Words by Jacob Barron

Since graduating and getting a real job, I’ve almost completely jettisoned lyrics from my iPod. Seriously people, I have 8 gigs of space on this baby and I’ve exhausted 6 of those gigs with wordless music. I just can’t work when someone’s saying or singing things. It may just be the fact that I’m a writer, and am prone to absent-mindedly typing out the things I hear in my ears, rather than the things I’m constructing in my head. Like, I’ll be listening to Bob Dylan while writing an article on the stock market and I’ll write “The Dow dipped briefly below 10,000 this morning before rallying to its highest level since it ain’t me babe, no, no, no, it ain’t me babe.” Not good.

Anyway, if there’s one fallacy that mainstream radio has effectively shoehorned into the public consciousness, it’s the idea that music without lyrics is boring, or belongs on public radio. It is not boring, nor should it be relegated to “All Songs Considered” or that one radio show on your local college station that starts at 2am on Wednesdays. Instrumental musicians craft moods and melodies that are as infectious as anything else you’re liable to hear, with the added benefit of inviting listeners to participate. Since the songs are ostensibly about nothing in particular, they’re functionally about whatever you’re feeling or thinking when you’re listening to them, whether that’s the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the way that one cloud looks like it’s dancing with the other one.

Ergo, here are five albums lyric-less enough not to ruin your work but active enough to make you feel feelings. And as you may have guessed, most all of them fall into that gloriously amorphous post-rock category.

Tortoise – Millions Now Living Will Never Die – 1996

This is one of those canonical post-rock albums that fits in here only because some of the other canonical post-rock albums have lyrics, or something resembling them, and thus they find no quarter in this article. That said, Millions Now Living Will Never Die more than deserves your attention. When the tape effects hit just before minute 14 of 20-minute album opener “DJed,” your heart will skip a beat, whether you’re sitting at your desk or watching the sun set. I think a lot of people think of post-rock in terms of long songs and loud climaxes, but tape effects are an underrated genre tool that Tortoise used here to breathtaking effect. It’s epic in size and scope, but not necessarily volume. I think a band like Explosions in the Sky could benefit from this sort of mentality, by tempering their eruptions with a more subtle approach to building tension that’s never really released.

Tortoise – Glass Museum

Now with that said…

Explosions In The Sky – The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place – 2003

EITS are monsters. As overwhelming and melodramatic as their music might be, it’s still undeniably moving and nakedly passionate. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to star in your own action-packed epic cinematic romance, one that’ll have audience members crying while crawling over their seats to vomit into the nearest trash bin, listen to The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place. It makes every gesture significant, right down to picking your goddamn nose, and that’s no small feat.

Explosions In The Sky – The Only Moment We Were Alone

Menomena – Under An Hour – 2005

I haven’t been shy about my love for Menomena, and while this might not fit right into the post-rock category, I think the overlap between experimental indie rock and post-rock is ample enough to accommodate Under An Hour, which was originally conceived as the soundtrack to a dance performance. Its three lengthy tracks are very clearly meant to play second fiddle to whatever dances we’re supposed to be watching as they’re performed, but the album still spotlights the band’s virtuosic taste for rhythm and use of traditional instruments, untraditionally, but this time with an added, admirable dose of patience.

Menomena – Water

Do Make Say Think – Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn – 2003

This could’ve been the first indie album I ever bought. In college I had a radio show and played “Fredericia” every show if I could. It was long enough to allow me to leave the booth and take a bathroom break, but good enough to make me want to wait, which, it hardly needs to be pointed out, is quite an endorsement.

The rest of the album is magically rustic, as the sound of rain drops on a tin roof swirl into gentle melodies and all the guitars and bass guitars and cymbals and clarinets and horns and organs crash along to gloriously grimy climaxes, before ending on the sleepily optimistic “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!.” Do Make Say Think are linked to Broken Social Scene, and some of the lo-fi indie-ness of that band’s earlier work can be easily heard here, but it all feels a bit more organic, like these songs grew out of the rich soil of some deep canadian forest.

Do Make Say Think – Auberge Le Mouton Noir

Balmorhea – Constellations – 2010

Balmorhea sound a bit like what I think Sigur Rós would sound like unplugged. I know, I know, they kind of did that on the Hvarf/Heim release, but those songs were electric in their original form, made acoustic for the purposes of a novelty release (although it is still good). If Jónsi & Co. approached songwriting with only acoustic instruments, Constellations is what they’d end up with. Balmorhea know their instruments and use them all to navigate what sounds like treacherous territory, before reaching a slowly realized epiphany with “Palestrina.” More than any other album on this list, Constellations sounds like it could have lyrics and vocals, something delicate but potent, like a Leslie Feist or Sufjan Stevens, singing about…I don’t know…what works for you?

Balmorhea – Palestrina

Less-than-post-rock honorable mentions:

Post-metal category:
Pelican – Australasia – 2003

Ambient category:
tie between Fennesz – Endless Summer – 2001 and Tim Hecker – Harmony In Ultraviolet – 2006

Blatantly-Icelandic category:
Múm – Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is Okay – 2000

Guitar-Only category:
James Blackshaw – The Cloud of Unknowing – 2007

Dance-Dance-Dance category:
The Field – From Here We Go Sublime – 2007

Leave some comments on your favorite lyric-less albums or what you find yourself listening to the most while working.

Filed under: Lists, Not Blake, Jim, or Brendan