pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

"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

uh i think the PJ Harvey review was written by sc0tt p., who IS the editor... right?

i got about 1/3 into it and stopped reading btw. one of the only recent pfork reviews to be totally offputting b/c of the ridiculous density of language. i mean yeah i can read but i think music reviews should be, like, approachable

maybe they realized that some of the college kids reading PF won't learn world history unless they do an occasional wikipedia infodump in the middle of an album review as a public service.

lol @ the new streets review figuring out a way to work in james murphy/lcd

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15099-computers-and-blues

i got about 1/3 into it and stopped reading btw. one of the only recent pfork reviews to be totally offputting b/c of the ridiculous density of language. i mean yeah i can read but i think music reviews should be, like, approachable

― Damn this thread seems so....different without ilxor (ilxor), Saturday, 26 February 2011 15:57 (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

? really?

yeah man there's this whole weird BLOCK of words, it's not cool! why can't they be like ilx posts?

lol yeah i just read the review + i agree that the history lesson in the middle is a bit weird but apart from that... i mean 'ridiculous density of language'??

relatively speaking... for a pitchfork review, i guess?

like, i can't think of a recent review that uses ANY of the following "big" phrases

collective trauma of World War I
imperialistic Victorian stupor
Russian Revolution
isolationism and a flirtation with pacifism
embrace the Third Reich
modernism, dadaism, and surrealism continuing to overtake the giddiness of la belle époque <---- WTF
geopolitically, it redrew European borders

i mean, sure, i guess it ties back to the album's core themes and inspirations, but i dont like my music reviews to come with high school history lessons -- just tell me what the album sounds like, please!

"Victorian stupor" seems like a potentially useful description of a PJ Harvey album tbh

not "imperialistic"?

i think he's saying that if a music review is going to be hard to read, it might as well actually talk about the album

frankly I think I prefer this to ham-handed current events tie-in

well yeah thats one paragraph, the rest of it talks abt the album xpost

collective trauma of World War I9/11
imperialistic VictorianRepublican stupor
RussianEgyptian Revolution
isolationism and a flirtation with pacifism [uh nobody does this anymore]
embrace the Third ReichTea Party
modernism, dadaism, and surrealismchillwave reggaeton and bloghouse continuing to overtake the giddiness of la belle époquethe Clinton Years

it doesn't matter that its just one paragraph it just kind of defeats the purpose of the record review, and this is the kind of thing they do all the time and it's really agitating. like that max tundra review where they just tried to draw similarities to him and the "real" fictional max tundra, the whole thing was just like "we got a hook, it's not about the music, but god damn it we're gonna use it"

i think it's totally okay to dedicate some of a record review to some overarching metaphor or non-musical commentary or introductory anecdote, if it's done well, obviously. at least with Pitchfork they've got enough leeway in wordcount that they can indulge in that stuff and still have room to discuss the music, sometimes in print reviews writers will just burn through the only 2 or 3 paragraphs they've got talking about some irrelevant side issue.

yeah i dont see how it 'defeats the purpose of the record review'. one of the themes of the record, is WWI, that paragraph addresses it, he then moves on to talking abt the sound of the album. i just get the feeling that ppl are so ready to jump on pitchfork reviews when most of them these days are perfectly fine

i'm not saying you can't diverge into something but for God's sake tie it into the record somehow. it would be like if their Aeroplane review spent a paragraph spouting off random wiki facts about Anne Frank (it may actually do this, I havent read it). it "defeats the purpose" because it doesn't mean anything in the context of the review. it's just there to show off.

every review i've read of the PJH album, inc mine, talks about WW1, for good reason. i haven't read the full p4k one, but that para isn't particularly insightful about WW1 - as al says it reads like a wikipedia infodump.

i'm not saying you can't diverge into something but for God's sake tie it into the record somehow

it does tie it into the record... have you read the review?

yeah they kind of clumsily try to bring it back but it still seems bad to me. obviously you should mention WW1 when talking about this album the same way you can relate Aeroplane to Anne Frank or the mechanics of cycling when you talk about Tour de France Soundtracks but there's a point where it goes from talking about an album to spouting off random facts that you hope the readers think come off the top of your head. I just think in general pitchfork does a pretty terrible job of writing reviews in ways that actually would make someone want to jump into an album, I read their reviews a lot and only really bought one album because of them. like, they would rather jump off the deep end right away rather than describe what the album actually sounds like and which songs are good

it wasn't the ref to ww1 that agitated me, it was that he actually elaborated. and maybe would've been excusable had he taken some thematic element of ww1 and applied to the album, but he just goes on and on trying to impress us with his vocabulary. he just name-drops terms like he's taking the 11th grade AP test - Victorian, dadaism, surrealism. please shut the fuck up and return to album.

i guess it gets me more considering p4k's leeway when it comes to word count, like they really think every word is worth reading. most ppl's attentions spans are not remotely that long, and i tend to skim reviews. i do like that p4k goes in depth about stuff but they tend to abuse their reader's with how long they allow themselves to project their ego onto their review... indie-rep (comparisons to obscure bands), educational background, musical know-how (i just sorta doubt the college-dominated readers of p4k really know what terms like 4/4 really mean). anyways.

weren't longform record reviews the entire point of pitchfork from like 1999 onward? that's kinda what set them apart originally, they had these long rambling pieces when other sites would just have a paragraph or 2.

also i think it's weird how enthusiasm for an album equates to 6 more paragraphs, while mildly reviewed albums won't get more than 3. the prime exception is that succint kanye blurb for album of the year... otherwise, they're just seem much more to discussing merits like bubbling fanboys than explaining what exactly is wrong with an album.

*much more prone

i guess it gets me more considering p4k's leeway when it comes to word count, like they really think every word is worth reading. most ppl's attentions spans are not remotely that long, and i tend to skim reviews.

this may have been on ilx, actually, but i remember Sc0tt Plagenh0ef (who wrote the PJ review!) talking a year or two ago about the average length of time Pfork readers spend on each page. and the longest-viewed review in recent times, the one Pfork readers spent the longest amt of time actually sitting on the page, was Vampire Weekend (can't recall if it was the first album or second) -- and the length of time spent was, like, two minutes and change. two minutes! for the most-viewed page! i guess that's relatively decent for an online record review, but... gets ya thinking about attention spans & such.

Sc0tt's actually a good writer, i just didn't care for the PJ review. he doesn't do too many reviews (surely he's busy) but when he does, i think his reviews tend to be longer than most on Pfork re: word count/length.

http://pitchfork.com/search/?query=plagenhoef&search_type=extended&filters=albums

the prime exception is that succint kanye blurb for album of the year...

a fitting counterpoint to pfork's excruciatingly long review of the kanye album, which went on more about his celebrity, perceived importance, ego, fuck-ups & redemption etc. etc. than the actual music ;_;

sometimes they don't even do that; their review of Underworld's Barking generally seemed to suggest they liked the album, and yet rated it 5.9; their only complaint was that "Louisiana" (a ballad) didn't have any "real power" (which would have ruined the song)

I always wondered if there was some kind of system they used to come up with these scores. I mean really what's the difference between 7.9 and 8.2, for example? Do the thresholds mean anything? It all seems so random to me. Have they ever rated anything 9.9?

Bjork's Homogenic got a 9.9, i think some Miles Davis or Beatles album, too... can't remember

Silver Jews - American Water got 9.9 too

it doesn't really take more than 2-3 minutes to read one of these reviews if you're just reading each sentence once and not stopping to re-read or think about something before moving on, would it? like i almost want to get a stopwatch and try it but that seems about right as a length of time.

plus i'm sure the high number of people clicking on the page just to see the score and maybe skim the opening paragraph brings down the avg time for people who are actually reading the review

yeah that seems about on target, but 2-3 min is for the *most* read reviews -- others are probably nowhere near?

why would that figure change just because a review gets read more? more popular albums would probably bring out more casual readers. i'd think the reviews of the more obscure stuff would probably get read "all the way through" the most

yknow this shouldn't really get to me, but shit like making the LEAD REVIEW on a FRIDAY a fucking deerhunter live EP exclusive to itunes... and then giving the fucking thing an 8.2, an equivalent rating to Mark R's review yesterday of colin stetson's absolute fucking monster of an album, which is likely the most gripping thing i've heard in years)... only at pfork, that's all im gonna say.

Different reviewers like different things?

sadly about 10x as many folks will prob click/read the deerhunter review. really now. who made this editing decision? run the stetson review as lead on a friday, guys, and bury those iTunes live EPs deep in the mix.

think they ran a vampire weekend iTunes EP as the lead review, too, earlier this year or late 2010, fwiw

Different reviewers like different things?

actually, good point, let me self-edit:

run the stetson review any other review as lead on a friday, guys, and bury those iTunes live EPs deep in the mix.

I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm guessing it has a little to do with driving traffic.