The birth of punk-rock, though it was a great thing to happen, is now so enfolded in romantic mythology that you get the feeling if you were actually there (which, dear reader, you may have been), it wouldn’t have been as momentously euphoric as ‘I Love 1977’ would have you believe. By that logic, I put it to you that punk-rock is currently being re-invented right under our noses. Well, no. It’s not punk-rock. It’s something else. I don’t know what it is, they don’t know what it is, but it’s something. It’s new, it’s powerful, it can’t be shuffled away ‘indie-rock’. It’s bigger than your god-damn genres, bitch, and in 30 years even the hackiest of hacks will write with longing, misguided nostalgia about it, ignoring whatever fantastic new kind of music the kids of the 2030’s will be banging out. Of course, people have attempted to genreficate it. The most popular effort was from ‘The Wire’ magazine, who called it ‘post-rock’. Which is clearly ludicrous. It’s very difficult to classify it, because it’s musical content is fairly diverse, and as such a single name would almost always miss the point. And just to clear up any confusion, I’m not talking about jazzy post-rock wank bands who’re more concerned with masturbating their saxophones to clever time-signatures than crafting giant aural towers of 21st century avant-rage. Nono. These people have nothing to do with what I’m talking about. Among the most successful of these ‘post-rock’ bands is …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, a band who only escape being called ‘movie soundtrack music’ (a tactic hacks regularly employ to classify music that’s simply beyond the power of language to describe) by basing their music, roughly, around punk-rock. Their slow-burning guitar epics fall somewhere between Unwound and Mogwai, between Shellac and Godspeed You Black Emperor!. There’s only one other band that springs to mind that’s plowing the same field, Aerogramme, a little band from Glasgow on Mogwai’s old label Chemikal Underground. Both bands’ music is hard to place. It’s not punk-rock/grunge, and it’s not quiet-loud-quiet-loud style Slint rip-off music. It’s both and neither. Well, whatever it is, it’s beautiful. A short interview with Conrad Keely:
