Artist	Song
Tortoise	Glass Museum
from Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996)
Talk Talk	New Grass
from Laughing Stock (1991)
Sigur Rós	Starálfur
from Ágætis Byrjun (2000)
Slint	Carol
from Tweez (1993)
Mogwai	I Know You Are But What Am I?
from Happy Songs for Happy People (2003)
Gastr Del Sol	Ursus Arctos Wonderfilis
from The Serpentine Similar (2007)
Mouse on Mars	Saturday Night Worldcup Fieber
from Iaora Tahiti (1995)
Broken Social Scene	Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl
from You Forgot It in People (2003)
Godspeed You Black Emperor!	09-15-00 Pt. 2
from Yanqui U.X.O. (2008)
Labradford	WR
from Mi Media Naranja (1998)
Rachel's	Rhine & Courtesan
from The Sea and the Bells (1996)
The Sea and Cake	Flat Lay the Water
from The Sea and Cake (1994)
Trans Am	Obscene Strategies
from Sex Change (2007)
Codeine	D
from Frigid Stars (1991)
Dirty Three	I Really Should've Gone Out Last Night
from Whatever You Love, You Are (2000)
Cul de Sac	Lovemaking / Mae's Theme
from The Strangler's Wife (2003)
The Album Leaf	Twenty Two Fourteen
from In a Safe Place (2004)
Bark Psychosis	A Street Scene
from Game Over (1997)
Stars of the Lid	Requiem for Dying Mothers, Pt. 1
from The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2001)

Comment:

Experimenting in the underground, post-rock pioneers expanded — no, [i]rewrote[/i] — rock’s definition, reassembling a whole new beast from spare parts. Guitar-keyboard-bass-drums-vocal? [i]Out[/i]. Verse-chorus-verse? [i]Nope[/i]. Lyrics in the spotlight? [i]Gone[/i]. What was in? UNPREDICTABLE DYNAMICS, going from LOUD to soft when you least exPECT it. Non-traditional instruments (think cello or music box). A sound that could be as delicate as lingerie or as harsh as a sandstorm. While post-rock didn’t have one solitary ground zero, Slint (the granddaddy of the vaunted Chicago/Louisville scene) is a reasonable place to start; they built a fiercely fanatical following over the course of their two albums, and it’s instantly apparent why when you hear the gauze-filtered primal scream of [i]Tweez[/i]’s “Carol.” Like the salmon that dies after spawning, Talk Talk ushered in [i]their[/i] post-rock reinvention on their final (and essential) album, [i]Laughing Stock[/i]; its “New Grass” is as airy as a daydream, as fragile as a soap bubble. And Mogwai’s drop-dead-gorgeous instrumental “I Know You Are but What Am I?” takes a simple piano riff and curves back in on itself with the stark, ethereal beauty of Saturn’s rings, revolving slowly, eternally, in space. From Sigur Rós to Tortoise, we’ve got all the post-rock powerhouses that one genre, two ears, and your iPod can hold.

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