Post-Black Metal/Blackgaze
 

Anyone a fan of this hipster BS?
I honestly find some of the most beautiful and some of the most haunting music in the blackgaze world. I'm talking about bands that combine the ravishing grimness of BM with the lengthy instrumentation of post metal and/or the ethereal atmosphere of shoegaze. Deafheaven (who's new album Sunbather is fantastic), Dopamine, Soliness, Heretoir, Shyy, Ethereal Beauty, Dernier Martyr, Thranenkind, Amesoeurs, etc.





A lot of people think it's gay hipster crap, but I love it.

An important split one might want to check out is The World Comes to an End in the End of a Journey. Featuring Ethereal Beauty, Shyy, Heretoir, Soliness, Dernier Martyr, and Dopamine.


The World Comes To An End In The End Of Journey [Split] (2009) [Full Album] - YouTube

The "post" genres are always kind of hard to quantify because it doesn't seem like any one band sounds similar to the other.

When I think of post-black metal bands I immediately go to bands like Solefald, in particular their 2003 album In Harmonia Universali. It's been awhile since I've looked at the genre label though, but when I look on Last.fm I see a lot of the blackgaze bands which I never really would have associated with the label, but again we come back to how hard it is to quantify any of the "post" labels.

I understand the need to differentiate between certain sounds, because using an umbrella term like black metal just doesn't work because Mayhem doesn't sound anything like Arcturus or Sigh, but avant garde is just as murky.

I'm not a fan, so I don't really listen to much Arcturus, but they don't seem particularly avant garde to me. I keep hearing "avant garde" metalheads saying that La Masquerade Infernale is the best album ever, but it just sounds like goofy 70's prog metaled up, with bargain basement opera vocals thrown in to make the whole thing extra laughable.

The only Arcturus album I'm really a fan of is their 2002 one The Sham Mirrors.

Like I said, avant garde is just as murky and I actually get a chuckle when people actually try to differentiate how an avant garde metal band is different from an experimental metal band when I think of the terms as completely interchangeable with the latter being used by wankers.

I thought there was an actual difference between experimental and avant garde.

If you can explain it then by all means, but I do think we're getting a little off-topic here.

I've heard a lot of good things about that Deafheaven album so maybe I will give it a try. I've always been pretty lukewarm on Alcest though, and everything else I've heard just sounded like a derived version of their albums so I don't know if I'll be quite as on board with Sunbather (2013) as everyone else.

Gallowbraid and Bossk do it for me or just switch to the really dark side and listen to Swans and forget genre labels!

the Sunbather song sounded kinda like a song from that last Wolves in the Throne Room album, only a little brighter in it's guitar backdrop thing.