people complaining about post rock being all the same... read this.
 

Why people complain about post rock songs being similar to each other in their style so much??
there are MANY genres that are way more stagnant than post rock -
like folk,
punk,
blues,
and pentatonic scale+power-chords rock... (you know what im talking about)
Post rock is more varried than those genres^ yet no one complains about them being stagnant. people are bitching only when its post rock.

You make a lot of threads.

well, I like to be an active member ^.^
is it a bad thing? :p

I'm not saying it's good or bad, it's just something I've noticed.

You have to remember that the likes of blues and punk have a far greater history than post-rock. In any genre there is going to be a lot of traits that get repeated and similar artists or just straight-up copycats but in a thriving genre there will be bands that bring more to the table and continue to breathe life into it.

In post-rock there are stand-out artists that keep it interesting and although I haven't listened to a lot of it this year, I started to get tired by what I saw as the sheer number of bands popping up all doing the same thing. If the genre suddenly gives birth to a flurry of bands who all feel like taking a few risks then it will probably benefit greatly. Post-rock doesn't have 60+ years of experience to fall back on.

True, it doesnt have a long and rich history,
but its still not particularly samey whan you compare it to alot of diffrent genres

Well we'll have to agree to disagree on that one in that case.

In terms of (just to pick one) blues, you also have to remember that blues is at its heart quite basic. It was the way an awful lot of great guitarists learned to play, and initially they learned because it was easy. I can't play but it's relatively well known that one of the easiest scales/progressions to play in music is the twelve-bar blues, in fact it forms the basis of an awful lot of music. If these guys (Muddy, Sonny Boy, Wolf etc) had all been trying to learn classical or jazz, chances are it would have been a lot harder (though I'm sure some of them later moved into jazz at least, and some may have been playing it, but not at the start), but blues is simple, uncomplicated and with a few chords you can make a song, so that would have been attractive to young guitarists at the time. Not to mention that, especially in Delta Blues, an acoustic guitar was all the guys had.

But blues is still being played, and improved on today. Look at Robert Cray, Eric Clapton, the late Gary Moore and Rory Gallagher ... all played blues to the highest level possible and incorporated it into their music. Sure, blues could be seen as being stagnant, but there's not the widest amount of room there for changing it. It has formed the mainstay of rock music for over seventy years now, so it's hardly fair to compare it to post-rock and say it's a stagnant genre.

Love your avatar, by the way: reminds me of the fox off Glacier Mints! :) :thumb:

I'm guessing it's coming from listeners with very limited historical music knowledge. If you consider the contemporary string line of mainstream, current successful distribution and amount of radio play in terms of rock culture, of course they will stress on other artists with a similar sound. The industry analyses music in a general sense of taste and produce accordingly. That's business and marketing for you, and pretty much how it works in the present day.

Thx :p its actually a meme called Pyong :D

You either don't discuss music with many people or only discuss it with people who all have very similar outlooks.

Also great job providing value to your subject with examples and opportunities to explore the apparent wealth of artistic variety found within post rock and not just posting a one dimensional gripe.

:love:


The other thing, the 3-4 genres you mention are ALL rooted in the fundamental simplicity of their styles (with the power chord rock essentially being a combined extension of Punk and Blues). Folk, Punk and Blues are all ideally about the the live performance and the interaction between the musician and the masses. It actually makes sense for those styles to remain relatively similar, you wouldn't expect a Folkie to show up with a full orchestra and a DJ and rapping lyrics about outer space - it doesn't make sense, you expect one person with an acoustic guitar singing poetic lines about our common lives.

As for Post Rock, I do hear a lot of commonality in the stuff I've heard. In the same way you complain about the overuse of the Pentatonic scale in typical rock music, the perpetual atonal melodies of PR get kind of old too. Same with the build ups that last longer than the average Punk tune; or the rhythms that you can't really dance along to.