pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

From the standpoint of writing a review, I'd venture that "critical peak" often gets used to mean something like "the conventional wisdom is..." I.e., just a nod to whatever consensus opinion seems to exist on the topic. Which (usually) strikes me as not too meta and a reasonable thing to acknowledge alongside whatever personal opinions you have. (I don't know that the "critical" in the phrase is entirely aimed at critics, though it does have a "those in the know" vibe that separates it from "commercial peak" -- it's sort of the conventional wisdom among whoever the author is taking seriously, I guess, which tends to include music geeks and such, too.)

You know, I think my first thought when I heard "Beggar's Bowl" was that it reminded me of the riff from "Show Don't Tell" by Rush (I think that is the song, one of those later-period Rush). Now, I can get behind some Rush, but this was not really the kind of Rush I would have in mind.

"... one of those later-period Rush songs"

i thought about led zep and white stripes

Isn't "conventional wisdom" these days "Metacritic scores"? I mean, insofar as Conventional Wisdom has always consisted of aggregated positive opinions.

Well see one way I disagree with Jaymc is that people mostly use "critical peak" in retrospect, don't they? Talking about the span of a catalog. So I think there are some situations where the hindsight conventional wisdom about an act's greatest / most significant / most noteworthy album has changed a bit from how things were received at the time. In any case, the term just seems like a nod to CW/reputation among some allegedly "informed" class, which Jess is right, people often do appreciate being clued in on what the conventional opinion is.

To rewrite what Charles Evans Hughes once said about the Supreme Court re the law: conventional wisdom is what we say it is.

based on the comments here i assumed that what ppl were questioning was the idea that this actually was 'informed' cw -- i.e. something that everyone kinda seems to agree on -- vs. what the author wished was conventional wisdom, or that the author was challopping it as cw even if it wasnt considered so previously

but i have no knowledge of this band so

^^^ yes, at least i was, partially

I think neither of those, actually. I think the author was implying that Exploded Drawing achieved Polvo's "critical peak" at the time, not that it is necessarily the consensus agreed upon now. I think the idea of consensus and what is useful/desirable to the consumer/potential fan is another argument. When he mentions that Shapes came out and confused people, I do not think he intended that to mean for perpetuity either, it was meant to further establish the timeline and finish off his point. Metacritic has nothing to do with the review at hand, I don't think.

I think a lot of time an artist's critical peak calcifies into the current-day conventional wisdom and is therefore indistinguishable from it. Like I sometimes wonder whether the current critical consensus behind Emperor Tomato Ketchup as Stereolab's best album isn't just because it was praised so highly in 1996 and people are too lazy to reevaluate.

Yeah I think sometimes an artist's breakthroughs get grandfathered into 'peak' status even if a lot of people eventually look at their catalog much differently. It's almost like the "the first album you hear is always your favorite" syndrome taking place with a whole group or community.

this is also known as the Sonic Youth Syndrome.

"Like I sometimes wonder whether the current critical consensus behind Emperor Tomato Ketchup as Stereolab's best album isn't just because it was praised so highly in 1996 and people are too lazy to reevaluate."

Is this really a critical consensus now? It always seems to me like Transient Bursts get more love.

It's the only one that gets 5 stars on AMG.

That AMG review is from 1996 though!

Also AMG isn't exactly a consensus by itself.

ETK is def the critical favorite, Transient is the record store geek "I only like their early stuff" pick

ETK was definitely the only one i read about in big magazines like Rolling Stone in the 90s and i wasn't really aware at all of how many other albums they had

"ETK is def the critical favorite, Transient is the record store geek "I only like their early stuff" pick"

Makes sense that I would be deluded about their relative popularity then.

Although Transient's Amazon sales rank is higher!

actual best album is sound dust and in 30 years everyone else will realize this

maybe 25 years

In 30 years no one is going to give a shit about Stereolab.

ya that's why I changed it to 25

jaymc will give a shit about stereolab in 30 yrs

refried ectoplasm is all u rilly need

Maybe. I certainly don't love them as much as I did 10 years ago.

ETK is most listened to on Last.fm:
http://www.last.fm/search?q=stereolab&m=albums

ppl still give a hit about, like, josef k--why not stereolab?

ETK is the most sold back at record stores (I have no link, I just see more copies.)

"ppl still give a hit about, like, josef k"

No they don't.

Oh wait a SHIT. Okay maybe they do.

weird that ETK is so highly regarded. i love love lovedit when it came out, prob still do... but always saw it as the beginning of the end.

it's funky

ETK is great!

never heard of polvo before this week.

refried ectoplasm is all u rilly need
This is in my dj bag for the radio show tonight!

"That period of Os Mutantes isn't well-known outside of Brazil, but suffice to say it hasn't aged as well. They were as prone to prog excess as any psych band that survived past 1970, and though their music retained its wild spirit and Brazilian character, it also got tighter, more bombastic, and less infectious."
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13391-haih-or-amortecedor/
prog "excess"="less infectious" is an axiom that hasn't aged well, mediocore fans

lock this fuckin thread.

this isn't really focused just on pitchfork, even though i'm snagging the quote from pitchfork's review of the hercules & love affair mix, because i see this all the time in different sources:

By the first three tracks, which sees Butler link Westbam's zippy, overeager "And Party" to Todd Terry's ice-cool hip-hop drum pastiche "No Pares (Don't Stop)" to an oblong, twerky disco-house original (new H&LA track "I Can't Wait"-- sadly not a Nu Shooz cover), we're in full bloom.

does this serve any point other than allowing the reviewer to show off their vast array of musical knowledge?

Haha, just the other day some dude called out xhuxk for doing that in Singles Jukebox reviews.

Is Nu Shooz's "I Can't Wait" such an obscure song that busting out a reference in a review is supposed to establish some kind of massive cred? It was like a top 5 hit and got them a Grammy nom.

uh your argument just makes the reference even more pointless

I think n/a's point is that it's just absolutely irrelevant. I couldn't find an example of xhuxk doing the "sadly not a cover of..." line, but I did find this, in his review of Lisa Mitchell's "Coin Laundry":

Nowhere near as good as the Five Royales’ “Laundromat Blues,” Vivien Goldman’s “Launderette,” the Pretenders’ “Watching The Clothes,” the Electric Eels’ “Agitated,” or Trafassi’s “Wasmasjien.”

I get the sense, from having read his stuff here and in The Accidental History of Rock'N'Roll, that a lot of what drives his criticism is just free association. Which has the potential to yield some interesting insights (sometimes he notes, for example, that a song in one genre uses the same sonic signifiers as a song in a totally different genre, thus suggesting that the boundaries between genres are nowhere near as rigid as we'd like to think) -- but a lot of the time does just seem sort of shallow and useless, nothing more than vomited-up trivia.

i think the nu shooz thing is a "joke"

as in

"how hilarious would it be if hercules and love affair covered nu shooz?? guys?? seriously??"

(Sorry to pick on xhuxk, btw. He himself says "if people can’t see humor in songs sharing titles, that’s their loss.")

haha sorry my good-natured ribbing turned into a thorough jaymc survey of the eddy canon ¯\(°_o)/¯

Well, it struck a chord.

heh yeah...I mean the whole genesis of it was me thinking it myself, and then going "I shouldn't say this in the blurb, it's the kind of thing that I roll my eyes at when Chuck does it"