1. **Thinking Plague: “The Aesthete”**: Thinking Plague is just plain *odd*. They’re
\na hard-to-classify group. It’s got vocals, but instead of the vocals being the lead,
\nthey treat voice as just another instrument. They’re often atonal, and when they’re
\ntonal, the chords are often very dissonant. They *sound* like they’re very influenced
\nby Robert Fripp’s guitar craft, and there’s a persistent rumour that their guitarist
\nis a crafty, but after the last time they came up in a FRT, he showed up in the
\ncomments to say that he wasn’t. They’re definitely not a group that I’d recommend to
\neveryone, but if you’ve got the right kind of taste, they’re really quite remarkable.
\n2. **The Tap Room Trio, “The Blackberry Blossom\/THe Ballina Lass”**: very traditional
\nIrish music by a trio including my favorite traditional flutist, the great Harry
\nBradley. Very simple traditional arrangements of classic Irish tunes.
\n3. **Tortoise, “It’s All Around You”**: Tortoise is a very influential post-rock
\nband. Given how much I like post-rock, and how much of what I listen to is
\nsupposedly influenced by Tortoise, I expected to really like them. I find this
\nto be incredibly dull – downright trite.
\n4. **Gentle Giant, “A Reunion”**: Progressive rock with strong madrigal influences.
\nGG is brilliant.
\n5. **Sigur Rós, “Andvari”**: Post-rock from a mellow Icelandic band. This is more like what postrock is supposed to be to me. It’s very mellow and subdued, but it’s got a
\nreal depth and sophistication. Beautiful track.
\n6. **King Crimson, “The Howler”**: a track off of Beat, the second-album by Discipline-era KC. Very typical of the vocal tracks from that phase of KC: lots of
\nFripp’s tape loops setting the structure of the track; Belew doing his crooning voice.
\n7. **Naftule’s Dream, “Something is There”**: Brilliant neo-Klezmer, for lack of a better word. Naftule’s Dream is named after Naftule Brandwine, the genius of Klezmer clarinet; they’re a modern band that plays stuff clearly inspired by Klezmer, but filtered
\nthrough a lens of modern jazz and some rock. There’s some Ornette Coleman and Some Robert Fripp in here, mixed with the klez. Highly recommended.
\n8. **Sonic Youth, “Mildred Pierce”**: If you know what Sonic Youth sounds like, this
\nis absolutely typical of their sound. If you don’t know, you should check it out.
\nThey’re strange, harsh, loud, and very, very good.
\n9. **Dirty Three, “Dream Evie”**: one of my favorite postrock groups, playing in the
\nmore classically inspired vein of PR; Dirty Three is always wonderful.
\n10. **Mogwai, “With Portfolio”**: another favorite PR band; this one comes from the more
\nrock-oriented side of things<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1. **Thinking Plague: “The Aesthete”**: Thinking Plague is just plain *odd*. They’re a hard-to-classify group. It’s got vocals, but instead of the vocals being the lead, they treat voice as just another instrument. They’re often atonal, and when they’re tonal, the chords are often very dissonant. They *sound* like they’re very influenced by Robert Fripp’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-7n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}