pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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.

exactly! but it's lame nonetheless

i guess moral of the story is: websites do stupid things and make annoying decisions to drive traffic

see also: Allmusic --> AllRovi

i dunno, there's somewhere a list of bands out there - it's like Radiohead (and any side projects whatsoever), Sigur Ros, Deerhunter, LCD Soundsystem, Gorillaz, Nine Inch Nails, Animal Collective, and maybe a few others, that just get the lead review no matter what it is they're releasing. they most definitely do play favorites.

right, but a live iTunes EP????

i mean i guess lol 2011 digital music etc. but really??

you understand that Pitchfork is, to some extent, a business, right?

hah yes yes

anyway i've made my point, i'll drop out of the convo now

I get why it bothers you. It kind of feels like if they had the lead review be the themed bonus CD you get with a copy of Mojo, as an extreme example.

shocked pfork didn't lead with an album featuring a bass saxophonist collaborating with laurie anderson.

I completely understand that there is some editorial discretion when assigning the numerical score to a review, but there is nothing about this Eleventh Dream Day review that makes it sound like a 5.9 record.

yeah the tone is much more positive

reads like it's written by someone who's an actual fan of the band, too

maybe the editors were like "calm down, fanboy" and knocked a couple points off the score

Prairie School Freakout only got 7.8, maybe they were scoring it relative to that?

ha that would probably be fair in a sense but I have a love of that record utterly out of proportion to pretty much the rest of the world

(I also have to review the new one this weekend)

i had to talk to some journalism students last week about Our Noble Career and they asked whether any publication had ever changed my star rating as though it was the worst thing they could think of

To be fair, maybe it was.

It's really not.

most of the time i forget to give mine a score when i send them in

thought it was hilarious when ethan used to write track reviews and didn't notice for a while that there were star ratings next to them and just sent in reviews and editors slapped a # on them

it's obv not the worst thing that can happen to a journalist but i still think it's fairly basic

Once I accepted that star ratings and scores are about marketing rather than criticism, and that they have nothing to do with how sophisticated the review itself might be, I stopped worrying. Three stars, four… who really cares?

yeah that's exactly what they did to "Barking"...I don't get these guys

only if u think those ratings 'matter' i guess xxp

As a reader, I always assume that the rating is a quick, dirty summation of how much the reviewer liked whatever they're reviewing, so ratings being out of whack with the review itself is a little disorientating. I can see why an editor might have to calibrate the rating from time to time tho and split the difference between the reviewers personal tastes and the publication's general stance.

5 of the 27 topic sentences in Tom B's Odd Future wrap-up

This is where things get great.

More importantly, though, Bastard is just a straight-up great rap album, the first from the Odd Future camp.

Musically, it's a great, short distillation of the Odd Future aesthetic, with Tyler's murky synths and lurching drums only slightly obscuring a great ear for melody, like the hop-skipping piano line that makes "Luper" bounce so hypnotically.

Earl, it turns out, is a great rap storyteller, though his stories quickly become nightmares.

And the production here is borderline gorgeous; it's like the Odd Future production brain trust of Tyler, Left Brain, and Syd all got together and agreed that they finally wanted to make something that would sound great in a car.

Also worth noting is the topic sentence that appears between the first two above: Here's Bastard's basic appeal in one punchline: "Cruisin' in my go-kart at Walmart selling cupcakes/ Go 'head, admit it, faggot; this shit is tighter than butt-rape."

What a great review

"Earl, it turns out, is a great rap storyteller, though his stories quickly become nightmares."

http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/um/um3/440.jpg

haha "great" is such a placeholder word, when i'm writing drafts i put it in caps though, to remind me to go back and think of a synonym

^^^ great call

u mean GREAT call?

breihan is just the master of goonthusiasm