pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Well, the Albini thing practically is...

Makes sense, really.

Well, the Albini thing practically is... huh???

You have completed your learning of life's lessons. Now, you suck ass just like all the other bores before you. Kylie, Alanis? Whatever, bitch. I am sure you already have the defense mechanisms in place so, this will mean nothing but, another exercise in...oh, who cares. Looking elsewhere for reality...or maybe I can pretend to be a rubber worm like pitchwhore.com...here big fishie, look, I rounded 'em up for you in a arrel. A whole demographic!

Not Funny

Y'know sometimes they really are asking for it:

"White Williams issues a debut album layered with impeccable influences-- including Roxy Music, Beck, and T. Rex-- and a sense of calculated disaffection."

Well shit SIGN ME UP.

Yeah, that was a bit of a repellant blurb if I ever saw one.

Wait, are you saying that doesn't seem accurate?

I read 'White' as 'While' and thought "The Saul Williams album sounds like that?"

it's more that they used that as their _hook_

x-post

The front blurbs are always stripped/condensed summary descriptions from the review inside -- in this case

His songs are thin and languorous, with impeccable influences and the sort of calculated disaffection that comes from an MFA in design and a good weed connection.

omg that is horrorshow

The blurb >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the article quote

I assume that's an article quote; nabisco, if you just made that up then SHAME ON YOU.

why would a critic ever try to guess where a song comes from?

I'm more bothered by beck as impeccable influence

Wait, are you saying that doesn't seem accurate?

The description of "a sense of calculated disaffection", a combination of words that makes me imagine the shittiest band of all time, followed by "recommended" was repellant for me. I guess I like my disaffection to be natural, not carefully planned, so I would never recommend something like that.

Then again, I've never heard it so what do I know and so on.

b-but someone at pfork said "hm, how can we get people to read this review? I know! we'll mention the artist's impeccable influences and calculated disaffection! that'll reel 'em in!"

RIP satire etc

they could have collaged+mis-used _anything_ from the article, and they collaged+mis-used that

The White Williams album reminds me much more of late 10cc and Bread than of Roxy Music. That bit was like the classic "Let's over-hip our influences" review.

The description of "a sense of calculated disaffection", a combination of words that makes me imagine the shittiest band of all time, followed by "recommended" was repellant for me.

See, this sounds like the blurb WORKED for you -- i.e., efficiently let you know you would probably not like this act.

I agree, though, it looks kind of weird to have such a neutral-to-disparaging summary blurb on a recommended album.

I like how they gave the new Babyshambles, which is actually tuneful and a good all around album, a 4.0, but gave the first one, which is dreadful and hard to listen to / bloated, a 7.3,

Yeah, it was definitely TWICE as good as the new one. Fuckin' morons.

ugh, "impeccable influences" is really repulsive.

(xpost) was that a parody or are you really getting worked up about an internet score for babyshambles

He was worked up?

wait, i thought the grading scale was logarithmic. like 5 is twice as good as 4. somebody email ryan schreiber to find out.

shit, now i need to reevaluate all my purchases of the last five years.

It's actually modelled after the Richter Scale, hence the superlative designations of various well-reviewed albums as either "Reccomended," "Best New Music," or "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On."

"White Williams issues a debut album layered with impeccable influences-- including Roxy Music, Beck, and T. Rex-- and a sense of calculated disaffection."

if anything, that reads like a good reason not to check out the album....

richter scale is logarithmic xpost

but kudos nonetheless

yeah sorry the "actually" sounded like I was disagreeing when it more of an "yeah and" thing

No band has marked indie's prog revival more definitively than Battles: Their debut, Mirrored, took rock for a set of puzzle pieces, but was ultimately defined by its pictorial sensibility-- each song felt like a cartoon soundtrack-- and the incorporation of jokes into the most historically humorless music in the known world.

wtf, wtf -- wtf? -- wtf!

the incorporation of JOKES

ya i saw that too... pretty lazy writing

How can you get paid to write if you don't know what "but" means?

jokes?!?!? has dude ever read the back of a don cab/a minor forest/whoever cd?

That bothers me more in a semantic sense: I think the album has a sense of humor, sure, but I don't know what "jokes" refers to in a largely instrumental piece of work.

joeks, bruv

You can here an interpolation of classic knock-knock jokes in "Atlas".

<i>jokes?!?!? has dude ever read the back of a don cab/a minor forest/whoever cd?

-- YGS, Friday, 2 November 2007 19:53 (10 minutes ago) Link</i>

"jokes" was horrible word choice on my part--john is right--but come on, do you really think that having a punny song title is the same as making music that is formally and sonically <i>humorous</i>? eh. don cab always struck me as definitively unfunny, they just tried to compensate with SURREAL HEADLINES.

Who Got The Camera? is one of the best music books I've read in years.

I love that he called out Marley’s infidelities. A lot of those dudes get a pass for being shitty to their spouses

― Heez, Wednesday, January 21, 2026 10:42 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

The book Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer goes into how piggish Rastas were in general with women...I didn't know that Aston "Family Man" Barrett's nickname was ironic because he'd fathered 52 (!!) children with a bunch of different women

book is highly recommended as a history of that era

FYI for further reading, here's Harvey's Substack post on his Legend review:

https://ericdharvey.substack.com/p/print-the-legend?

Gives a peak into how he approaches these:

I consider these to be mini-33 1/3 style pieces, challenging myself to research and write a condensed cultural history of the culture, media and politics of an era that spawned collections of music that we now deem “classic” for varying reasons.

One more hell yes for Who Got The Camera?, which I need to re read at some point.

Eric's Anita Baker and Sugar essays are some of the best criticism those artists I've gotten.

Pitchfork's editors are at their best with longform pieces. I've weaned myself from certain tics thanks to them.

as someone on the outside there’s nothing I read there that rises above the level of a middling ILM effort post or inspires me at all to pay to see more of his writing.

god, this is hilariously embarrassing, given the target

Yeah, Eric's great people and a sharp thinker, so I don't get what the original criticism was even about?

I think Viborg has a beef with Substack in general

Bah. I subscribed. I won't have to think about it for another year now.

So this week's reviews of albums from 1996 are brand new reviews, right? They keep calling them "Sunday Reviews," which makes it sound like they're re-running reviews that were originally run on Sundays. I even saw a post from them that said "Our week of Sunday Reviews from 1996 continues with Outkast's second album..." which makes it sound like they're re-running reviews from Sundays in 1996!

It's TGIF all week!

https://scontent-ord5-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/539384836_1324373513030633_3548221073021314296_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg_tt6&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=SEkNIy1_glIQ7kNvwHLQb9o&_nc_oc=Adm_nSwqf26uHIXYvnUwOugxBfbXb9CxrYyX5QzIwWq811I-jd9PpIqBS8SpwEBEnbE&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-2.xx&_nc_gid=OfMQMoMRA7LcRhhScxaOaA&oh=00_AfoRpAGX13aQuMC1lJqlSJTxq1HzrxGYoQrIeamsPRMI0Q&oe=69799A19

it's Low retrospective weekend

I loved that review. It reminded me of low's music itself. Most Pitchfork reviews are so packed with hyperlinks to other bands and concerts and songs that it is dizzying. There are some hyperlinks in this review, but mostly it's about this band and this record. It moves along deliberately and slowly. It's really beautiful. It's a slowcore review for a slowcore classic.

Album not streaming?

The Life of the Record podcast had a really good special on Things We Lost In The Fire with Alan and Mimi talking all about the recording and history of it.

i can't speak for streaming, crypto— i noticed a reddit thread saying it had been removed from Apple Music last week— but it is on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ruU-MohvMY

Great review, fwiw— still my favorite band.

Yeah, I think it's been pulled from most streaming service. It's on YouTube but not on YouTube Music.

Apparently the rights revert back to Alan in a year or two, so hopefully a reissue coming. This goes for stupid money on Discogs and is the only Low album I don’t own.

It's on YouTube but not on YouTube Music.

that channel is explicitly labeled as being illegal uploads of full albums

okay, problem?

I mean, I didn't listen to it, but if you search for the album on YouTube Music, that's what comes up (as a "video").

Apparently the rights revert back to Alan in a year or two, so hopefully a reissue coming.

oh are they? that's great news. he's talked about wanting to do reissues for ages but universal previously refused offers to buy back the rights

it's still on streaming here in australia

and in the UK, on Tidal at least.

but if you search for the album on YouTube Music, that's what comes up (as a "video").

this feels alarming tbh

if ever there was a site where if you're going to paywall people into music, going old-school and citing/linking sources for the article would be great.

where did this intro "corona" story come from?! jackass links are probably easier to cite.

does anyone know much the switch to subscriptions hurt readership of reviews?

i checked in on a daily basis for many years, just to see what was being reviewed if nothing else, get a general feel. but i haven’t dropped by since the switcheroo. i know you get a few free reads per month, but it introduces this weird “but what if i need to save this read for something big later in the month” scarcity mindset that is exactly the same as finishing a final fantasy with hundreds of unused powerful potions, just to make sure you had enough for later. and i know how archive.ph work but it’s just too much hassle.

i spend my free read tokens when friends of the pod are reviewing

i guess they probably get most of their views/ads revenue through the “news”? and then there’s this other, much smaller audience of heavy review readers who are willing to fork over money in order to continue reading all of them, give modest mouse a 9.4 whatever

I'm in the same boat as you. I checked every day out of a habit and I haven't bothered since the change.

I do check it still pretty often, but I read next to nothing. I read the Seefeel review a few days ago, first one I've read in months. It was a good review. If I trusted the people running the site with not making it worse in a few months, I'd probably consider paying.

give modest mouse a 9.4 whatever

― z_tbd, Monday, May 11, 2026 6:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

that's an incredibly unlikely scenario tbh

A P4k subscriber giving Modest Mouse a 9.4 is unlikely?

heh, yeah that’s what i was referring to, very vaguely - the addition of reader review scores. i assume there are a lot of 9.4s

ah sorry misread

I subscribed, because why not, and I leaf through the reviews once a week, reading pieces about artists I like, or by writers I like, or anything that's getting a BNM. Just yesterday I did a hate-read by a writer I really don't like and was pleasantly surprised at how cogent and thoughtful the analysis was, which was nice to read, always good to feel like somebody you've written off is upping their game