what does this pfm song review thingy even mean anyway?

it was a glorious moment. gives me chills just to think of it. someday i'll tell my kids that i was there.

*tho this is not as baffling as why this review was singled out for a thread!

"this -does not- really sound like the Shins-Will-Change-Yr-Life"

see blog reference as perjorative: oh, awesome, in that case i'll like this. (but they won't.)

see blog reference as positive: oh, this isn't like that? nuts. (but they'd like it!)

Tom+Jess maybe OTM except that we were mostly bracketing that issue to talk about its readability. Also I'm possibly pretty forgiving of all that stuff Tom's asking for when it comes to Pitchfork's track reviews of indie-rock songs, which aren't always set up to make a critical case for the song -- this one works more like news, really, alerting the reader to a new act in the genre and offering a quick snapshot of what they sound like. If none of that good critical stuff showed up in the album review, I'd be more bothered.

tom - i think that there's a functional difference. this is not parsing the song, or trying to articulate what it sounds like to those who want to know if they should get it, but more of a riff on it, an expression of how it sounds to her ears, because that might be interesting to you if you hear the song too.

in other words, part of this (new?) of crit that seems motivated by instant-listen slsk/download stuff.

You can make references that will neatly sort out who will or will not like the music in question

Unless, of course, you've only heard from a friend that you should check out this review and song and have never heard Beulah or Phantom Planet or know their members or backstories. This is why PFM (and other sites I read regularly) are mentioned as sites for indie music obsessives. My sister was telling me about enjoying and possibly seeing Beulah live, but I doubt she knows the name of the singer. PFM singles reviews are for the obsessives, definitely.

"a bendy plywood voice emoting like Miles Kurosky or even Alex Greenwald."

has to do with getting dressed up.

(that part is kinda silly. skin & bones/socks/plywood voice)

haha, and the "fleeting moment" is also the worst part. (can you tell that i wish the Shins changed my life?)

Yeah well now's the part where reading any more closely starts to seem actively mean. Which is to say: it's a really short track review, one of many, and so picking on a failed metaphor or two might be getting a bit too demanding.

my main problem with this style is that there are actually no real people who talk like this/think like this. i guess it's supposed to sound speedy and preoccupied?

“The writer is having fun and being somewhat clever in ways that impress her, so good on her, despite the fact that I don’t understand this review, really, and have no more desire to hear this song than I did before I began reading it. Man, I sure hope my singles reviews don’t elicit a similar response.”

Dude, you are hanging out with the wrong people.

Yeah, I know that tone. I think it's trying to communicate a bunch of qualities about itself: excitement, personality, casualness, range of high/low culture references -- some trait we might call "freewheeling," you know? There's also an attempt toward density -- using that freewheeling quality to pack as much into a capsule review as can possibly be gotten in there.

I don't know that it really matters whether people ever talk like this -- writing is not talking, and nobody talks like the New York Times, either -- but you'll be either frightened or relieved to learn that there are indeed people who kinda talk like that, or whose discussion at least vaguely takes that shape.

xpost

Guys, L said he didn't mean this review, so much -- I think the reference runs more toward Sylvester-type capsules, really.

the syntax is off-kilter and often hard to penetrate but the weirdness is calculated and the grammatic acrobatics finely tuned. it's not a new trick i guess (trying hard to sound breezy) but i guess it's just a little more obvious when you've got this self-conscious overuse of parentheses, abbreviations, and unexplained references. i understand they're trying to keep these little blurbs to word count but there's still something distasteful about writers purposely alienating readers and casting themselves as "insiders" too busy to explain what the fuck they mean.

Again, for the record: it seems to me to be a better challenge for the critic to evade this issue entirely, and in fact I think the people lauded as top-notch critics usually do find a way to write that can be sophisticated and universally-understandable at the same time.

There's a problem of genre here. When people read music criticism (or at least, when I read music criticism) they want something along the lines of an IGN.com video game review or a newspaper movie review. Straight and to the point. It's utilatarian literature, they want the question "Do I want to hear this?" answered.

They aren't expecting something that looks like it belongs in the Norton Anthology of British Literature. Reading music reviews on sites like Pitchforkmedia, I often feel like opening a technical manual for my car to find out how to change the oil and finding the entire thing is wrote in haikus.

'the writer is giving the reader a little credit' by referencing phantom planet twice

'the writer is just aiming to the most initiated portion of the audience, aiming for the approval of his/her peers' by referencing phantom planet twice

there must be an option d.

most music fans and music magazine readers have as little or less 'technical knowledge' as the writers, so unless your readership was of a level of, say, readers of Guitarist magazine or another title aimed at musicians, then that wouldn't work, because the reader wouldn't necessarily understand the technical terms being (ab)used. which isn't to say your point of view is in any way invalid, but you're representing a faction of a music mag's readership.

as an avid reader of the music press growing up, i always loved writers who could demystify the technical aspects of the music just a little, but i never anted someone to lay it open. and i was always more interested in how this music related to its influence, contemporaries, followers, etc, and the experience of the musicians and how it impacted their art. and as a writer now, yes, i'm of limited technical knowledge regarding how the music is made, but i honestly don't believe that impacts on my ability to discuss the music. because i rarely appreciate it in terms of technical brilliance, but rather the personality of the music (for want of about a million better phrases), a more emotional response, i guess.

and i'm not really sure how a review's value judgement could be anything other than subjective.

So the more I think about it, maybe the kind of criticism we're all wary of here stems from exactly the stuff Mickey is advocating -- maybe thinking about these things as "just an album review" is exactly what causes the problem. If it's "just an album review," then why not freewheel and reference and slang it out? Whereas the clearest criticism -- in lots of different arts -- tends to come around when someone has something important to say about the world beyond the art itself. Because it has something to communicate beyond just describing the record for you, something that's actually more ambitious than that.

Guilty as charged! Although really if one goal of writing about music is to get people thinking about it, why is trying to teach your reader a little bit about the way the song is put together such a verboten thing?

dude, it totally shouldn't be! though i wouldn't be able to write that review.

my uncle often sends me letters saying he doesn't understand the stuff of mine that runs in the London Times, which is frustrating because that's generally the least-opaque, least-artful, most-straightforward stuff i write, and i *want (sometimes) to be understood by *everyone. he also clips out pieces in the paper that he liked better than mine, as 'guidance'.