worldly -- an artistic maneuver that complimented the tropes of HBO’s The Leftovers, when “Laughing With” featured towards the end of a season two installment.

In a short essay from 2001, influential electronic music composer Laurie Spiegel posed the question: “Can orchestral music and electronic sound comfortably coexist?” To the chagrin of any traditionalists who came across Spiegel’s article, and to the joy of her peers in the avant-garde community, she wrote yes. Computers and electronics can produce the sounds that an orchestra isn’t able to, while the orchestra gives the electronic artist an opportunity “to do music as part of a social framework instead of alone.”

Scritti Politti are one of the major yet most under-recognized influences on today’s pop music. The British band led a groundbreaking run in the ’80s as captured on their 1985 album Cupid & Psyche 85 and 1988’s Provision. The songs on both full-lengths pummel through your body. At the same time, each one is a high-ceilinged edifice to walk around and relish in its rich texture and design. They’re simultaneously verbs and nouns: As forces, inexorable; as architecture, immovable. While the lyrics themselves—the ornate, cunning poetry of frontman Green Gartside—penetrate your limbic system, the group’s music is a language in and of itself. And their descendants have proven that the originators speak it best.

The negation in “no wave” has a double-meaning. First, there’s no real wave; no specified provisos for taking part in the ethos. Second, that in itself is the affirmative proviso: to be without a concrete ethos and play music as abstractly as possible. When musicians in the late ’70s and early ’80s were churning up some weird, disparate stuff throughout Greenwich Village, avant-punk group DNA could be just as “waveless” as chameleonic cellist/producer/composer Arthur Russell, who was writing classical music. While the term mainly gets applied to the grittier ensembles like DNA or Swans, “no wave” overall describes a melange of underground artists—in addition to punk: classical, disco, jazz—jaded by conventions, hankering to warp them like crazy.

Incredible bands from around the East Coast are still doing authentic no wave—among them are Zs, Pill, Palm and Horse Lords. For a style that implies timelessness, it’s expected, though still really exciting, that current bands are interpreting no wave in such a fresh, new fashion. Below, these 10 albums capture the fortitude and miasmic tonal beauty eventually inherited by the mentioned contemporaries, and which defined no wave in the ‘70s/’80s.

The aughts’ penultimate years saw the trajectories of Fleet Foxes and Animal Collective steepen in their respective upward slopes. As the latter had taken a decade to eventually rise toward such a pinnacle in 2009, the former’s career was still nascent that year, their popularity contingent on the acclaim amongst Seattle locals of a self-released 2006 EP which led to Sub Pop releasing their second EP and debut full-length both in 2008. The disparity in success is stark, and boils down to gradations of accessibility: Animal Collective began as a band centralizing drone and musique concrete, while Fleet Foxes from the start had fireplace-tender harmonies, crisp acoustic guitars, along with every other motif on the folk troubadour’s grocery list.

Post-rock started burgeoning as a bigger deal genre in the early '90s; prior to that, it was even more of a niche genre. Underground music scenes each offered varied takes on post-rock; in Chicago, for instance, bands like Tortoise and the Sea & Cake were mingling it with jazz. It sounded minimalist earlier on but became more maximalist towards the start of the 2000’s, with bands like Sigur Ros, Mogwai, and Explosions In The Sky amplifying post-rock to sonic capacities that could crush the sturdiest of infrastructures. Those three bands have also made the genre more accessible, via their respective soundtrack work—their music has been featured in countless television programs and films around the world. (Explosions In The Sky, specifically, have scored for well-known films like Friday Night Lights and Lone Survivor.)

Recently, however, there’s been a minor revival of post-rock minimalism. Tortoise dropped The Catastrophist back in January, seven years after their last full-length, 2009’s Beacons Of Ancestorship, and along with Tortoise’s return, Explosions In The Sky’s own comeback full-length, The Wilderness, marks a stylistic shift for the band, an album characterized by its concise repertoire. Also, Sigur Ros will be embarking on a tour soon, but they’ll be performing without auxiliary musicians, specifically the brass and strings sections that they had employed on past tours (according to Pitchfork); it’s going be a new and obviously much sparser live approach for them.

What unites both the minimalist and maximalist bands (as disparate as their levels of loudness are), and what essentially defines post-rock, is a thoughtful approach to guitar-based music: the genre is averse to flashy, fast-as-possible musicianship, and instead songs tend to go at a slower tempo, ensuring that each minute musical flourish is emphasized. Post-rock is primal and cathartic, a style that’s most visceral at its sonically purest -- so here are ten post-rock albums that would sound incredible on vinyl, the best format on which to experience this form of music.