http://www.factmag.com/2015/06/24/40-best-post-metal/
As with the recent indie hip-hop list, the first thing we need to do is define what post-metal even is.As with most sub-genres of music, by the time people started accepting post-metal as a thing, time was running out for it. Music is often most interesting when you’re left wondering what the hell it is even supposed to be.
If you ask the average underground metal head, they’ll tell you that post-metal is the stuff that sounds like Neurosis or Isis (the latter beating Anthrax into a cocked hat for the title of Band Most Ruined By Unrelated Terrorists, even if the rock group was rather long gone by the time Mosul fell). But then, the best Neurosis albums don’t sound anything like the best offerings from Isis. And where do you draw the line between post-metal and doom, or modern black metal, or even prog?
The truth is post-metal takes in all of these elements without being entirely any one of them. So we’ll be featuring nothing totally proggy, like Ayreon; nor pure doom, like Electric Wizard; nor your modern black metal fellows like Leviathan, Wolves in the Throne Room, or Velvet Cacoon, though their peaks certainly coincided with post-metal. We’re also starting the list in the 90s, so while Gore, early Swans and Godflesh and even Last Exit and Glenn Branca may be deserving, they won’t be on this particular list.
Around the time grime was evolving from garage – in the simplest terms – so too was post-metal emerging from noisecore. Noisecore was the culmination of the fast-and-complex style of thrash and metallic hardcore. Between 1997 and 2000, bands like Botch, Kiss It Goodbye, Dillinger Escape Plan and Coalesce were twisting hardcore and metal into increasingly technical shapes, blurring the brutality with jazz, pop and, well, Gregorian chants. Eventually, the time passed for noisecore, and those young intellectuals decided to slow it down, growing oddly tender at times.
Once the material Relapse and Hydra Head were releasing started getting slower, more bass-heavy and abstract, the name post-metal came about: This is most likely due to the fact that post-rock, by that stage, inhabited a similar area, thanks to the likes of Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Lift To Experience loudening up what was once the domain of Tortoise, Labradford and Ui. No sooner is a movement given a name, than people then have to look back to investigate what may have caused this. As a result, you end up looking at 90s metal-that-isn’t-metal, like Helmet, Rollins Band, Swans or Fugazi.
Some of the aforementioned will be on this list. Some won’t. Some attempts at justification will be made for a band or album’s inclusion. The only guarantee is there will be some very long songs.
Listen to the list’s highlights now on
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg5ScSqSDXsuySunY27jDgNT8QDPd2sOh
http://www.rdio.com/people/FACT/playlists/13764675/The_40_best_post-metal_records_of_all_time/
https://open.spotify.com/user/factmag/playlist/1ZSsCAdT0W9909TsfNBxls
Poll Results
| Option | Votes |
| 10. Tool - Ænima | 6 |
| 6. The Angelic Process - Weighing Souls With Sand | 4 |
| 9. Boris - Flood | 3 |
| 11. Jesu - Silver | 3 |
| 27. Dazzling Killmen - Face of Collapse | 3 |
| 35. Pelican - Australasia | 3 |
| 15. Earth - HEX: or Printing in the Infernal Method | 2 |
| 1. Neurosis - Through Silver In Blood | 2 |
| 30. Painkiller - Buried Secrets | 2 |
| 2. Kayo Dot - Choirs of the Eye | 2 |
| 18. Godflesh - Pure | 1 |
| 14. Envy - A Dead Sinking Story | 1 |
| 12. Isis - Oceanic | 1 |
| 3. Mare - Mare | 1 |
| 36. Cult of Luna -The Beyond | 1 |
| 4. Nadja - Touched | 0 |
| 13. The Ocean - Precambrian | 0 |
| 5. Rosetta - The Galilean Satellites | 0 |
| 7. Old Man Gloom - Christmas | 0 |
| 16. Neurosis - A Sun That Never Sets | 0 |
| 17. Akimbo- Jersey Shores | 0 |
| 8. Cloudkicker - Beacons | 0 |
| 19. Supercontinent - Vaalbara | 0 |
| 39. Inter Arma - Sky Burial | 0 |
| 38. Palms -Palms | 0 |
| 37. Russian Circles -Empros | 0 |
| 34. Mindrot -Soul | 0 |
| 33. A Storm of Light - Forgive Us Our Trespasses | 0 |
| 32. Isis - Celestial | 0 |
| 31. SUMAC - The Deal | 0 |
| 29. 5ive - 5ive | 0 |
| 28. Neurosis - Souls At Zero | 0 |
| 26. Bloodlet -The Seraphim Fall | 0 |
| 25. Rye Wolves - Oceans Of Delicate Rain | 0 |
| 24. Mouth Of The Architect - Time and Withering | 0 |
| 23. Gnaw - This Face | 0 |
| 22. Locrian - The Clearing & The Final Epoch | 0 |
| 21. Corrections House - Last City Zero | 0 |
| 20. Minsk - The Crash And The Draw | 0 |
| 40. Sólstafir - Ótta | 0 |
― Eric Burdon & War, On Drugs (Cosmic Slop), Wednesday, 24 June 2015 23:03 (eight years ago) link