Attempt to get me into post-punk.
 

I tried to get recs a while back but kept forgetting because I had so much post-hardcore to listen to. I've decided this time why not make it an entire thread where people attempt to make me like this genre. Now that I've gotten into post-hardcore, it might be a bit easier. One useful thing I learnt from last time is s
that I find the "flanger" sound off putting.

I'm a huge punk fan, and I like a fair share of alternative rock genres. But I never really got post-punk, the grand daddy of alternative types of rock. I'd like to get a bit outside of my comfort zone again.
What's the appeal to you? What are your favorite styles and bands? What bands do you think I as a melodic punk, hardcore punk and post-hardcore fan would like? Currently, the only post punk I really listen to are gang of four and minutemen, with a bit of the contortions.

I'm not really into the genre either, but this album that Frownland threw at me was honestly a big surprise. A side of the genre I hadn't seen before. It's pretty cool, but perhaps not exactly what post-punk sounds like on average.

Wow.. this is.. strange. It's definitely intriguing, at least. I don't think I've ever heard anything like this, and each song so far manages to surprise me in what it would be like. Feels like an atmospheric journey. Like I'm watching some weird ass artsy movie. The first song felt odd but kinda warm and welcoming, and then the second track felt dark and uncomfortable as **** I was like o.o.

I don't even know how much of this can be called post punk, :').

If you're talking actual punk (Post-punk covers a lot of ground actually), I'd start with the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, The Gun Club (really like these guys), and Mission of Burma. Also The Fall if you're more into noise rock. Like I said, it's really a large net, but these are probably the best out of the harder bands.

Aren't the first 3 just.. punk? I've listened to them for years. Anywho, yeah, I know it's wide. That's kinda the thing with these "alternative" genres. Post-hardcore, alternative rock (the genre, not the umbrella) and indie rock are wide too. I'm not necessarily looking for stuff that sounds like punk, but it'd probably be easier to get into because it's closer to my comfort zone.

Not really. They were considered post punk at the time. The term post-punk really started around 1979. Personally, I don't look at the labels; the Gun Club is every bit as punk as the Clash, imo.

The best advice I can give, though, is only you know what you like. So explore on YouTube (or a music service like Spotify if you have it). Or you can google something like 'bands that sound like Gang of Four.' for example. You can then search for those bands on YouTube or the music service. Half the bands won't sound a bit like them, but you can really find some gems doing that.

I don't think I've ever seen them associated with post punk. Just punk rock, early hardcore punk, and surf punk. Later black flag does have post punk ish things going on tho. Yes, I know genre terms change and a lot of terms are added retroactively, but from what I heard they just called it punk, and they called the post punk bands punk too.

Also, I may know what I like, but I don't know what I will like. There was a point in time where i didn't like Minor Threat, an that's one of my favorite bands ever. It was all about getting comfortable with something new.

Btw, listening to the gun club now.

Today, I'd say it's more prominent to consider DKs, Black Flag and Circle Jerks hardcore punk, which I tend to agree with. I think of post-punk as being not as abrasive as punk, usually the guitars aren't as loud, constant, or distorted. Post-punk, to me at least, borrows a lot from spacier and groovier genres like psychedelic rock, funk, afrobeat, etc. so I tend to think of Devo's first album, Talking Heads, The Cure, The Clash from London Calling forward, and Joy Division.

The thing about post-punk is that it's ambiguous enough to cover a lot of different sounds so stuff like Joy Division, Suicide (technically proto punk but still the dope dope), This Heat, and ****ing U2. As far as I've found, Metabolist is the only band that I've found that's very similar in sound to This Heat but still their own band.

A few of my faves:
Public Image Limited - First Issue
The Pop Group - Y
Pete Ubu - Dub Housing
Teenage Jesus & the Jerks - Everything
The Beatloads - s/t
Swans - Filth
No New York Comp
Glen Branca - The Ascension

Dude. Stop calling The Fall noise rock.

The odd thing thoufg is that I can most of the time still go ''That's post punk'' before seeing the genre tag despite the range in sounds.

Anywho, I'll check out more later. I listened to This Heat, The Gun Club and Mission of Burma so far, all at school because I'm such a punk rebel. I liked the burma the most (had a bit of a noise rock thing going on, and those guitars sound cool), though I found this heat the most interesting for obvious reasons :')

But noise equals noise rock.

*has aneurysm*

You just need to learn more about music.

You make it sound like noise rock is a liability or something. It is a well respected sub-genre and I'm not the first one to refer to the Fall as noise rock. They also happen to be freaking good.

I love and play noise rock. The Fall is not goddamn noise rock.

Some people lump the entire new wave genre in with post-punk, which may actually be accurate to some extent given new wave's emergence from the punk scene in the late 70s. I always thought of new wave as being more accessible, but the more I think about, the more I realize that they're essentially the same genre.

Post-punk is kind of an odd name. I mean, when Punk didn't really have a general sound yet we had bands like Talking Heads playing with punk bands who were considered punk too. Tetroactively we consider that post-punk. And even the ''true'' post-punk bands didn't come that much later. So that means post-punk wasn't all that post. Seems like you just had two types of punk in the beginnings, one that was doing something new, the other that was trying to bring back rock to its roots, both not caring about any traditional idea of what makes a good rock song (as one sounded different and the other was amateurish).

And then you have new-wave, which is basically just post-punk bands with a poppier sound and image, and I bet back then not much of a distinction was made. It seems pretty similar to how certain punk rock bands like the ramones were poppy, yet others like crass were noisy and aggressive. We retroactively call those (traditional) Pop punk. I guess it's just pop post-punk, really. So yes, you could basically call it the same genre. That said, I'm just theorizing and completely talking out of my anus here as usual.

For someone who was around during 'new wave'. It was basically a term used to make punk sound more commercial. Blondie especially had the new wave tag pinned on them. It would also be the label from more danceable bands like the B-52s. It eventually got so out of hand as by 1980 it had become so trendy that more traditional bands would cash in on the term. Alice Cooper even had one of his biggest hits that year with the 'New Wave' Clones. Shockingly enough, it's actually pretty good.

True punk bands though cringed at the suggestion they were New Wave. I could imagine John Lydon throwing up at the term even now.

So it really is the pop version, but it was a big marketing term even back then?

It was the marketing tool. Radio stations used the term to separate bands like Blondie and Talking Heads to the likes of, say, Foreigner or the Bee Gees. It seemed like a softer way of saying punk rock to make it more palatable to the consumer. Some of it wasn't even New Wave. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were considered New Wave for example. It worked for a few groups (Blondie wasn't that big commercially speaking until Parallel Lines), but for others, it was kind of a disaster. It's possible the Post Punk description that was big in the early eighties was a reaction to the New Wave hype. There was also something called Post Wave which would have included bands like New Order for example.

You labeled them as noise rock and then MES died. Concidence? I think not.

heh, so that's probably why they called it ''No Wave''

The problem is that punk bands said that they weren't rock bands, even though they used the same old **** - Chuck Berry chords and rebellious lyrics. That in itself is all marketing bs, and why I don't see much difference in post-punk and new wave. In fact, I see it as the new wave started popularizing punk and then punk musicians decided they wanted to do the same thing and still pretend that they were real punks. Not saying I don't love some of that music, but there really isn't much difference other than I'd say that post-punk bands tended to be more independent and have more creative control as a result.

Basically, Duran Duran is new wave, The Smiths are post-punk.

Listened to a bit of:
Public Image Limited - First Issue
The Pop Group - Y

The first started out promising and then bored the **** out of my by going nowhere. The second though.. I genuinely dig this. I don't think I would have digged this two years ago but here I am.

PiL goes everywhere. You need to try harder.

How about some Bauhaus?

The Monochrome Set - Jet Set Junta

Suburban Lawns - Janitor

I totally forgot about The Birthday Party - they sort of remind me of NoMeansNo here, but less heavy and less precise. Also, they were Nick Cave's original group from before The Bad Seeds.

I'm pretty sure the Ramones considered themselves a rejection of rock or something stupid like that, I could be totally wrong, but they recorded a bunch of songs with distorted Chuck Berry riffs. I agree that punk is the ethos and style, but it's pretty much just marketing **** to teenagers like music has always done. As I get older, I tend to distance myself from the confines of "sub-genres" because that's really all it's about is marketing.

Nah. There are definitely some that began as or became marketing terms, but subgenres are usually coined by music nerds themselves.

They're not very descriptive and the marketing departments of record labels always end up getting behind them, regardless of who coined them. I just don't really care about the sub-genre labeling system because there's so much overlapping that it's not very practical. There are so many different genres within metal, which isn't very distinct from rock or punk to begin with, that people are just making them up now to describe their band because it's become satirical to do so.

This is where I stopped reading. Subgenres make it easier to communicate elements of music for discussions and exploration, even if people do go over the top and coin genres that only apply to one band or apply to too many bands to meaningful. I'm very much pro subgenre.

They literally communicate a brand or a style, and that's pretty much the extent of it. You can communicate elements of music in ways that are more descriptive, and you won't end up limiting your results to terms like "psychedelic".

No ****. Doesn't devalue subgenres.

Then you can go for more esoteric psychedelic genres like krautrock, zolo, or molam. It seems like this point actually goes with my pro-subgenre stance more than yours.

What's the value in that? So you know what kind of clothing you're supposed to buy to look like a krautrocker?

I thought by style you meant musical style. Like hey I want to listen to black metal right as opposed to I want to listen to metal with fast tempos, a shrieking vocal style, heavily distorted guitars played with tremolo picking, raw (lo-fi) recording, unconventional song structures, and an emphasis on atmosphere. It saves time.

It really just sounds like you need to stop getting your music from the television. What you say holds up for something like grunge, but it doesn't really apply to something like, idunno, izlan.

Yes, as a tag the sub-genres work okay, but so does looking up by artist and searching for bands that are similar. It's more precise and just as effective at saving time.

Eh it can and can't be since (at least online), "similar artists" are just artists that are a common denominator amongst fans. There's a lot that can potentially be left untapped if you don't use every way that you can to dig deeper. I don't see why you can't do both.

I think sub-genres get in the way of the "similar artists" feature, because you'll see bands from the black metal genre when you look up Venom, and one or none of them will sound like Venom.

No one method will be one-size-fits-all. I still have yet to see you demonstrate that subgenres are without value beyond misconceptions and goalpost moving.