Do Make Say Think - & Yet & Yet (2002)

post-rock is silly and the name do make say think is silly and the title & yet & yet is sillier than both of those things, and after a while of trying to understand post-rock and pinpoint what makes one thing likable and another thing bland, years ago i concluded that it must be bro-core builds a la godspeed but mono fucked all that up when i thought hey i can see where this one's going and the next one and the next one my god i hope this stops soon and so resorted to tortoise who advocated a movement from predictable bro-core crescendos and contrived catharsis into dusty high-brow steve reich and faust references, but that solution's boring, dusty, and the whole thing just confuses me. so what makes do make say think's 10 year old silly titled & yet & yet work or appeal all these years later and in spite of the world's relative dissatisfaction with post-rock outside of this year's swans and godspeed releases which'll likely be in everyone's 1-5 spots when it comes to ranking this year's bestest albums, and in spite of do make say think's tortoise-ish quietness and reserved retro experimentation standing in direct opposition to swans' and godspeed's blood-sweat-tear-hnggghh-brotharsis masculinity and mood-core drone-masochism, maybe those ones'll kill post-rock and maybe this one's a relic of that strange time in indie rock where people wanted casual escapism via the occasional transcendent outro and otherwise the mimicry of older artistic trends the listener can't've been around for- a return to the utopian naivete of modernism, or the contemporary listener's rose-n-dust-tinted vision thereof, removed of purpose, context, guts- dusty like tortoise, experimental like the early 70s (ha), jazzy like tortoise, safe like the rose tint, dusty like the rose tint, dusty like the 70s, dusty like jazz or the contemporary listener's vision thereof, dusty, just dusty. a dusty relic of a time where for some reason a record needed to be dusty- a musical encyclopedia, or a naively faux-nostalgic, creepily vacuous denial of anything post-1980.

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