pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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

This IS fun to watch...!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcq7NTFHgOk

Honestly almost every cut to the crowd is golden.

could even cut 'someone perform a'.

― suggest and ban is my favourite combination (history mayne), Friday, 18 March 2011 14:37 (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it might just be me but the verb 'perform' wrt a DJ set seems really odd and clunky to me, so yeah... other than that I don't see the issue w/ the serntiment given that it's talking about watching a film of a DJ set?

I realize that video isn't really a DJ set by the way.

DJ sets would be much funner to watch if you were actually able to see what it is they were doing... from the standpoint of most shows, it looks like a lot of unskillful knob-turning and intermittent fist-pumping being all you need to be the next big thing.

dunno how this would be accomplished, tho, aside from video camera

er well you could go and see a bunch of DJs somewhere small w/ no barrier and have a peek maybe

then get told to leave the club when you spill a drink in their record bag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFhxr8Muz5A

granted this was a long time ago, but this was not boring

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

Deadmaufive is not a DJ

?

I was hilariously mispelling Deadmau5

Is that the Hensel twins at :06 in the Deadmau5 vid?