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Head-Fier
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I am both a huge shoegaze fan and a post-rocker; and I love both genres, different as they are, so I hope that I can at least in some way describe the two genres of music; even though music is a difficult thing to describe, and I am not a very good describer.
Shoegazing started out in the late 80s in Britain, and it's eventually evolved under names like The Boo Radleys and Catherine Wheel to become what we know today as brit-pop. Shoegazing itself however makes use of heavy drone on the guitars (they're run through a fuzzbox), and they're used more to carry the entire sound than for any individual melody. Bands like My Bloody Valentine create entire waves of noise, like an entity of sound. Good luck even trying to make out any instrumentation; production is such that bass becomes voice (both male and female) becomes guitar becomes the reverberating percussion. Of course later shoegaze artists like Ride and Slowdive separate out the instruments a little more, especially the drums and the vocals, but there's still the same giddy sense of swirling synths and distortion throughout. Be aware, you're not going to get a sense of dynamics with this kind of music; it's loud and it's always loud. Often heavy, but calming; mood and tone range from optimisitic (When the Sun Hits, Slowdive), to the downright depressed (Here She Comes, Slowdive).
Slowdive (Souvlaki)
Ride (Nowhere)
My Bloody Valentine (Loveless) (although this is most people's favourite... it's meant to be an album about falling in love :/ but it didn't do a lot for me. That said, MBV's distortion pedal must have got stomped to pieces in the making of this record.)
Post-rock is an often minimalist genre that used rock instrumentation to play classically arranged pieces. There are hardly any vocals, and where there are vocals, they're spoken or whispered, hardly ever sung. Tonality is more often minor than major. The tune is carried by two guitars, interweaving. Unlike shoegaze, post-rock makes huge use of dynamics, because they don't have vocals to convey emotion. Instrumentation is diverse; expect everything from glockenspiels and vibraphones, to organs with the attack-and-decay patterns reversed, trumpets, also electronic sounds, synths and voice samples.
There's a lot of post-rock, and a lot of it is very different; you have jazz/post-rock in Tortoise, or classical/post-rock in Godspeed, but here's what I think is the best of the bunch:
Slint (Spiderland) (godlike masterpiece, regarded as the first post-rock album)
A Silver Mt. Zion (He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Still Grace The Corners Of Our Room)
Explosions in the Sky (The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place)
Also see: Bark Psychosis (Hex), Mercury Program (A Data Learn The Language)
Some artists that are a lot like Sigur Ros (more so than the bands listed above), that you might have overlooked:
The Album Leaf, Makeshift:Shelter, Efterklang, El Ten Eleven, Fridge
Shoegazing started out in the late 80s in Britain, and it's eventually evolved under names like The Boo Radleys and Catherine Wheel to become what we know today as brit-pop. Shoegazing itself however makes use of heavy drone on the guitars (they're run through a fuzzbox), and they're used more to carry the entire sound than for any individual melody. Bands like My Bloody Valentine create entire waves of noise, like an entity of sound. Good luck even trying to make out any instrumentation; production is such that bass becomes voice (both male and female) becomes guitar becomes the reverberating percussion. Of course later shoegaze artists like Ride and Slowdive separate out the instruments a little more, especially the drums and the vocals, but there's still the same giddy sense of swirling synths and distortion throughout. Be aware, you're not going to get a sense of dynamics with this kind of music; it's loud and it's always loud. Often heavy, but calming; mood and tone range from optimisitic (When the Sun Hits, Slowdive), to the downright depressed (Here She Comes, Slowdive).
Slowdive (Souvlaki)
Ride (Nowhere)
My Bloody Valentine (Loveless) (although this is most people's favourite... it's meant to be an album about falling in love :/ but it didn't do a lot for me. That said, MBV's distortion pedal must have got stomped to pieces in the making of this record.)
Post-rock is an often minimalist genre that used rock instrumentation to play classically arranged pieces. There are hardly any vocals, and where there are vocals, they're spoken or whispered, hardly ever sung. Tonality is more often minor than major. The tune is carried by two guitars, interweaving. Unlike shoegaze, post-rock makes huge use of dynamics, because they don't have vocals to convey emotion. Instrumentation is diverse; expect everything from glockenspiels and vibraphones, to organs with the attack-and-decay patterns reversed, trumpets, also electronic sounds, synths and voice samples.
There's a lot of post-rock, and a lot of it is very different; you have jazz/post-rock in Tortoise, or classical/post-rock in Godspeed, but here's what I think is the best of the bunch:
Slint (Spiderland) (godlike masterpiece, regarded as the first post-rock album)
A Silver Mt. Zion (He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Still Grace The Corners Of Our Room)
Explosions in the Sky (The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place)
Also see: Bark Psychosis (Hex), Mercury Program (A Data Learn The Language)
Some artists that are a lot like Sigur Ros (more so than the bands listed above), that you might have overlooked:
The Album Leaf, Makeshift:Shelter, Efterklang, El Ten Eleven, Fridge
