pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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

Is it someone here who coined the phrase, "a Breihanian level of misunderstanding"? Because that's all I can think about when I read his stuff now.

only took tom two paragraphs to drop an "asthmatic rasp," which is right in line with his world record time

Have you ever forgotten to remove one or a few, leaving some GREATs throughout?

all-caps great wouldn't stick out that much in some of the things lex has written tbh

"The idea of watching someone perform a DJ set may not be the most enticing proposition"
"The idea of watching someone perform a DJ set may not be the most enticing proposition"
"The idea of watching someone perform a DJ set may not be the most enticing proposition"
"The idea of watching someone perform a DJ set may not be the most enticing proposition"
"The idea of watching someone perform a DJ set may not be the most enticing proposition"
"The idea of watching someone perform a DJ set may not be the most enticing proposition"
"The idea of watching someone perform a DJ set may not be the most enticing proposition"

hold up what!??!

thats otm though for the most part. nb i dont know the context. u dance to dj sets you dont watch them

Well... no one actually goes to a DJ set to watch the DJ, right? Unless they also happen to be DJs?

xp: yeah D-40 OTM

the sentence contains with it the assumption that people go to dj sets to watch them! which makes it doubly clueless.

*within it

"The idea of watching someone perform a DJ set may not be the most enticing proposition"

it's not the idea that's the proposition... it's the watching. try this:

Watching someone perform a DJ set may not be the most enticing proposition

boom, three words saved.

could even cut 'someone perform a'.

maybe it's from a review of a concert DVD where the camera is pointed at the DJ the entire time

It's from the Thom Yorke thing, no?

maybe they're reviewing Creep's live show

The reason Deadmau5 is successful is because people like watching him perform a dj set