The Greatest Post-Punk Bands You Never Heard

It's on sale for $1500 on Discogs.com!! The digital version is slightly more affordable.

Blimey, it recently sold for £63 on ebay

crustaceanrebel, I'm not going to beat a dead horse on The Individuals; I loved them, you don't. Just curious when you say they were "far too hugely influenced by a single band" what band that was? Trouser Press said Cure and Gang of Four, neither of which I get tbh, and the Db's, which I do. The guitar interplay is a bit Television to me in spots, the rhythm section a little bit Talking Heads. I kind of lump them with bands like Let's Active, but they don't really jangle (and Individuals records actually came out first.)

Loving this thread by the way, tons of stuff I've heard of but not heard.

My vote goes to The Human Switchboard.

I know you're busy and have lots of things to occupy your time, but it would be great if you took 8 minutes and 8 seconds to listen to their Stairway To Heaven, Refrigerator Door.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tfAG-52xt8

Not sure why the link didn't show up. Try clicking here

Bar/None Records just put out a Human Switchboard Comp. Good Stuff

God bless Acute. Hope yall get another chance to release that expanded (or "even" the original) Wanna Buy A Bridge?, Dan.
Really like 2012's Fac Dance 02--was afraid there would be too many Joy D/New O wannabees, but it went much further than expected--didn't know Factory was involved with rai, for instance. This review is too tough on some tracks, but I certainly agree with favorable mentions of ESG, A Certain Ratio (in the years covered by this comp) and others. Don't know if all the streams still work, but as a Comments guy points out, it's also on Spotify (although I'm not gonna set up housekeeping with Fecebook just to get into Spotify--not just yet)
http://www.residentadvisor.net/review-view.aspx?id=11667

Thanks dow.

The Wanna Buy a Bridge was a pipe-dream from a long time ago. The difficulty of dealing with major labels for licensing a few key tracks (WBAB without We Are All Prostitutes?), the issues of licensing a comp from so many different people, and finally the passing of Nikki Sudden all made it slip through our fingers. I've told this story probably too many times, but I met NIkki the night he died in New York and he was excited to help me with the liner notes and put me in touch with Gina Birch.

For what it was worth, here's how I envisioned it. A CD release of Wanna Buy a Bridge with a set of bonus tracks culled from other early RT releases. The tracklisting would've been:

The original LP:
1. Delta 5 - Mind Your Own Business
2. The Slits - Man Next Door
3. Essential Logic -Aerosol Burns
4. Television Personalities - Part Time Punks
5. Swell Maps - Read About Seymour
6. The Pop Group - We Are All Prostitutes
7. Spizzenergi - Soldier Soldier
8. Liliput - Aint You
9. Cabaret Voltaire - Nag Nag Nag
10. Young Marble Giants - Final Day
11. Scritti Politti - Skank Bloc Bologna
12. Robert Wyatt - At Last I Am Free

CD bonus tracks:
13. Subway Sect - Ambition
14. The Nightingales - Idiot Strength
15. The Monochrome Set - He's Frank
16. The Red Krayola - Born in Flames
17. Cult Figures - Zip Nolan
18. Blue Orchids - Work
19. Missing Scientists - Big City, Bright Lights
20. David Gamson - Sugar, Sugar
21. The Gist - This is Love
22. Epic Soundtracks - Jelly, Babies

It flows really great, so feel free to buy all those songs individually and make a CD-length playlist of them.

Another idea I had was to JUST use the bonus tracks and call it Wanna Buy a Bridge 2, a nice compilation of more Rough Trade stuff, though there are a lot of great Rough Trade comps, like this italian one that I own:

http://www.discogs.com/Various-Cross-Current/release/593442

and this japanese one:

http://www.discogs.com/Various-Clear-Cut/release/593437

Not the bonus tracks end with a Robert Wyatt vocal, just like the original.

OK I totally had good intentions to listen to more of these guys before the poll ended but I've just ended up listening to Lives of Angels on repeat all yesterday evening and this evening.

Damn, this is good! Thanks to NickB and everyone on the other post-punk thread for saying the magic words that got me listening. So I guess that's going to be my vote, anyway.

One vote for The Embos.

Now , where the fuck is my' retrospective' cd eh? Which great mate did I lend it to all those years ago?
I need it now, 'pal'

Afterthought. No, I have that tape somewhere - it's the double cd I'm missing

xp Nice rundown, thanks Gerald!

It may have been crustacean who inspired me to get all four Spherical Objects reissues a few years back. I really wanted to like 'em, but cannot get past the excruciating vocals. You'd think if I could take David Thomas I could handle anything. Listening to Steve Miro and not clicking yet. I do really like the Rema Rema EP, great noisy stuff. If there were other unreleased recordings I'd expect to see it on Acute someday!

I can almost, but not quite appreciate someone who was lucky enough to experience the original post-punk era firsthand not wanting anything to do with later so-called "revival" stuff. I'm really liking the recent releases from Merchandise, Deep Time, Big Joan, Pins, Savages, New War and Talk Normal. Like most bands, they just pick and choose elements from many sources they like and aren't necessarily revivalists. To say they're not worth bothering with because PiL or Joy Division were more original is like saying the Stones and many other great rock bands aren't worth bothering with because Chuck Berry did it first. For a while back in 2000 my favorite band was The Fire Show, who were based in Chicago so I actually got to see them live several times. They were brilliant, and I was bummed when they split (M. Resplendent moved to Europe), and I always have a gaping hole in my live show schedule for great post-punk inspired bands. I could easily have expanded this poll beyond the 80s but there were already more bands than I could fit. The mention of my exclusion of The Rapture upthread was just an oversight -- I must have forgotten to give them the "post-punk" tag in my database.

I have both Lines CDs and have been enjoying re-listening to 'em. Right now I'm listening to a playlist called "electro-glam" made up mostly of early stuff from Ultravox, Tubeway Army and Japan. Maybe I should promote it as a sub-genre to irritate certain people :)

I've just ended up listening to Lives of Angels on repeat all yesterday evening and this evening.

Glad you liked it!

Dan - thanks for that excellent expabded Bridge, I am going to compile that immediately!

Is it just me or has the crush of great post-punk comps ended? In the 00s it felt like there were many great ones every year, covering scenes all around the globe. But the last few years has seen a dearth of them. Even the Messthetics series has slowed to a crawl.

hey what about Five or Six?

Oh boy, LOVE Portrait, which I knew from Pillows and Prayers, and Another Reason, which I think maybe was on Seeds Electronic? Then I got the LP A Thriving and Happy Land which is really wonderful if a bit all over the place. Kind of the post-Syd/pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd era of Post-Punk. There's a 12 minute song called "Consider This" that's just beautiful. Then when Cherry Red finally did an Five or Six collection, I was surprised none of Thriving was on it. Really don't know much about them as a band. I see I have another track, The Building Kind, from a Where to Now? compilation (UK post-punkish club night). But that track's not on the Cherry Red Best of.

Certainly if they had an album's worth of "Portrait" they'd be talked about as a key proto-jangle band w/ Orange Juice, Monochrome Set etc.

my friend put out an LP & CD of Irish Post-Punk, DIY and Electronic Music 1980-1983 last year. got good reviews from RA & FACT so might be more electronic than post-punk in appeal but here it is anyway
http://www.finderskeepersrecords.com/discog_cache03.html

http://www.factmag.com/2012/11/30/the-40-best-reissues-of-2012/27/
http://www.residentadvisor.net/review-view.aspx?id=11312

dan--re Five or Six--their Polar Exposure mini-lp is great; a-side produced by Kevin Coyne. very mysterious band.

Is that stuff that's on the Cherry Red CD?

looks like the track Polar Exposure and two from the other side are on the Cherry Red comp.

Proto-jangle! If this poll spawns/popularizes even more sub-genre names, that would be excellent! And if someone could shoot a documentary called "Jangle," even better, though some may confuse it with Django.

There is/was a documentary in the works called "The Sound of Young Scotland" but I don't know what happened to it. Your basic Postcard/Fire Engines etc story.

xpost Yeah, that Irish post-punk comp was good if a bit inconsistent (as these things tend to be). Very glad to have it, it was my sole comp bought last year!

The fact that there's bands mentioned in this thread for whom I have no tracks on compilations indicates there's still room for more archival releases.

Check out the Instant Pop Classics bootlegs. Turned me onto Desperate Bicycles.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Random thoughts at 11 pm...

Far worse things than the Modern Eon LP have seen the light of day recently. There'd be a nice cd of that with the singles and the comp tracks. I'm rather fond of the Street to Street vol. 1 track. Sounds rougher, and earlier, than the LP. Not a bad thing—not every moment is all breathless importance.

That Scars cd was, to my ears, a travesty. Somebody may have won the loudness wars on that one. And not being able to include one of the all-time post-punk greats, "Adult/ery," is rough. There's some talk of another attempt by these folks: https://www.facebook.com/scaredtogethappy?fref=ts

Exposing the Individuals to a list that includes Josef K, Liliput, and the Lines is almost actionably cruel.

And I've had this Systematics song on the brain of late. Can be found on the M-Squared box set.

Decent stand-in for all its ignored Aussie brethren. Title is wrong on YouTube. Should be "International Voltage."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvZGCrtOt24

And my Australian fave, though here the high end (amongst other registers) has been excised by shoddy transferring, so all the proto-jungle skittering of the drum machine has to be imagined. Wollongong, 1983. Second of two albums (if we're trying to satisfy the LP quotient mentioned above), which came after three singles and some cassette stuff. 250 copies....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYRdsf79E2E

yeah that's my favourite systematics too xpost

that sunday painters song is cool, i haven't heard that one before

I wish the YouTube version sounded better. So much missing. Though the crappy-stylus crunchy distortion has its points, too.

Oh, and to close the circle, the Sunday Painters' 15-minute "Rema-Rema" cover from their live, early '82 cassette (Any Port in a Storm, is a great thing. Beat This Mortal Coil and Albini to the punch.

You sure know a lot about The Sunday Painters!

I never really got into Modern Eon. A friend who I think now runs SXSW or something tried to pitch me on doing a reissue. Don't know if knew them or had a connection or just thought I should do it. He burned me a CD-R, back when that's what you'd do. I liked it but didn't really get into it.

I did a playlist of Joy Division-influenced/likeminded grey raincoat post-punk stuff that I called Nightshift. This is the tracklisting:

Artery-Into the Garden
Dance Chapter-New Dance
The Associates-Amused as Always
The Cure-A Forest
Section 25-Friendly Fires
The Gist-Dark Shots
Comsat Angels-Independence Day
The Wild Swans-Revolutionary Spirit
Wah! Heat-Better Scream
2.3-Where to Now?
Article 58-Echoes
23 Skidoo-Another Baby's Face
The Sound-Night Versus Day
Nocturnal Projections-You'll Never Know
The Durutti Column-Spent Time
New Order-Ceremony
U2-Gloria
Garage Class-Terminal Tokyo
Josef K-It's Kinda Funny
Gardez Darkz-Winter Scene
Modern Eon-Child's Play
The Names-Nightshift
Stockholm Monsters-Death is Slowly Coming
The Wake-Favour

Dan - I just put the finishing touches on your expanded Bridge comp. Did you leave off the SLF and Raincoats tracks intentionally?

No. You know that probably happened? I made the playlist, and sometime since then, deleted those files and replaced them with different versions, or just didn't have them and forgot to put them in the playlist. Or I had removed the SLF already because I knew it'd be a licensing issue. The Raincoats I don't know what happend.

So you found David Gamson and Missing Scientists?

Oh I should mention regarding Acute's 2 Lines CDs that although thanking and credits were minimal, ILX poster Michael Train was a part of that. I had all the 7"s but couldn't find Cool Snap. Michael burned me a CD-R with the cover artwork being Cool Snap and a few of the singles (though I think you were missing one? Maybe House of Cracks?). It basically looked just like Memory Span, which makes sense because that looks just like Cool Snap. Anyway I never owned Cool Snap until well after the first Lines CD came out and my friend Joseph Colbourne, a disco DJ in boston, was in NY and had a copy and I told him that he had to sell it to me because it was ridiculous that I didn't own a copy of Cool Snap, and he was generally selling off post-punk singles to buy more disco singles, so everyone came out on top.

Yup, I found Gamson on a blog and Missing Scientists on slsk. Everything else I had one place or another. I'll spin it tomorrow but I know it'll be great as I love most of it already. Boy, I sure wish Rough Trade put together a giant singles box set like Cherry Red did a few years back.

The big difference there is that Rough Trade, in it's creator-owned hippie attitudes, let all rights remain with the artists, many of whom have since sold to bigger/major labels, whereas Cherry Red own mechanicals or publishing for 80% of all music, and know how to license what they don't own!

So if anybody's gonna do a Rough Trade comp, maybe Cherry Red should!

Voting Lilliput/Kleenex, the same way I voted for "Surfin' Bird" on the other thread.

Yeah, full disclosure suggests I should admit to being in the middle of trying to reissue everything by the Sunday Painters, as great an unreissued art punk band as I know. Sorry for using this space promotionally....Seemed sort of the right audience.

And if I were to attempt a quick distinction between art punk and post punk, it'd have to do with the centrality and distortion of the guitars. Of course, some bands wander across the line repeatedly. Or pass through one on the way to the other. As with...

The cd of Wire demos, Behind the Curtain, is maybe the best instruction manual. Several demos from each period: they go from thrash, to pub, to punk, to art punk, to post punk, to experimental in three years and thirty songs.... Ontology recapitulating phylogeny. Out of print, I'm sure, but well worth tracking down. includes many album songs, but without the keyboards and production, which is often a very nice thing.

Co-sign Wire's "Behind The Curtain". Shockingly great versions, and one or two tracks they never recorded I believe. Very few bands demos are worth more than a single listen, this album get regular plays. Indeed it is way out of print, going for a minimum of $30. Pity.

Would make an excellent double Lp these days.

How do you know they're great if you haven't heard them?

Most people in general haven't heard most of the bands, but this is ILM, where most people have heard some, and as grown-ass music nerds in 2013 are fully capable of giving at least a handful a listen if they're so inclined. Handholding and spoonfeeding even including providing a mix with 13 of the bands. Youtube links galore upthread, and some are on Spotify. I don't know what else to tell ya. Poll ends in a few hours.

xp Behind the Curtain used to be pretty widely available. I have it and am happy to hook up anyone who wants a rip. I should give it a listen today, Wire are one of my all-time faves. Their new album Change Becomes Us comes out March 25. Hope it's good!

Thanks for sharing news about Sunday Painters, it's absolutely welcome here. This poll has exceeded expectations, turning into a goldmine of recommendations beyond the list I did my best to come up with. If there's enough interest perhaps someday there can be a proper Greatest Post-Punk Albums poll with nominations and up to 50 album ballots.

And don't get Dan and me started on Nocturnal Projections, NZ's best post punkers. That cd is out of print, too. Dont know what it goes for now. Time for a double Lp?

I must MUST track down Behind the Curtain. I didn't even know it existed!

Has anyone mentioned the Homosexuals? That multi-disc comp from several years back is pretty cool (headed out the door and blanking on title, sorry). Some of it goes back so far, maybe not so much post-punk as para-punk. Also, since Theoretical Girls came up, should we conaider no wave? If Mars and DNA are too radical for this loose round-up, maybe Contortions/James White & The Blacks, Material, some of the bands Arthur Russell passed though?

Also, early Flesheaters, when they incl. members of X and the Blasters: punk, in terms of abrasive elements, like some sounds associated withe wilder side of early "roots", also with free jazz, lurid/ominous/deadpan camp b-movie imagery, grooves best danced to/in when really blitzed, which danceablity, though challenging, can be part of the "post-" (some long live performances posted in YouTube from time to time)

xposts then you probably don't know about "Turns and Strokes" either?

http://www.discogs.com/Wire-Turns-And-Strokes/release/1871722