Joe Theobald, aka DJ Captain Wormhole, Looks at all things vinyl 

EVERYTHING that has a ‘pre’ has a ‘post’. And quite a lot of things that don’t have pres do still have posts.

Post-modern architecture. Post-war austerity. Post-colonial guilt. Post-man Pat. No one talks about pre-colonial bliss or pre-Post-man Pat, do they? Well, where’s this going, Wormhole? I’ll tell you where. Post-Hardcore is where.

After picking up the latest Future Islands LP back in Cardiff a few weeks ago I was doing some online exploring and came across another band from the Baltimore area – Double Dagger. Vivre Sans Temps Mort is a nice song with a pleasant melody and cool video about a boy and his model cars. The Lie/the Truth has Sam Herring from Future Islands screaming which is nice too.

Double Dagger were a three-piece composed of drums, vocals and a loud bass. The singer and bassist are also graphic designers (Post Typography) so they referred to their sound as ‘graphicdesigncore’, but I’m more interested in the post-hardcore moniker applied by the wider music-listening public. It takes me back, more than a few years, to my weeded-up college days listening to bands like Refused, Fugazi and The Blood Brothers.

Actually, it’s not the post-hardcore either. Just the ‘post-’. Because it’s an interesting subject. A reactionary creative/socio-political/postal legacy dangling from the sleeves of a precedent movement. Ragged threads wiggling their way out of the hems of established epochs. It’s as though we couldn’t distinguish enough merit to warrant an original name for what it is that you do, so we’ll just skewer the obvious precursor with a ‘post-’.

As if post-punk wasn’t good enough. Joy Division and Gang of Four and the Fall were/are just pumping the same drugs, from vaguely distinct strains, into the same tired old veins. It’s the categorical equivalent of when the olden days people used to refer to So-and-so as So-and-so, son-of-So-and-so. Or maybe So-and-so the younger.

‘Post-’s are also annointed retroactively – very rarely do progenitors self-apply a ‘post-’ title. In some years from now we may even be talking about post-Wormhole syntax. Or post-emoji emotion. Or post-music sound.