The eMusic Dozen: Post-Rock

Millions Now Living Will Never Die boasts the quintessential post-rock anthem in "Djed," a 20-minute composition by what sounds like a motorik funk band getting lost in spells of dub, jazz and the mellow parts of old '60s acid songs. The drums phase through different studio effects, a store of organs trade moody duties, and guitar expresses itself through scrapes instead of strums, all while repetitive xylophone riffs space out on minimalist classical music. The rest of the album can't help but be a letdown, but the more rock-indebted songs snake through some rich, cinematic vistas nonetheless.

A Chicago band whose wispy pop incorporates cocktail-lounge glimmers and breezes from Brazil, the Sea and Cake fanned out in gorgeous form on 1997's The Fawn. Electronics moved closer to center stage, tarting up the textures and cascading rhythms, but songsmith Sam Prekop still casts a long melodic shadow. Songs such as "The Argument" cackle and brood in equal measure, while the likes of "Bird and Flag" trade in a deceptively pinched sort of funky release.

This early collection of Stereolab singles finds the band chugging through repetitive riffs that sound more interesting at the end of songs than they do at the beginning. From the opening crash of "Super-Electric," the band kicks into organ-driven overdrive, with metronomic kraut-rock drums and clipped guitar fits charting the ground beneath floaty "la la" vocals. Stereolab would grow more dynamic and varied in short time, but this still stands as a landmark of their raw, droning power.

Flying Saucer Attack spread the rush and rustle of rock thin and wide on their 1994 debut. The flowing sheets of feedback sound as entrancing as they are enervating, but mellow spells of keyboard lend the atmospheres a breeze of folkie air. Flying Saucer Attack are a rock band with a texture fetish; songs like "And Goodbye" are all about the grain in would-be rock sonics, scanning like etchings of a blueprint faded by time and contemplation.

Laika were a "rock band" that was really more an electronic band; that they could conflate the two is emblematic of the post-rock milieu in which they thrived. This career overview shows Laika's liking for rhythm, whether the mellow trip-hop slink of "T. Street" or the torrent of drums bashing in "Sugar Daddy." Sinister vocals qualify most of Laika's works as "songs," but they're dictated just as much by wandering backdrops that skirt around the edges of genre.

Trans Am are a rare post-rock band with a cheeky side. Their tight, shifty compositions boast all the complexity of heady math-rock, but there's just as much arena-minded bombast bashing near the front. Few bands on the Thrill Jockey label have ever been so forthright about their devotion to prog-rock bands like Rush, which makes the big drum fills and hot guitar theatrics on Trans Am hard to place: they're post-rock in the way they fan out, but they're straightforward "rawk!" in the way they burn.

An Athens, Georgia band with lots of stamps on its musical passport, Macha took post-rock's purposeful gait on a stroll across the planet. Their love of Indonesian music comes out in "When They First Saw the Floating World," which chimes through exotic melodies played on instruments that are definitely not guitars. Elsewhere, the group lays gaggles of gamelan and reedy horns atop galloping drums, highlighting delicate worldly accents while still hitting hard and heavy.

Scottish band Mogwai seized the internal drama of post-rock and blew it out to a grand degree on their first full-length album. All the tracks are instrumental, loping through interlocked guitars and meandering drums that rise up together in monolithic waves of noise. Some of the quiet parts slink by without much notice, but there's always a wake-up call on the horizon. See the long outro track: the direction reveals itself right at the start, but Mogwai spin the compass needle as they surround and suffocate a simple groove expanded to suggest much more.

Sonic Youth made peace with pretense on Goodbye 20th Century by going straight to the source of their avant-garde heritage. The album has little to do with rock per se, but its tributes to experimental classical composers evoke post-rock's academic grounding. The songs themselves play like atypically spacey Sonic Youth guitar jams, but the open-ended scores they follow come from a hit-list of avant-garde legends: Christian Wolff, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich. What those composers did on their own remains shrouded here, but the intent meets their "unclassical" ideals more than halfway.

For their fourth album, Tortoise eased into a brand of wiggly funk swing that had been missing from their earlier work. The intro guitar blast of "Seneca" sounds dour and moody, but it's not long before billowing drums and keyboards start bouncing the songs into sinewy shapes. Tortoise sound more like a band than an experiment here, flapping through grooves that buoy their braininess to the level of a visceral rush.

One of the farthest offshoots of post-rock's stylistic canon blast, Oval is a German electronic project that found an unlikely home on the epochal Chicago label Thrill Jockey. It's easy to describe Oval's sound as that of skipping CDs, but it's hard to overstate how mesmerizing the glitches and loops can grow. Tracks like "Textuell" float through ethereal wooziness akin to ambient music, but the jittering, clicking beat-spurs make it all more complicated the deeper you dig.