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This is the Buffalohed official guide to post-rock. I'm not going to give definitions or any of that crap, you can find it somewhere else. I'm not discussing whether or not it is a genre either. This is simply meant to guide people to finding more music they like within the genre if they have listened to or like any of the big artists.

I am not including Sigur Ros because they are on the fringe of the genre and really there are no bands like them. Bands that come close are much more dream-pop or shoegaze-esque than post-rock.

For more information or to find more bands, here is a bigass post-rock message board with a ton of good information lying around. http://www.afterthepostrock.com/index.php

For most bands I am going to add a year of when they hit the scene so you can get some kind of feel for a timeline and realize that a lot of these bands are much older than our favorite modern post-rock acts.

Without further ado, here is the guide:

Beginners listen to this:
Godspeed - Lift Your Skinny Fists... ('00)
Mogwai - Young Team/Happy Songs for Happy People ('97/'03)
Tortoise - Millions Now Living Will Never Die ('96)
Explosions in the Sky - Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place ('03)

This main 4 will give you a good idea of what you might like or not like within the genre. I'm also going to create my own little sub-genre and describe it for each one to help you figure out the styles. So here is the continuation:

If you liked Godspeed:
[the Orchestral/Epic sub-genre - long compositions, large groups often with strings, epic songs with slow crescendos and often a good bit of ambience]

Do Make Say Think ('98
Silver Mount Zion ('00)
Mono ('02)
Rachel's ('95)
Dirty Three ('95)

If you really like any of those, here are some more:
The Drift
Larval
Seascapes of the Interior
Sparrows Swarm and Sing
Fly Pan Am
Character
Experimental Audio Research
Labradford
Flying Saucer Attack
Yndi Halda
Giardini di Miro
Southpacific
Yume Bitsu

If you liked Mogwai:(if you didn't, go away!)
[the Instrumental Rock/Noise sub-genre - These guys play hard and heavy, guitar prominent with huge dynamic changes, often depressing and often loud]

Mono ('02)
Red Sparowes ('05)
Slint (~'89 - they were the original post-rock band, before the term existed)
Kinski ('99)
Pelican ('03)
God Is An Astronaut ('02)

If you really liked any of those, here are some more:
The Workhouse
Russian Circles
Bardo Pond
Yume Bitsu
Surface of Eceyon

Way too many to list, if you want more, just ask.

If you liked Tortoise:
[the Jazz/Ambient sub-genre - much looser song structures, predominantly electronic instrumentation, often jazz or IDM influenced]

Labradford ('94)
Experimental Audio Research ('94)
Stars of the Lid ('95)
Fuxa ('95)
To Rococo Rot ('96)
The Samuel Jackson Five ('04)

If you really liked any of those, here are some more:
Windsor for the Derby
Autechre
Can
Kraftwerk
Bowery Electric
Amp

This is the type of post-rock I am least familiar with. Perhaps someone else can add more to the electronic/jazz post-rock type stuff.

If you liked Explosions in the Sky (you are in luck, everyone tries to sound like them now):
[the Post Post-rock sub-genre - this is predominantly the stuff being made now. It is mostly a mix of epic and instrumental/noise and was pioneered by EITS. They take a bit from all 3 others but most are mainly influenced by either Epic or Instrumental sub-genres I specified.]

Mono ('03)
Red Sparowes ('05)
Russian Circles ('06)
65daysofstatic ('04)
Kinski ('99)
Yndi Halda ('06)

If you really liked any of those, here are a fuckton more:
Actually I'm not even going to list them. Just follow the link provided.

If you have bands to add or would like to modify or correct the suggestions, post them! If I think it is a good suggestion I will edit it into this post.

Edit 1: added sub-genre descriptions.
Edit 2: added year guide

Sweet. Looks good. Thanks

Yndi Halda

Fun time

What did you think of them? Was my description fairly accurate?

They are good. I don't remember your description, so I couldn't tell ya.

Edit: What the hell was I thinking? They aren't good... they are fucking awesome!

huh?

Uhh. Alrighty then.

This comes at a perfect time since I am just starting to discover Mogwai

Godspeed, Mogwai, and Explosions own them all, obviously. I really like Mogwai because they are the most conventional out of all those bands although I think they just run out of ideas and copy themselves. But they are the most satisfying to return to. Explosions are great and probably the most melodic, but they are a wee bit too mathy for me. Their music kind of lack spontaneity, but maybe that's just IMO.

And Godspeed...their compositions can get tiresome but there really aren't many things better than Skinny Fists. One of the first times I actually sat down to listen to that album was on acid, and the experience was pretty sublime and cosmic, like staring into a black hole. I'm at a lack of words for describing how I react to that music. Maybe how people felt in the 70s listening to Dark Side of the Moon.

actually, mono. mono wins. FOREVER.

excellent thread, mister. i just downloaded a shitton of post-rock.

I recommend Ash Ra Tempel's first album (from -71) to post-rock fans.

There is something I want people to know about the outline, and I might edit it to reflect this soon.

There is a certain timeline involved in this genre and I have included bands that span that timeline. Except for the Post post-rock sub-genre, I spread out the bands from the early works to the recent ones so that people can get a grasp of the development. There really is a pretty significant difference between post-rock of the 90s and modern post-rock. A lot of these bands you don't hear about anymore because their style isn't "in" anymore, but I included them because they are very good and deserve to be recognized as the originators of the genre that has evolved into such amazing music in recent years.

I think I'm going to put some years up for bands in the original post.

what the hell does shoegaze mean? I've been listening to post-rockish kind of stuff forever, but i've never really gotten that term..

PS. add The Samuel Jackson Five for the If You Liked Tortoise Section

It's quite literal actually. Coined by the British music press in the early 90s as a pisstake of indie bands (Slowdive most famously) that didn't move about much on stage, just gazed down at their shoes. There were enough of them about playing broadly similar music for the term to become descriptive of a 'scene', although no one would admit to being a shoegazer and many bands, such as Ride, consciously rocked it up a bit to escape the term. Funnily enough I don't remember My Bloody Valentine ever being called shoegazers although when I saw them they did indeed gaze at their shoes for the entire show.
I think the press had far too much respect for them, as I say the term was originally meant in a derogatory sense.

Good call. One of the more popular jazz influenced bands of the past couple years.

Great work!

I just saw Do Make Say Think open for Broken Social Scene, and they were fantastic! the crowd really got into them.

I saw Godspeed on the Skinny Fists "tour" and it was epic....literally, like 3+ hours epic.

Slint

Hey Buffalohed, do you post on the afterthepostrock forum? That genre subclassification thing sounds quite familiar.

It actually saddens me a bit, that the further it goes from the major players, the less I seem to like. I love Godspeed, Silver Mt. Zion, Explosions and Mogwai and have also recently been getting into Do Make Say Think, Fly Pan Am and Mono kind of heavily. However, I can only occasionally listen to Tortoise and Slint. As for the others: I gave 65daysofstatic a try, and while they were interesting sounding, there was nothing I could get into. Same thing with Yndi Halda, Caspian, Mt, Foxhole et al.

Maybe, I just look for more eclectic stuff, because I decided to dig deeper into the Constellation roster and found a lot of intriguing music.

No, I do not post there. I have always thought of subclassifications for post-rock and sometimes typed them out for myself, but those came from me and I haven't seen them used somewhere else.

Unfortunately, you are right. The big 4, along with a few select other bands, are as good as it gets for the most part. Unlike some other genres, digging deeper into post-rock isn't guaranteed to find you even better bands. On the other hand, there are some incredible bands that are unheard of, like Seascapes of the Interior, and a lot more bands that are really damn good if not at the same level as the big ones.

You should also check out the Temporary Residence label, there are a ton of great artists on there, many of them eclectic. In fact I'm going to add The Drift to the guide, they are on TR as well.