So, what is the worst music review ever then?

Anyway, it's not in the paper, but I have a sorted list of the 10 worst Pitchfork reviews by our g(s) grounding term sum metric. We also have Amazon and AMG reviews in our DB but I had already done the PF numbers, so here they are. Note that this isn't writing ability but rather music "describability:" how well can the human/computer predict the contents of the audio after parsing the review? People here probably different ideas about what makes a good review.

The short of it: to get these scores, the computer listened to about 300 albums worth of music, and tried to find out which terms used in the corresponding reviews were best at describing the music. "Funky" does well, as does "acoustic" but "girlfriend" doesn't do so good. Then we take those predictive scores for each term and average them over a new review. If the review uses more musically-descriptive terms, it'll have a higher score.

"Worst" 10: Artist/Album, Score, Reviewer

./Arovane/Tides/ 0.862 Paul Cooper
./Juno Reactor/Bible of Dreams/ 0.866 James P. Wisdom
./Stereolab/Dots And Loops/ 0.892 James P. Wisdom
./Beck/Midnite Vultures/ 0.91 Brent DiCrescenzo
./Morcheeba/Big Calm/ 0.95 James P. Wisdom
./Gorky's Zygotic Mynci/Spanish Dance Troupe/ 0.95 Brent DiCrescenzo
./Swervedriver/99th Dream/ 0.97 Brent DiCrescenzo
./Sleater-Kinney/All Hands On The Bad One/ 0.97 Brent DiCrescenzo
./Herrmann & Kleine/Our Noise/ 0.97 Paul Cooper
./Dr. Octagon/Dr. Octagonecologyst [Dr. Octagon]/ 0.97 James P. Wisdom

Brian, have you seen Pitchformula? That guy didn't analyze relevance, but he found some interesting results on sexism and use of cliche.

"He starts by reciting some of the most embarrassing lyrics ever committed to an indie rock album, the kind that even twits the size of Conor Oberst or the folks in Arcade Fire would have the good sense to balk at."

Song after song, Currie's trademarked sick wit is nowhere to be found. "My Sperm Is Not Your Enemy" is a vintage Momus title, but it's hung on a predictable and humorless ditty; the same goes for "Beowulf (I Am Deformed)", and whatever hilarity could be gleaned from "Electrosexual Sawing Machine" comes from the posh way Momus pronounces "seks-you-al."

Hope is momentarily rekindled with the arrival of "The Last Communist", an energetic number with an actual melody, rather than a half-assed waltz or polka pastiche. Alas, the song is quickly exposed as a third-rate Auteurs ripoff, the kind Luke Haines probably writes in his uneasy absinthe sleep. The lyrics are an embarrassing laundry list of lame Russki clichés ("Drinking vodka through a straw/ Looking for the visions Lenin saw"), which is more than a disappointment from the guy who wrote "Trans-Siberian Express"-- a cruel, precise, and terrific poem that deserves a place in any number of modern literary anthologies.

That was old Momus, I guess, unencumbered by tabloid infamy and money concerns. The new Momus is the kind of guy who stoops to include a minute of silence as the 16th track on this disc and titles it "A Minute of Silence". If that's not enough, he follows it up with an instrumental reprise of the album's second track-- rendered in telephone ringtones! Oh, the fun!

Awful as it might be, Oskar is not easy to dismiss because awfulness has always been a part of Momus' gambit. The man's main fallacy, however, is that his laboriously cultivated image of a postmodern ponce is binding and irreversible. Behind the moniker of the Greek God of Ridicule, Nick Currie is an erudite man who consigned himself to powdered-wig naughtiness and endless intimations of buggery. This kind of stuff gets old-- even for the joker-- and there's nothing to kill a comedy routine like a whiff of noblesse oblige.

This is a good joke. Bravo!

>Anyway, it's not in the paper, but I have a sorted list of the 10 >worst Pitchfork reviews by our g(s) grounding term sum metric. We

Grounding term sum metric. That's fucking great! You are the man with the plan, the supplier of the unified field equation for the evaluation of prose and music criticism.

>Note that this isn't writing ability but rather >music "describability:" how well can the human/computer predict the >contents of the audio after parsing the review?

Yes, we are all human/computers. IBM, UBM, we all b.m. for IBM. And it's not reading. Reading connotes things that are not quantifiable, not sufficiently machine-like. Human/computers should get that through their thick wafers and motherboards. It's parsing, dammit, PARSING!

>The short of it: to get these scores, the computer listened to about >300 albums worth of music, and tried to find out which terms used in >the corresponding reviews were best at describing the music.

Did the computer listen to death metal for twelve years olds, too?

> "Funky" does well, as does "acoustic" but "girlfriend" doesn't do >so good.

How 'bout "dog" and "shit" or "dogshit"?

>Then we take those predictive scores for each term and average them >over a new review.

And attempt to demonstrate how to nail jello to the wall.

You've become slow-witted from too much drinking of your old computer machine sack.

The best overall review is this AMG (Jason Ankeny) review of June of '44's "Four Great Points:"

"June of 44's fourth full-length is their most experimental effort to date -- fractured melodies and dub-like rhythms collide in a noisy atmosphere rich in detail, adorned with violins, trumpet, severe phasing effects, and even a typewriter."

That's the whole review. It got a 4.15.

Replace 'acoustic' with "rock," "M.I.A.", "loud", "i like this," "violin", you get the point. It works well for some things and not well for others. I make no claims of it saving the world, but for some tasks it's very useful.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/lookaroundyou/furniture/banner1.gif

...people might post some of mine.

m.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/16927/Death_Cab_for_Cutie_Transatlanticism

Who needs this shit?

That said, we can progress to a more balanced appreciation of the third Funkadelic album. In it, the group continues their rather limited exploration of the dark side of psychedelia–a shattered, desolate landscape with few pleasures.

At its most mindless, we are given almost nine and a half minutes of "Wars of Armageddon" - steady bongos and drums behind a creeping ooze of guitars and repeated nudges from an organ, collaged with an arbitrary mix of angry yells, airport departure announcements, cuckoo clocks, garbled conversation and lame variations of popular slogans ("More people to the power; More power to the pussy") -which ends with: 1) several rumbling bomb blasts, 2) a beating heart and 3) a three-second disintegrating snatch of music. Far out. Balancing this is the ten-minute title cut which layers stark electric guitars over a simple, repeated, "beautiful" pattern on what at first sounds like acoustic guitar but at times swells to harp-like vibrancy. With this pattern unfolding like a cool breeze in the background, the electric guitars pursue independent courses out front like dragonflies dipping and sweeping; abrasive and fuzzy, then pure, lovely and shimmering.

In between "Maggot Brain" and "Armageddon," the opening and closing cuts, is an uneven group of shorter, more precise funk songs. One of these, "Can You Get to That," is a reworking of an old Parliaments single, "What You Been Growing," written by the producer here, George Clinton. The changes the song has been put through are indicative of Clinton's declining inspiration as a songwriter. The first verse in both versions ends with the lines, "But I read an old quotation in a book just yesterday: Said, 'You gonna reap just what you sow The less you make you'll have to pay.'" But instead of the original chorus "You been growing just what you been sowing," a nicely succinct message to an errant lover the Funkadelic substitute soul cliche: "Can you get to that I wanna know if you can get to that." In spite of this tell-tale change for the worse (and the other material displays an even more pronounced lyric thinness), "Get to That" is bright and enjoyable, making use of a female chorus and a tight but deliberately slowed-down pace.

Funkadelic is primarily an instrumental group, performing as the band for Clinton's funked-up Parliament, and the LP is marked as a "Parliafunkadelic Thang," although the Parliaments aren't on the record. With the exception of the two long showcase cuts one awfully muddy and jumbled, the other a fine sweet-and-sour dish the music on the whole is more competent than exciting. At best. Side two, culminating in (or descending to) "Armageddon," is a horrible mush. Such dead-end stuff.

Funk for funk's sake becomes merely garbage. Maggot Brain begins with a few echoed introductory lines: "... I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe. I was not offended; for I knew I had to rise above it all or drown in my own shit." Don't look now, bro' but it's up around your knees.

VINCE ALETTI
(Posted: Sep 30, 1971)

oh funk for funk's sake

the review that always come to my mind when discussing the worst review ever is this:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/16927-death-cab-for-cutie-transatlanticism

VINCE ALETTI

^^^WOULD STAB

Oh thanks for reminding me of that Death Cab review.

wouldnt piss on him if he was on fire
x-post

I've always hated DCFC but now I guess I hate their fans too

ACH! That Funkadellic review is bad yes.

CONCLUSION: (III),
Ends the album where the Stability EP left off, w/ "A Lack of Color"-- a low-key ziplock on the freshest meal. Record IS a meal, with all courses well thought out. Ingredients may be obvious-- final taste and chef's vision remain a family secret. Just have to taste for yourself. Same cook-- bigger batch of sound.

UGHHHHHHHH!

I don't understand that Death Cab For Cutie review at all. What's the point?

it is a parody of people's circa-whenever-that-was expectations of Pitchfork reviews and how they were written

kind of a bitch to read and not very good, in my opinion, but I don't think what it's attempting to do is all that opaque

Well couldn't you say the same thing about all their "gonzo" reviews? Like the ones for White Stripes' Elephant and Tool's Lateralus and the first Franz Ferdinand album?

(x-post)

lol @ people wanting to kill Vince Aletti

Aletti = one of the great music writers, can't wait to get that new book of his disco columns that's coming out in April. I don't agree with that review either, though I think it's funny.

Now here's a gaffe that TO THIS DAY they continue to apologize for at every opportunity:

The popular formula in England in this, the aftermath era of such successful British bluesmen as Cream and John Mayall, seems to be: add, to an excellent guitarist who, since leaving the Yardbirds and/or Mayall, has become a minor musical deity, a competent rhythm section and pretty soul-belter who can do a good spade imitation. The latest of the British blues groups so conceived offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better three months ago, and the excesses of the Beck group's Truth album (most notably its self-indulgence and restrictedness), are fully in evidence on Led Zeppelin's debut album.

Jimmy Page, around whom the Zeppelin revolves, is, admittedly, an extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist and explorer of his instrument's electronic capabilities. Unfortunately, he is also a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs, and the Zeppelin album suffers from his having both produced it and written most of it (alone or in combination with his accomplices in the group).

The album opens with lots of guitarrhythm section exchanges (in the fashion of Beck's "Shapes of Things" on "Good Times Bad Times," which might have been ideal for a Yardbirds' B-side. Here, as almost everywhere else on the album, it is Page's guitar that provides most of the excitement. "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" alternates between prissy Robert Plant's howled vocals fronting an acoustic guitar and driving choruses of the band running down a four-chord progression while John Bonham smashes his cymbals on every beat. The song is very dull in places (especially on the vocal passages), very redundant, and certainly not worth the six-and-a-half minutes the Zeppelin gives it.

Two much-overdone Willie Dixon blues standards fail to be revivified by being turned into showcases for Page and Plant. "You Shook Me" is the more interesting of the two – at the end of each line Plant's echo-chambered voice drops into a small explosion of fuzz-tone guitar, with which it matches shrieks at the end.

The album's most representative cut is "How Many More Times." Here a jazzy introduction gives way to a driving (albeit monotonous) guitar-dominated background for Plant's strained and unconvincing shouting (he may be as foppish as Rod Stewart, but he's nowhere near so exciting, especially in the higher registers). A fine Page solo then leads the band into what sounds like a backwards version of the Page-composed "Beck's Bolero," hence to a little snatch of Albert King's "The Hunter," and finally to an avalanche of drums and shouting.

In their willingness to waste their considerable talent on unworthy material the Zeppelin has produced an album which is sadly reminiscent of Truth. Like the Beck group they are also perfectly willing to make themselves a two- (or, more accurately, one-a-half) man show. It would seem that, if they're to help fill the void created by the demise of Cream, they will have to find a producer (and editor) and some material worthy of their collective attention.

JOHN MENDELSOHN
(Posted: Mar 15, 1969)

pretty soul-belter who can do a good spade imitation

stopped reading

"posted"

Dunno if it's the worst but Glam, the singer from Wig Wam of 2005 Eurovision fame, recently complained about a review in a newspaper of his recent solo album. The review was written in a way which actually made his kids believe their dad had been reported to the police. Because, well, the reviewer thought the album was so bad that he should be for making it...

Besides, I dunno if there is a minimum requirement about the rewier to actually call it a review, or Rate Your Music is crowded with contenders for this thread.

Check this one out: http://www.island50.com/albums/detail/five_leaves_left

No wonder Nick Drake topped himself.

Also see the Bob Woffinden review of I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight on the same site. Basically it says "Good album but why don't they cheer up a bit?". I would love to read what Bob had to say about What's Going On or Blue or Blood On The Tracks. But I'll forgive Bob as he is now one of the few people in the UK writing about miscarriages of justice which is perhaps the great neglected issue of our age.

Rock criticism as we know it hadn't really begun properly then. OK, it had in Rolling Stone, which was probably more critical then than it is now. But in Europe, critique was still mainly "Do I hear a hit here?". And Peter Sarstedt did sell more records than Nick Drake. At least back then.

Btw. I am pretty sure Sex Pistols got some truly awful reviews back then. On the other hand, maybe those critics were the ones who were right, after all. :)

: )

Peter Sarstedt sounds like he might be onto something....a review from AMG on his Where Did You Go, Lovely album....wondering about that "sub-Donovan sense of melody and delivery" though.

<<"I looked up from my book and thought, I am a cathedral, in the shadow of St. Stephen." The very first line of Sarstedt's debut LP gives fair warning that you're dealing with a writer who isn't going to let a little thing like overblown cosmic pretension be a cause for embarrassment. If you want more along that line, there's the song about "Many Coloured Semi Precious Plastic Easter Eggs," and if you want an over-ambitious subject, there's "The Sons of Cain Are Abel." He does show a sense of humor, though, in "My Daddy Is a Millionaire." Elsewhere, his overtly observational, oh-so-slightly self-satisfied sense of wordplay dominates. His sub-Donovan sense of melody and delivery isn't bad, and the precious baroque orchestration both dates the record and invests it with a peculiar fascination. Originally released as Peter Sarstedt, it features the huge European hit title track. >>

I have to admit, I don't really get the habit of digging up bad reviews of now-legendary material and having a laugh at the writer's expense, often because I don't think the writers are actually all that wrong -- and because they were in a position to have pointed out obvious aspects of the material that people are too cowed by the legendary status to say anymore without the whole thing being vexed and controversial. Okay, obviously it's funny and ironic when someone's dismissing some legends and saying they're never going to get anywhere. But pointing out that Funkadelic can be a bit jumbled and muddy and aimless at points is, like ... sort of true! This is why a lot of people who are generally fond of Funkadelic don't listen straight through their albums all the time!

I sort of like seeing that -- the ultimate example, I guess, being Edmund White reviewing Ulysses and saying "this is terrific, but seriously, all the Homeric illusions get to be kind of a chore at some point, we get it"

Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone [Startime International, 2002
Just what we always wanted--Jonathan Fire*Eater grows up. Put some DreamWorks money into a studio, that was mature. Realized Radiohead was the greatest band in the world, brainy. Stopped playing so fast, hoo boy. And most important, switched vocalists from Nick Cave imitator to Rufus Wainwright imitator. Wainwright makes up better melodies with a dick in his mouth, and not only that, Cave has more literary ability. New York scene or (hint hint) no New York scene, DreamWorks isn't buying.

- Robert Christgau

Not only tin-eared and way-off-the-mark (regardless of what you think of The Walkmen), but offensive!

so long...

not like "goodbye". so long as in "wow that thing is long".

i don't know a lot of the non-ilx pitchfork people. i thought brent d. was funny. most of it seemed pretty samey though. 1996 they started? sheesh. i had no idea.

was pitchfork making money before conde nast took them over? why don't all these online places just stay independent? i don't get it. they want to get "BIGGER"? is that the thing? so stupid. owning your own thing is where its at. it never ends well when rich people get involved.

my understanding is that conde nast offered them money

God, that Sleater-Kinney review is abysmal— All Hands on the Bad One is an excellent record.

Just accidentally read a Mark Beaumont review.