pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

"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"

I did this in a review the other day (songs with ice cream in their title) then realised it was retarded and took it out. That Chuck one above is... cute tho (although I don't get the Electric Eels thing - do you need to know the words?)

Check the big thing inside the tub:

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/how-to-repair-a-washing-machine-1.jpg

i think the nu shooz thing is a "joke"

― fleetwood (max), Friday, 4 September 2009 12:58 (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

as in

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

― fleetwood (max), Friday, 4 September 2009 12:58 (28 minutes ago) Bookmark

Is it not more "how dope would it be if hercules and love affair covered nu shooz??" coz that's a great song, and one that I could imagine them covering.

As long as Antony isn't singing it.

upside of this thread is i totally have nu shooz stuck in my head today and god that song rules

TBH when I saw the H&LA tracklisting I assumed it would be a cover of Nu Shooz.

the video for "I Can't Wait" features such key articles of 80s pop iconography as a plastic cactus & a dog wearing Wayfarers. Also, I was struck by how strongly the singer's voice resembles that of the singer from Ace of Base. Also, that song is srsly stuck in my head now, esp that "voice" synth lead.

yeah i didnt think that was a weird aside at all! i would have wondered if it was a cover

god how awesome would it be if that new track was a nu shooz cover

― psychgawsple, Friday, June 5, 2009 10:16 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark

Fleet Fox dude on the Guest List:

"I was 14 when (Kid A) came out."

I knew the bearded bros were young, but, still, put in that context it's a jaw dropper.

whoa he's younger than me

is this how it starts

hahaha YES

Gotta get my act together.

Anybody read Joe Colly's review of Nick Oliveri's Death Acoustic this morning. Makes me wonder what kind of editing process these reviews go through before they're posted. I mean:

...the album features the same brutality and hostility as his contributions to Queens and other groups, and offers a bleak, sometimes frightening character portrait of Oliveri as an outcast not fit for normal society.

Death Acoustic is a pretty strange record and there isn't much precedent for it beyond perhaps the outlaw country of singers such as Hank Williams and Waylon Jennings, men who sold the idea of themselves as kinds of modern-day desperados. The difference, I suppose, is that Oliveri seems to actually be that character in real life, and when he offers up lines like, "I use crystal methane by the boatload/ I live off straight booze, I just don't fucking care," in "Outlaw Scumfuc", you don't really question the validity of that statement for a second. In some sense, it's effective songwriting, as the listener gets some insight into Oliveri's persona, but often the material here is presented in such a violent and misogynistic manner that it makes it difficult to feel much sympathy for the storyteller.

"Outlaw Scumfuc" is a fucking G.G. Allin cover, dude! That's the goddam "precedent for it." It's got some new, Oliveri-specific lyrics, but it's obviously intended more as comedy than confessional. As is the cover of the Dwarves' "Dairy Queen", which inspires Colly to note that, "one doesn't easily root for a guy who paints his ex as a prostitute who 'went down on every guy in town.'" I mean, jesus christ, how hard is it to notice that this record consists in large part of covers of intentionally offensive and comically OTT punk rock songs? 2 from the Dwarves and 1 each from GG, Moistboyz and the Misfits. It's not a soul-searching expose of the artist's deep thoughts. Hard to understand why you'd even consider treating it as one.

Which leads to another general suggestion for music critics: stop telling me about the bullshit artist persona that you imagine this record fucking reveals.

just in case there was a demand for an acoustic cover of "I Kill Everything I Fuck"

I wonder if this type of thing is a result of journos only getting e-mailed a link to download some mp3s with no other type of information. At least a CD with bare bones liner notes would have allowed Colly to have noticed that Oliveri didn't write all the songs. If he was unfamiliar with GG or the Moistboyz he might have just assumed they were originals and went from there. OBVIOUSLY a little research on his part (or editing, as you point out) could have alleviated the problem, but I can't help but wonder if the reliance on digital files with no liner notes can be leading to more and more of these incidences, especially when the writers are either under too tight of a deadline or too lazy to do additional research.

It totally is the result of that, you need not wonder.

That's all true, but I think there's also a tendency in a lot of reviews to treat lyrics as a direct sort of window onto the artist's soul, with no apparent awareness that they can just as easily be a stylized construct. That the persona seemingly behind the song(s) can just as easily be part of the artistic creation as a view of the artist's undisguised "true self".

Plus, it's really damn hard to imagine anyone taking the lyrics to "Dairy Queen" or "Outlaw Scumfuc" seriously. The only reason we do so in GG's case is that he went to such absurd lengths to prove that he really was, in fact, speaking from the heart.