MathRockbands7

Math-rock can be a sound whose roots trace returning to the American hardcore scene of the late-'80s. Planning to employ hardcore's elements -speed, tightness, dissonance, volume- in additional abstract, interesting ways, a scene created in which bands played irregular rhythms and unconventional guitar fragments in sharp, precise ways.



Where hardcore bands, similar to their punk forebears, stuck to rock orthodoxy, math-rock bands took influence from uncool sources like Captain Beefheart, Henry Cow, and King Crimson; exploding familiar riffs into strange shapes. In several ways, its relationship to hardcore resembles no-wave's relationship to punk; but, where no-wave bands championed amusicality along with a complete lack of training, math-rockers held technical proficiency worth focusing on.



The sound sprouted in midwestern US cities inside the late-'80s and early-'90s, sharing its beginnings -and many of its key musicians- with the initial flourishings of yankee post-rock.



Bastro, whose members would go on to form key post-rock bands Tortoise and Gastr del Sol, were in many ways the initial true math-rock band, as well as their sound -made well before math-rock begun to come to be bonafide movement- remains seen as an definitive instance of the genre.



How it Sounds:

Math-rock vocal is, as its name suggests, renowned for the complexity. Where rock'n'roll is eternally stuck in 4/4 time, math-rock bands deliberately employed strange meters like 7/8 and 11/8. Bands flaunt virtuosity, much less individual players, but because a unit: stopping and starting at irregular intervals, activating any cash and breaking in new, unexpected directions as one.



Vocals tend towards unintelligible screams or becoming completely absent; signature math-rock bands like Breadwinner, Don Caballero, and Hella all instrumental. Guitars don't play familiar chords, riffs, and melodies, but create repetitive patterns -often via fretboard tapping- that will get dissonant or amelodic. And drums are, routinely, the foremost instrument in math-rock bands, the center of your band's rhythmic sound.



Genre Misconceptions:

Because of their close relationships, crossover of early key musicians, and tendency towards instrumentalism, there can be some confusion between post-rock and math-rock bands and sounds. However that isn't exactly a misconception in regards to the genre itself, I suppose.



In which the Name Originated in:



Like countless genre names -twee, shoegaze, krautrock- math-rock was invented being a term of slander, mocking the technical proficiency of their players. The name seemed this kind of natural fit it seemed to have no source.



Matt Sweeney from indie-rock outfit Chavez, however, told this (possibly apocryphal) tale in an interview with Pitchfork in 2006. "It was introduced by a friend of ours being a derogatory term for any band me and James [Lo] played in called Wider," said Sweeney. "His whole joke is that he'd watch the song rather than react whatsoever, then sign up for his calculator to find out how good the song was. So he'd refer to it as math rock, and it was a total diss, since it needs to be."



When it broke:

Well, math-rock certainly never started. No math-rock band ever became famous, as well as the genre itself never took a solid hold on tight the pop-cultural consciousness.



But, if there was a time in which math-rock first had been a noticeable underground movement, it had been circa 1995. The genre's patron saint, Steve Albini, became an amount of enormous counter-cultural clout; from his acerbic writing in zines like Forced Exposure and English weeklies like Melody Maker, his production for bands as large as The Pixies and Nirvana, and the role out front of massive Black and Shellac.



Record labels like Touch and Go and Skin Graft were fostering rosters packed with bands making complex, dissonant, angular guitar-rock. Along with a new crop of bands -US Maple, Don Caballero, A Forest, etc- were furthering the concept that it was a real movement, that a new, fierce sound was establishing itself.



Math-rock never really went beyond that; never really became just a a sub-strain of the underground. But if the genre had a time in sunlight -a amount of time in which future generations could see daily becasue it is 'golden age'- it had been then.



Defining Albums:

Bastro, Diablo Guapo (1989)

Breadwinner, Burner (1994)

Don Caballero, Don Caballero 2 (1995)

A small Forest, Flemish Altruism (Constituent Parts 1993-1996) (1996)

Hella, Hold Your Horse Is (2002)



Current State:

Although it has little cultural capital as some happening movement, the sounds from the genre are alive. There exists a cult community of fiercely-loyal math-rock purists sticking in keeping with the sound -for whom a band like Japan's Lite, tastefully instrumental and post-rock-ish, are pin-ups- but much more interesting happen to be a recent run of bands who, whilst essentially math-rock, aren't stylistic purists, and possess thus found much crossover.



Battles are essentially math-rock royalty; founded by former Don Caballero/Storm & Stress leader Ian Williams, and displaying super-tight former Helmet skinsman John Stanier. They've publicly abhorred the evocation of the old genre, but the band's dancefloor-friendly jams are built along the same old lines of repetition and complicated polyrhythms.



Fang Island are, underneath their Andrew W.K-styled totally-awesome bro-down-ness, a math-rock band: all chaotic riffing at odd angles. Foals and This Town Needs Guns, a pair of bands from Oxford, England, both grew from your scene of local math-rock nerds (citing largely-forgotten US math-rockers Sweep the shin bone, Johnny as key influence), but have applied the genre's elements to pop songwriting, creating a kind of math-rock/dance-punk hybrid.



Marnie Stern, the fretboard shredding guitarist from The big apple, has earnt a lot of critical acclaim and notoriety for, essentially, feminizing ridiculously-complex, hyper-virtuosic punk. Stern's genre credentials take a look at, too; she's collaborated with Zach Hill of Hella and Robbie Moncrieff of What's Up?, and toured with math-rock true-bloods Tera Melos.



And few ever reference either band during these terms, but both idiot-savant noise-pop outfit Deerhoof and ridiculous surf-rock kids Ponytail are, in their own ways, math-rock bands; even if both acts appear to be the maximum amount of about chaos as control.