The University of Idaho Argonaut

Let me first acknowledge there are many people who care much, much more about genre appellations than me. For the most part, I couldn’t give a damn.
From time to time, however, they are a useful tool for describing and grouping bands. Genre is defined by bands more often than not, and so that is where I’ll start.
Post-rock and post-punk are faux amis, insofar as they’re separated by about 25 years. Post-punk was concurrent with and immediately followed punk.

The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Clash and so forth were first-wave punk. Very soon, everyone knew what to expect from a punk song. Personally, I find The Ramones extremely overrated but nevertheless decent.
Post-punk applied the aesthetics of the avant-garde to punk. Bands most commonly associated with the movement include The Fall, Joy Division, Devo and Television, but many others could be considered among post-punk’s penumbra: Talking Heads, especially numbers like “Sugar On My Tongue”; Nick Cave’s pre-Bad Seeds project the Birthday Party; and even Violent Femmes, whose song “Add It Up” undeniably rocks hard.

The continuing influence of post-punk is seen on the charts. Its revival in this decade has been seen most clearly in New York and the United Kingdom, with The Rapture and Interpol from the Empire State and Franz Ferdinand, Clinic, Bloc Party and Arctic Monkeys coming from the isles. Bluntly, most of the English music that makes its way across the Atlantic is related to this subgenre.
Post-rock’s origins lie most clearly in krautrock (Kraftwerk, Can) and the droning works of the Velvet Underground. The early pioneers of the modern post-rock era are Slint and Tortoise, and their respective albums “Spiderland” and “Millions Now Living Will Never Die.”
“Spiderland’”s classic cut is “Good Morning, Captain,” a 7:39 piece built on two chords, based on Samuel Tayler Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Shoegaze deserves a mention. Here are the things you need to know about shoegaze: “Loveless” by My Bloody Valentine, “Psychocandy” by the Jesus and Mary Chain.
Indie pop could be described as upbeat, more-jangly indie rock. A subset of indie pop, twee pop, is yet more aggressively upbeat: adorable music with a bit of an edge.

Most of the Elephant 6 Collective worked in indie pop, especially the Apples in Stereo and Elf Power. Tilly and the Wall, from Omaha, employ a tap dancer for their percussion.
Reinforcing the adorable motif — both Tilly and the Wall and Scotland’s Belle and Sebastian are named after children’s books.

I’ll also note the Little Ones, whose music is transcendently wonderful indie pop. If you like The Shins, please do me a favor and check out the Little Ones who are better.
Fundamentally, a genre defined so narrowly as to describe no bands, or so broadly to describe every band, is useless. When “rock” includes both Nickelback and Radiohead, we should give serious consideration to benching the generic term for a while.