 An article by The Silent Ballet Staff
Neurosis is noted as the founder of the post-metal genre, but it is ISIS that is credited with its expansion and evolution. ISIS started the decade with an album and companion EP that pushed the band's previous sludge sounds more towards what now has become the post-metal archetype. 2002 saw ISIS release the ground-breaking Oceanic, and this was quickly followed up by the equally well-received Panopticon two years later. These two albums vary from each other, but they set the standard for post-metal with atmospheric songs that progress slowly and build to monolithic heights before crashing into rocketing guitar and roaring vocals. It’s a formula that has been copied endlessly, but none have perfected it like ISIS. The last two releases by the band this decade, In The Absence of Truth (2006) and Wavering Radiant (2009), have seen ISIS stagnate slightly, but Oceanic and Panopticon will remain the keystone in the post-metal sound and style for years to come. (Gary Davidson) 9) Bohren & der Club of Gore Bohren, whose name means “to drill” in German, has a reputation for writing music that sounds as though the air is quietly yet incessantly being sucked out of the room. Yet in the asphyxiated gasps that are left, we can sense true beauty. Given all this, one wouldn’t think that the addition of a saxophone player would make or break the band, but in Bohren’s case, this is almost certainly true. Since 2000’s Sunset Mission, this GORE fan club has been able to add free-jazz stylings to its ambient black-metal tones, and the results have been legendary. Dolores, the group’s latest and potentially best album, offers a ray of sunshine into this dark discography, but this functions mostly as a flickering scented candle among eternal midnight. I’d hesitate to call this dangerous music, but it is certainly profound. (Tom Butcher) 8) Do Make Say Think In any genre of music there are always a groups that are seen as standard bearers in their field, whether as a result of their commercial success, influence, or by just being downright brilliant at what they do. For post-rock/instrumental rock music, Do Make Say Think must be considered one such act. It is difficult to think of any band out there that, six albums into its career, has been able to keep the quality of its output so high. Each album the band has released shows subtle progression, while always retaining its signature sound. DMST's mesmerizing blend of jazz, folk, and, of course, rock remains unsurpassed, and while some new bands seek to imitate their heroes, few will be able to match the pure celebratory joy of the Do Makes in full pomp. If this year’s Other Truths proves anything, it’s that DMST remain one of those special acts that are setting the standards for others to meet. (Matt Fernell) 7) Grails It’s revealing to note how long a time it's been since we last heard from Godspeed, yet the band is still recurrent in all sorts of media and is an undeniable influence on many musical projects today. Now we see the collective as one of post-rock’s progenitors, as an indirect inertial force that taught us how enormously powerful instrumental rock music could be; yet in its day GY!BE was treading new ground, tearing apart our sensibilities with sorrowful pieces about politics and the disappointment of contemporary human life. It was a fight for hope, a message to all those stubborn tiny lights to not give up. While we’ve lost that vitality and somewhat reduced the band's work to mere sounds across time, we’ve also gained a sort of expectation for someone to finally come up and match this inimitable band one day. GY!BE is a phenomenon that might not happen again in rock music, but it’s incredible how fierce its legacy is, how hollow the genre at times feels without the half-hour epics of classical instrumentation and truly cathartic buildups, full of intensity and light on drama. I used to say I wanted “Storm” to be played at my funeral, as a kind of salutation to Nature, as everything is revitalized and cycles are re-started; and if there’s one band that needs to be revitalized by audiences in the future, it’s Godspeed. Here’s to another decade of instrumental rock music! (David Murrieta) 5) Tim Hecker Tim Hecker must be an alchemist, because anyone who can take washes of white noise and morph them into pieces of such musical beauty is obviously breaking a law or two of nature along the way. His 2001 debut, Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again broke new barriers in terms of what it meant to be an ambient artist, and electronic artist, or indeed even a musical artist, and it instantly created a sound that today can only be called "Hecker." Since then, he's hardly slowed down, putting out one of the most impressive discographies of the decade: 2003's Radio Amor, 2004's Mirages, 2006's Harmonies in Ultraviolet, and this year's An Imaginary Country, which, even among such a mighty back catalog, still manages to stand out as some of his best work to date. And let's not forget his other work from the decade, like the live EP Norberg, Sweden or last year's collaboration with Aidan Baker, Fantasma Parastasie. Remarkably, every one of these albums is worth one's time. To put the matter bluntly, Tim Hecker enriches the experience of listening to music beyond all possible belief. (Tom Butcher) 4) 65daysofstatic "This negativity just makes me stronger. We will not retreat, this band is unstoppable!" 65daysofstatic demanded attention with these words off 2004’s genre-defying The Fall of Math. The humanity-tinged roboticism of that album still echoes in quite a few ears, yet 65dos had truly only begun its movement with that release. Five years later, many still eagerly follow the continuing onslaught of the four Englishmen, who’ve stunned legions with their well respected live performances and two subsequent albums. Somewhere amongst the eerie twinkling piano bookends of “Default This” and the devastating wall of adrenaline that is “Radio Protector” lies the already-fulfilled promise of Sheffield’s wunderkind. (Calvin Young) 3) Explosions in the Sky The year was 2003, and, although I seldom paid heed to – or even glanced at – music reviews in the national press, one particular cliché-riddled review in a Sunday broadsheet caught my eye. “If you like Godspeed, Mogwai or Sigur Ros, this album has your name on it... I defy you not to be smitten.” Never one to shirk a challenge – particularly when my three favorite bands were namechecked in one sentence – I took the plunge and ordered The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place. In retrospect, this was perhaps my most inspired moment of the decade (getting married and graduating twice being close runners up), with the album forming the soundtrack to my mid-twenties. With its sublimely interweaving, chiming guitars giving way to crushing crescendos, EITS also proved as spectacular live as it was on record. In the space of a mere decade – bearing in mind that EITS only recently celebrated its tenth birthday – the Texan quartet has arguably made a greater impact on the instrumental world than any other band, opening up the genre to an entirely new audience. They’ve scored movie soundtracks, been featured on various advertisements, headlined and curated festivals, and – surely the greatest accolade of all – guested on the Conan O’Brien show. Although they’ve been somewhat quiet of late (with their latest offering All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone being greeted with mixed reviews in 2007), instinct suggests that EITS will unveil the mother of all comebacks in the next decade. Just watch this space. (Richard White) 2) Stars of the Lid After a flurry of mid-to-late 90’s releases, Stars of the Lid’s output slowed in the new millennium. Rather than album after album of spacious, enveloping drone, Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie honed their sound into something architectural, elegant, and pure, and assembled their creations into cavernous, symphonically-sequenced double albums. The result was not a band declining in its second decade; rather, Tired Sounds Of... and And Their Refinement of the Decline stand as colossal, self-enclosed monoliths of perfectly-realized ambient drone that have cast an inescapable shadow upon the decade’s ambient milieu. In doing so, the duo utterly deconstructed the boundaries between electronic, acoustic, ambient, classical, and minimal musics, became the definitive Kranky band, garnered acclaim from various corners of the underground, and came closer than anyone before them to realizing the “music of the spheres.” (Lucas Kane) 1) Sigur Rós While the genre-shattering that Sigur Rós is most globally associated with began before the year 2000, when films and TV started discovering its emotive brand of long form composition, the band entered the new millennium with no small portion of vision. Technically, the quartet's first release of the decade was Rímur, an EP that sought to highlight the distinctly Icelandic brand of epic poetry the record is named for. This raw form of cultural collaboration continued six years later in the Iceland-lauding documentary Heima. In 2002, while Sigur Rós was releasing its first full-length sung completely in their glossolalic language Vonlenska, the UK and US finally got their hands on an official release of Von, the group's abstract debut from 1997. So it's no surprise that each new record feels like a tangible and unending landscape unfolding and stretching out like the infinite sustain of Jónsi Birgisson's bowed guitar. Descriptions of Sigur Rós' sound resort to abstract cliches like 'epic' and 'big' because they are the only indigents of the worlds they create, leaving the rest of us to describe their music the way a penciled drawing on flat paper understands flesh and bone. (Bryan Parys)
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