It’s been hotter than a bathroom used to stash boxes of top secret documents here this weekend and while today is a little cooler, the kick in the pills that is Monday is made a little more of a groaner thanks to reduced sleep.

So to ease into the week I’m soundtracking my day of working from home with some glorious slabs of post-rock.

Once again, here’s another borrowed attempt at defining the genre which you can enjoy / disregard / discredit as a witch-hunt as you see fit: “Post-rock is a style of rock music that foregoes common tropes like blues-based riffing, verse-chorus-verse song structure, flashy guitar solos, and storytelling lyrics. The typical post-rock song or post-rock album tends to feature unconventional song structure, extended instrumental passages, oblique lyrics, and influences outside of blues or classic rock.”

Here’s today’s selection:

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Mladic

Some mornings you take a mellow, Kenyan coffee and savour it as the day begins. Some mornings you need to turn the espresso machine on and get a hard hit. Some mornings you can start with the melodic, some mornings you need the equivalent of Vulgar Display of Power‘s cover. Those mornings are what Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s ‘Mladic’ is for. Their 2012 comeback album (following a near-ten year hiatus ) Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! is still one of my favourite albums full stop and ‘Mladic’ is just a real moment of ‘fuck this is good’ – from the sampled vocals, the middle-eastern vibe of the violin, the distorted drone-like thump and build of guitars and bass, the rise and falls, the dissonance and churning guitars and grungy power of it before breaking into an orchestral sweep still has me hooked throughout its twenty minute run time. Godspeed were one of the early pioneers of the genre and they still provide a benchmark.

Sigur Rós – Svefn-g-englar

Need a palette cleanser after that? How about something of ethereal beauty and one of the greatest tunes the genre has to offer? Pretty bold words, I know, but just as Godspeed represent one of the early trail-blazers of the genre’s heavier side, Iceland’s Sigur Rós lead the way on the melodic front and this, from their 1999 masterpiece Ágætis byrjun has been referred to as “a song of such accomplished gorgeousness that one wonders why such a tiny country as Iceland can musically outperform entire continents in just a few short minutes.”

We Lost The Sea – A Gallant Gentleman

Going for something a little more recent, We Lost The Sea hail from Sydney, Australia. That place with the bridge that Paul Hogan used to paint before arguing the merits of knives. In 2013 they lost their vocalist to suicide and the subsequent Departure Songs is a moving, soaring album of music inspired by ‘failed, yet epic and honourable individual journeys or events throughout history where people have done extraordinary things for the greater good of those around them, and the progress of the human race itself’ – including ‘A Gallant Gentleman’ which makes use of a  girls school choir,’ Challenger Pt1 – Flight’ and ‘Challenger Pt2 – Swan Song’ – which has become a modern post-rock staple and is a thoroughly beautiful thing.

Lost In Kiev – Psyche

Over to France for Paris’ Lost In Kiev – I loved their second album Nuit Noire but took a little longer to warm to their next, 2019’s Persona which was daft really as it’s bloody good stuff. Adding more texture to their sound but still retaining their driving, heavy charge and love for spoken-word interludes, this time with more of a sci-fi bent than its predecessor with words that, as they put it ‘raise the question of the human nature through the artificial intelligence mask’. Post-Rock can get a little like that sometimes.