pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

With Blake, it's like I'd walked into the kitchen and saw a big prickly triangular fruit in the fruit bowl. Didn't recognize it. Didn't know what to do with it. Sniffed at it. Poked at it. Tried it. Liked it. Couldn't stop eating it, and couldn't get the taste anywhere else.

"triangular" makes it

can pitchfork survive after 2010

I don't think so
later, website

i liked that

that excerpt has a nice cadence to it

i guess their new years resolution was to put tons of links in the text of the reviews?

actually very helpful if the links go to music videos.

also, that's every website tho

I was going to say, this is just Pitchfork catching up with everyone else. I'm fine with it, as long as they don't start doing those embedded Google Ads things with the linked text.

hypertext in the tennis review OTM. fuck yeah, link to all possible youtubes alwass, and also to explanatory text when you reference weird nerd shit. this is an entirely new decade of the century.

alwass = swass conception of always

Husband/wife indie pop duo follow a string of well-liked blog mp3s with their nostalgia-soaked, Brill Building-referencing LP

yeah it seems like a good thing--i've enjoyed reading reviews there less since the lala player got killed

http://pitchfork.com/features/columns/7932-out-the-trunk-1/

^cool

why in the "pitchfork is dumb" thread if it's cool?

idk, is there a "pitchfork is cool" thread

anyway, i haven't read it yet so maybe it IS a dumb column, i just think it's a cool platform is all -- these types of columns are often the best thing pfork does

otm re: pfork columns -- t0m ew1ng, nabisco and m4rk r.'s columns should be required reading for anyone looking for smart thoughts abt music. i also usually find something of interest in The Out Door.

I like "Resonant Frequency" a lot

so what you guys are saying is that pitchfork...isn't dumb?

oh it's plenty dumb but it has its smart moments too

Getting rid of the reggae dancehall column was dumb

iirc the dude who wrote that posts here in the rolling thread

Dave Stelfox, who wrote the Pitchfork reggae/dancehall column for awhile used to post here a long time ago. After he stopped writing for Pitchfork (he took a non-music journalism job in the Mideast), Erin MacLeod wrote a few columns. She posted here a few times. But Pitchfork stopped asking her for columns.

best pfork review i've read in some time:

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15122-space-is-only-noise

ugh, my least favorite misuse of "time signatures": In this more rhythmic first half of the album, electronic percussion figures in heavily as usual, but also with heightened emphasis on drummer Phil Selway's uneven time signatures

lol jesus

i wonder what the writer thinks time signatures are...?

once saw some review mention the "opening coda" of a song and just sighed so deeply

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcaYhGEzKD8

omg hearty lol @ "opening coda"

also maybe the phrase wasn't meant this way, but "uneven time signatures" could be acceptable if it's referring to stuff like 5/8, 7/8, 11/8, etc. where the subdivision of the macro beat isn't equal for every macro beat

(I should really get TKOL since, you know, I actually like Radiohead)

but the reviewer makes it sound like time signatures are something the drummer can do apart from the rest of the band. you know he really means "syncopated rhythms" or whatever.

btw everything on the radiohead record is in 4/4.

also thought it was weird they referred to "Neil Young-inspired guitar work" on "Seperator." I associate Neil Young with either strummy acoustic guitar or loud fuzzy solos, neither of which appear prominently in that song.

Guitar on Separator sounds Balearic to me. Reminds me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3ZJy-yQTtI

irrelevant:

that emeralds review from some months back is one of the best i've read, and alone made me buy the album. and then i reread it recently and it sounds fucking ridiculous. comparing emeralds to the bp oil spill? i was a lil more enthused by description of "thrilling, viscous rush" as it's ending line, which you kinda have to forget the oil spill was somewhat of a tragedy of nature before you can appreciate.

dont even know what my point is.

the oil spill not being a "thrilling viscous rush" seems like a good enough point tbh

hahahahahahahahaha @ comparing an album to the bp oil spill o_0

metaphor, you fail at it

that review was by phil sherburne, it was good, it didnt compare the music to the oil spill.

"Describing Emeralds' music feels a little like capping that underwater oil spill must: how do you get your hands around this stuff?"

ie hardly a comparison

well its comparing the process of describing the music, rather than the music?

yeah no, I was agreeing with you effectively

lol sorry i wasnt sure if you were being sarcastic

ha, failed meta-crit by kelpolaris then

but the reviewer makes it sound like time signatures are something the drummer can do apart from the rest of the band. you know he really means "syncopated rhythms" or whatever.

Sure but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyrhythm

Just saying, it's not at all unreasonable

btw everything on the radiohead record is in 4/4.

lol well I guessed that, I'm just being pedantic

actually, if you were _really_ being pedantic,

CLIFFHANGER

from the review for PJ Harvey's new album:

The Great War remains a rich and resonant subject for art because it briefly caused the world to step back, aghast and afraid to look at what it had done. The collective trauma of World War I did indeed shake England, specifically, out of the end of its imperialistic Victorian stupor. The rest of the world gasped as well: WWI hastened the Russian Revolution, coaxed the U.S. into isolationism and a flirtation with pacifism, and set the tone for a shunned Germany to embrace the Third Reich. Culturally, the result was modernism, dadaism, and surrealism continuing to overtake the giddiness of la belle époque; geopolitically, it redrew European borders, creating roughly a dozen new nations; diplomatically, the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, was meant to prevent war, at least on this scale, from ever happening again.

the fuck? do they not have editors?

You mad