the (second) Bon Iver album

I've said it before, I'll say it again, but the politics of small differences that surrounds the decimal points system used by PF is the single thing I hate most about internet music stuff. As if grades and grading weren't reductive and desultory enough without giving reams of asshole hipster pricks yet more fuel for their nasty little anal bullshit. I hate it. I fucking hate it. Even more than the everything-gets-three-stars-when-you-mark-out-of-five system. wtf does 9.5 MEAN? It means NOTHING. It's an expression of an opinion, but the decimal point makes it maths which makes it TRUE which makes it IMPORTANT. Fuck you, decimal point lovers, fuck you to death.

Argh.

Vent over.

Marry me, Nick <3

I listened to half of this last night and it sounded pretty amazing

I know next to nothing about Bon Iver, but this Onion headline made me lol:

Man Just Going To Grab Guitar And Old Four-Track, Go Out To Cabin In Woods, Make Shittiest Album Anyone's Ever Heard

This is like a soggy-potato-chip-mouthed chillwave Grizzly Bear....DO NOT LIKE.

Seriously, completely agree with you about the decimal point shenanigans, which is just challops.

It is a great, great album though.

Kind of an odd album for Pitchfork to feel they need to make a "statement" about

i keep seeing snippets of lyrics and it makes me never want to listen to this, because this man seems like he is the single worst lyricist ever

can't concur

Well, I met you at the blood bank
We were looking at the bags
Wondering if any of the colors
Matched any of the names we knew on the tags
You said, "See, look here, that's yours!
Stacked on top with your brother's
See how they resemble one another
Even in their plastic little covers"

from a strictly formal standpoint these are A+

wonder why pitchfork docked it half a point

lack of creativity on the album title

No Kanye guest spot

only thing worse than p4k decimal system is letting the p4k decimal system get to you

the decimal points DO matter though bc p4k knows they matter. ever since funeral, the score has held such an immense weight and they're so aware of it. they use grand scores as musical-political statements that don't really reflect the album at all (MBDTF MBDTF MBDTF MBDTF MBDTF MBDTF)

any album that score above like, a 9.2 is going to be met with groaning and eyerolls because pitchfork has set their system up so that NO new album could possibly be that good

but that album will proceed to become very, very popular

also high unemployment & anti-vaccine people

to sum up, list of things that are worse than p4k decimal system, ranked:
1. letting p4k decimal system get to you
2. high unemployment
3. anti-vaccine people

2 & 3 could be flipped idk

god help us if there's a war

4. war

list is closed now though I'm pretty sure that's it

no wait I take it back, brief reopening for final point on list
5. emerson, lake & palmer

i see you've come around somewhat to the "i miss you" video

5. emerson, lake & palmer

now THAT was a strictly formal A+

what did everyone think of his bonnie raitt cover/rework? shit was pretty moving imo

gotta admit i'm curious to hear this thing

what did everyone think of his bonnie raitt cover/rework? shit was pretty moving imo

I thought it was truly great - I mean, that song is a monument, start with that you'll have to work to go wrong, but he killed i

t

i must admit i hadn't heard the orig in so long, i couldn't work out how he had changed it!

i need to a/b them a little more, there's some shit that's not even in the raitt version? like i don't know what he's pulling from at all

i kinda cringed when i heard he covered it but damn i thought he knocked it out of the park

The Bonnie Raitt (almost typed prince billy) cover was giving me an "old man hat" vibe for some reason.

RIP steven tyler -- first ryan dunn & now this

To me the 9.5 translated to "Well, that Radiohead album was a bit disapointing and we need to give a relatively high score to something at this point in the year..."

oh for fuck's sake

anyway, i read some of the lyrics & yeah they were pretty dumb in places, but it def seems like an album that

a. is rich enough in texture/arrangement/vocals etc that the lyrics don't HAVE to matter
b. works from a lyrical standpoint if you stick to the phrases that make sense out of context & sorta let the other ones go in one ear & out the other

nb i listened to half of the album once, but that was my impression

I tend to look at the number rating as an enthusiasm meter, which works perfectly fine for me.

It's like, Pitchfork has a ton of different ways to use itself as a resource, and the number system is just one method of entry, along with Best New Music, The Playlists, the news stuff, and the reviews themselves-- which I feel like mostly serve to put music (even throwaway bullshit albums) into a musical/cultural context that they've created. So for me, it works incredibly as a resource for finding new music, which is I think what it's intended for, right? They have a lot of access points that they're really great about cultivating, developing and maintaining. I think it's a great site that I frequently disagree with, and some bullshit sneaks in through various individual personalities.

But if you can't figure out how to use it, I don't know what to tell you. Cuz that ain't them, that's you.

goole: Last night, Justin Vernon brought an iteration of Bon Iver to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon that sounded neither like the muted folk of his 2007 breakthrough or the layered majesty of his forthcoming follow-up. Instead, he sang beside pianist Phil Cook--his best friend and former bandmate in DeYarmond Edison, and now a multi-instrumentalist in Megafaun--to play a beautiful and simple medley of hits by other people: "A Song for You," by Leon Russell via Donny Hathaway, and Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me." It was one of the smartest television appearances by a band I've seen in a bit.

I saw him perform the Raitt cover on ... Fallon, probably? ... and was bothered that he seemed to be deliberately avoiding the melodic line. But I really love the original song, so.

Ha, that was actually an xpost.

It also seemed so left-field to me, because all I really knew about this dude before this album was "Skinny Love," but it makes way more sense in the context of "Beth/Rest."

I can't get past his voice, and I'm not that fond of Asia.

cool geebs thx

the vocals remind me of tvotr, theyre a bit more annoying in this context of less cool sounds but not the worst

In reply to sickmouthy:

I thought long and hard about this and came to the conclusion that the album was more like a 9.6 than 9.5. These Pitchfork dudes know nothing.

i was kinda disappointed that the new tvotr was missing the p gabriel 80s synth-rock vibe but this gets pretty close to hitting that spot

why don't you just marry peter gabriel already

you should stand outside his house with a boombox

and play a toto song.

or just beth/rest

bon iver's cover of "come talk to me" is kind of sweet, not nearly as good as the raitt cover tho

Prefer his cover of "Big Time" with Four Tet and Grizzly Bear tbh

you should stand outside his house with a boombox

Reminds me of the South Park episode where someone told Stan was told to win Wendy back he'd have to stand outside her house playing a Peter Gabriel song on a boombox. Cut to him standing there with "Shock the Monkey" playing.

^ poor structure, but you get it.