Bark Psychosis >> You stand apart with the sinking sunlight

☵☵ Bark Psychosis - "The Loom" ☵☵

☰ (Caroline Records / Circa Records, 1993) ☰

From one Hex to another...

The term "post-rock" was literally coined to describe this album, specifically by Simon Reynolds of Mojo magazine in his review in the March '94 issue.  Yes, this is what post-rock originally denoted, and other bands that got the tag back then included Long Fin Killie, Seefeel, The Sea And Cake, and A.R. Kane, none of whom would remotely be considered post-rock by today's lowered standards.  Sometime in the early '00s, it began meaning strictly instrumental music that had lots of aggressive climaxes.  I think this song illustrates perfectly the difference between "real" post-rock and "fake" post-rock.  The twos band that, above all others, led to the exploding popularity of fake post-rock are Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky.  The introduction of metal-style guitar was the death knell of the genre, in my opinion*.  Check out the instrumentation on Hex: guitar, bass,  drums, vocals, piano, melodica, triangle, flute, trumpet, Hammond organ, djembe, violin, viola, cello, and some samples/programming.  Compare that to what most post-Mogwai post-rockers use: guitar, bass, drums. It was also very important in the early days to use dubby, hypnotic basslines, which lent gravity to the often amorphous or nebulous song structures.  Obviously, Bark Psychosis did not invent this style out of thin air; many critics have pointed out how indebted they are to Talk Talk's last two LPs, though Hex is way better than either of those, in my opinion.
*Ironically/amazingly, Bark Psychosis actually began as a teenage thrash metal band with a fondness for Napalm Death covers.  Maybe this is what allowed them to get the whole juvenile metal thing out of their systems at a young age.  For me, the metal thing pretty much ended on the day I bought Pantera's new album the day it came out (May 7, 1996), as I'd sadly also done with their previous album (March 22, 1994), and realized how lame it was compared to all the indie/underground stuff I that I was discovering at the time.  I'm not sure why it took me two bad Pantera albums in a row to come to this realization...

Wikipedia has an interesting section about the difficult recording of Hex here.

I bought this CD at Tower Records in New Orleans on a summer night in '04, and I remember having been surprised to even find it on the racks, since I'd heard it had gone out of print 5 or more years earlier.  I stuck "Big Shot" onto a Miles Davis mix CD for my sister the next spring, since there were a few spare minutes at the end that I had to fill in.  I got my second copy of this CD at a WTUL record fair in March '11, sold by a guy who was a DJ for them in the late '80s.  Now this is one ultra-cool station, a station that was my go-to source for innovative music from the mid-'90s to the mid-'00s, and it was voted college radio station of the year by the Gavin Report in 1996, so you'd think he'd recognize the inherent significance, scarcity, and flat-out greatness of this album, and that he'd therefore sell it for a decent sum, right?  It was in his two-for-a-dollar bin.  I'm telling all this because I originally had not planned on ever posting anything from this album, thinking it was so popular that most of the people who would venture over here had surely already heard it.  But I guess it's really one of those albums that many people have read about, but few have actually heard.

A pic of the album's official promo poster, which I swiped from eBay many years ago; the text is a quote
from Melody Maker's review: "We're not just talking alternative music, we're talking alternative medicine."

To read a long and illuminating interview with Bark Psychosis frontman Graham Sutton, go here.  It's taken from this thing called Audrie's Diary from 1994, which was a 7" record plus a square 7-by-7-inch zine.  I own it; unfortunately, the record itself doesn't have a B-Psy song on it.

Planets with similar climates: Talk Talk - "The Rainbow" (1988), A.R. Kane - "Green Hazed Daze" (1988), American Music Club - "In The Shadow Of The Valley" (1994), Auburn Lull - "Desert" (1999), The Comsat Angels - "Pictures" (1982), Jeff Buckley - "Dream Brother" (1993), Plexi - "Faith Is" (1995).