Late last month, Cecil Sharp House, the English Folk song Society HQ in Regent’s Park, hosted the UK debut for Rex and Rachel’s, twin leading lights of a hardy hybrid strain of American post-rock dynamics and folk classical sensibilities. A 500-strong crowd on plastic seating saw Rachel’s showcase last year’s essential Sea & the Bells album, a requiem for clipper ships made up of delicate instrumentals – guitar and drums weaving between strings and piano.

Rachel’s are one of a host of uniformly excellent bands straddling their home, rural Louisville, Kentucky, and the studios and venues of nearby Chicago, who share common aims, a common ancestry and common living and rehearsal spaces. “Louisville is just … out of it,” says Rachel’s guitarist, Jason Noble, “so we all take inspiration from things as diverse as 40-year-old jazz records, reading a lot of books and the climate here, which is very dramatic.”
Louisville was also the home to American post-rock’s pilgrim fathers, Slint, who disbanded at the turn of the decade, core members currently recording with the For Carnation, Aerial M, King Kong and Tortoise. “I saw Slint when I was 15,” recalls Noble. “I could have thought: why bother playing music anymore? That’s as good as it gets. But instead of being dismayed, I was encouraged.”

Ironically, Noble’s own previous band, Rodan, have now assumed the same mythology as Slint, disappearing after one album in 1994 to filter into the finest American bands, the folksy Sonora Pine, symphonically complex noise rockers June of ’44, and the Shipping News, Noble’s current collaboration with Rodan co-founder Jeff Mueller. Their debut, Save Everything (Quarterstick), is a devastating fusion of impossibly heavy guitars and baroque finesse.

Onstage, Rachel’s reflect their disregard for rock conventions. Pianist Rachel Grimes scored their Music for Egon Schiele album as a live ballet soundtrack, and Cecil Sharp House saw Louisville artist Greg King back-projecting appropriate cine-images while Grimes luxuriated in the venue’s grand piano. Support Rex, a New York group commonly assumed to be part of the Kentucky clique, heroically duelled with the venue’s PA’s volume limiter to deliver a curiously appropriate folk-tinged set of thrilling complexity. “We get described as a Chicago band back home in New York,” laughs Rex guitarist Curtis Harvey. “We kind of fell into that group of musicians. I feel lucky and honoured to be part of that scene.”

Rex, whose new album, 3 (Southern), is their most accessible yet, soften and stretch the mathematical geometry of the Slint template with bizarrely successful folk and country influences. The track Waterbug’s chiming music-box strings suggest Michael Nyman scoring Deliverance, while Balloon might be the year’s most beautiful folk song.

Rachel’s and Rex take post-rock full circle. The scene that spawned them broke rock apart, enabling its survivors to make new shapes, alongside influences from folk, country and classical music, which the dogmatists of the 1980s would have gagged on. Now they can engage the heart as well as the head.