pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

See, the Cars were great in their time. The scene needed them. They bridged the gap between the Ramones and Elvis Costello.

O RLY?

never forget: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6656-kid-a/

xp see I started trying to construct a devil's advocate defence there based on the possibility of maybe only knowing very select EC songs and then I thought wtf am I doing

xp masterpiece. it's almost like a luriqua post or something

white pearls of arena light swam over their faces!

I need to take a cold shower after reading 50 shades of Kid A

There are rarely traditional arrangements in the ambiguous origin.

I do like how the how the pearls swam. It acknowledges wave-particle duality.

But arena light isn't very coherent, so Brent shouldn't notice.

This is probably my favorite sentence in the English language, no lie: --> The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard's cap.

Fantasia refs are pretty good

My boiling brain oozed out of my appalled honeydew ears.

babelfork

bands like the Talking Heads, Blondie and Devo started springing up out of the woodwork and the losers ate it up like Toffee bars.

love it when schreibs goes all hardboiled gravelly-voiced "i was there", it's like a 22 yr old playing a tough gangster in a student film.

well sure. but there's been a lot of talk about how ratings are discussed/decided from the top down, and the author of the first review still owns the site and presumably wouldn't have run the second one if he wasn't okay with the implicit rebuke of his old opinion. which i think is more a good thing than a dumb thing overall but w/e. xp

― some dude, Wednesday, November 20, 2013 12:23 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Yeah for sure and sorry to get all serious but it's also kind of interesting to see the kinds of stuff that P4k is willing to walk back 10 years later when they have an opportunity and the kind of stuff that they'll outright delete and pretend never existed (i.e. walt mink, save ferris)

But I posted more for 1) lol schreibs and 2) feelings personal vindication since I've been an AWK stan since I GET WET

wait what did they say about Walt Mink

Schreibs was a huge fan and gave at least one of their albums a 10/10

http://i.imgur.com/ZhPm1se.png

I have stumbled, quite absentmindedly, upon one of the best albums I've ever heard. Walt Mink's El Producto takes some growing on you, but grow it does, and in the largest way ever.

The album's opener, "Stood Up," fades in with the unmatched skill of John Kimbrough's fingers picking away at those old steel strings, and then shoves its seven inches of pop square up your ass. "Overgrown" steps around the corner with its unbelievable catchiness and intricate guitar riffs, and Orestes Morfin's intense drumbeatings. Who knew that when it was written (and rejected) for that hip, Gen-X slacker film, "P.C.U.," it would be such an irresistible chunk of beautiful noise? "Love in the Dakota" is the record's beautiful ballad, a sweetly- strummed storytelling of the plot to Roman Polanski's classic film, "Rosemary's Baby." Guitar, strings, and John Kimbrough's boyish voice blend together in what sounds like a serious case of good music.

Minneapolis has spawned more than its share of great music, but Walt Mink is the best band I've heard leave the city for the big time in over five years. We're trying to get in good with local politicians right now in hopes to pass a law that makes not owning a copy of El Producto a misdemeanor. Um, yeah.

-Ryan Schreiber

okay the hilarious thing about that is both Miss Happiness and Bareback Ride are way, way, WAY better than El Producto

12 rods was the future of music iirc

("Croton-Harmon(Local)" 4 lyfe)

today an article used "But Eva Gabor couldn’t touch Eric Wright" as a segue.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080924062007/http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/16264-live-at-the-village-vanguard-the-master-takes

I think it's understandable, I think everybody had a band or artist they rode for in college that they would have given a 10/10 or 5/5 mics or w/e if they had been EiC of a music rag

I probably would have given wolf parade a 10/10 if I had been in charge of p4k at the time

Thankfully I wasn't

Still, lol @ schriebs

Love that that review gets brought up every time we reminisce

http://i.imgur.com/8qJ7vcH.png

Needed to make a screencap this time. So good

funny thing is I bet zines are FULL of that shit, most zines just don't grow up to be the internet rolling stone

Shit cat is right

Walt Mink's bass player is a professor at Boston University now, I keep wanting to call her and say "hey, you rock" but I think that would be a fast track towards a restraining order

Keeping in mind Pitchfork's audience at the time of the Coltrane review, I'm now wondering if a single person bought the album off the review.

What voice is that even supposed to be

Shit cat

Yeah for sure and sorry to get all serious but it's also kind of interesting to see the kinds of stuff that P4k is willing to walk back 10 years later when they have an opportunity and the kind of stuff that they'll outright delete and pretend never existed (i.e. walt mink, save ferris)

But I posted more for 1) lol schreibs and 2) feelings personal vindication since I've been an AWK stan since I GET WET

― 乒乓, Wednesday, November 20, 2013 2:19 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah i feel you. the revisionism stuff is always entertaining to catch. a lot of really uncontroversial reviews are deleted, too -- some of my reviews, mainly of obscure bands that never went on to do anything of note, are gone, which seems like such an odd move, like deciding retroactively that things that got PF coverage weren't worthy of it.

I read "Shit, cat," as an imperative

Wow that sucks. Allmusic (or w/e its current name is) they're not trying to be xp

xp masterpiece. it's almost like a luriqua post or something

― flopson, Wednesday, November 20, 2013 12:44 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

woah woah woah woah, let's be careful of the words we choose

#hardsonned4lyfe

Barleywine churned out a bunch of reviews, but I don't recall any this embarrassing

I read "Shit, cat," as an imperative

haha yeah, it's really a charles mingus reference:
http://mingusmingusmingus.com/mingus/cat-traning-program

i know we've been over the Cars review but can i just

these days, they're remembered more as predecessors to Weezer's brand of pop music

so much Say It Ain't So back in 1999.

some proto-blogging in the first two paragraphs of this, Schreiber's earliest review still on the site (Feb. 1999):

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6455-sam-prekop/

I'm psyched. Y'know why? Okay, okay, if you're gonna drag it out of me, I guess I'll tell you-- I'm moving from Minneapolis to Chicago in less than three weeks. And I'm taking Pitchfork with me. It's strange, really, to think about the dramatic changes that are gonna take place in my life in such a short period of time. I mean, for starters, I've sold my car. What a major shift, going from a reliable little Geo Metro to public transportation. And I can't wait.

The beautiful thing about Chicago is that, unlike Minnesota, people actually talk to each other. In Minneapolis, if you talk to someone in the line at the movie theater, they get all nervous and twitchy. It's also slightly warmer there than it is in Minneapolis (though they get more snow). And best of all, everyone's completely laidback. Now, maybe I'm just glamorizing the place 'cause I'm excited about going there, but I've got proof about the laidback thing.

Love that album.

don't his reviews stretch back to 95 or 96?

well yeah, in those years he was one of like 3 people writing most of the reviews. i think anonanon was saying all those pre-99 ones were deleted.

the walt mink thing (which i agree w/dan they had peaked by that album anyway) is a little more explainable given he was in mpls at that time and if you saw them live in a club they could really tear your head off...in no small part to having one of probably the best rock drummers in the world in a setting where he could really go off (as opposed to his stints with beck, REM, and elliot smith)...so i could see being a little more hyped on them than ppl from the outside would be

yeah they purged stuff earlier than 1999

xp

the purge was especially annoying when that "The People's List" pool of nominations/suggestions was drawn from albums reviewed in their archive and the 90s selections were ridiculously thin compared to the 2000s stuff

I just remember jjj playing Miss Happiness for me and me sitting there slack-jawed going "uh HOLY SHIT this is great" and him replying "you should see them live, it will DESTROY you"

I tried really hard to make Walt Mink into a thing during college but no one who wasn't from MN seemed to care ;_;