It’s been kind of a trip, making this playlist. Most post-rock is melancholy at best, maudlin at worst, but if that’s an emotional spectrum you identify with - which, boy do I - then this is your music. When you write about music for a living people tend to ask you what your favorite kind of music is, and I rarely say post-rock because a) the term really is that embarrassing b) family, friends, and most bartenders aren’t familiar with it and c) it’s the kind of music you feel obliged to grow out of liking, akin to saying your favorite food is pudding. For better or worse, post-rock is the genre that for the last 20 years has remained closer to my heart than any other. I fell in love with post-rock before I knew the term existed, before I understood how traditions of music are passed from band to band, mutate in the process, and splinter into new ideas and shapes. For as cerebral as the music can be, it often has the urgency of punk rock: It wants you to feel something, intensely, right now. Some borrow from chamber music, while others take cues from Led Zeppelin.

Show me a post-rock band that’s entirely instrumental and I’ll show you five that use vocals and/or vocal samples. Post-rock has always reveled in this ambiguity that’s one of its defining characteristics. Truth is, if you tried to connect all the dots you’d have something that looked like a hairball. Perhaps, however, its vocabulary of textures and rhythms dates back further, to, say, the Velvet Underground, because crap, they invented everything, right? Certainly jazz was involved, but then so was post-punk and early hardcore. Above all else, the Wikipedia entry on post-rock exemplifies how difficult it can be to pin down movements in music: Did the genre begin in the ’90s? The ’80s? The term was coined a little over 20 years ago, in 1994, by Simon Reynolds in the pages of Mojo.

Pull the pin rock song