what does this pfm song review thingy even mean anyway?

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.

a lot of the reviews i'm thinking of try to come off like casually composed riffs. just thinking out loud, no biggie etc!!

This is certainly how I write track reviews.

Dan too.

(Also haikus are very clear and practical, not opaque.) (Also your haiku simile is an example of exactly the kind of literary tactic -- metaphor -- that I'm surprised people claim to have trouble reading.)

in conclusion it's nothing personal but rachel probably had to look up Phantom Planet on Allmusic.com before she referenced Alex Greenwald by first and last name. because any normal person would. that's reason enough to explain the reference, however briefly.

to reiterate, i might actually be more worried if she just knew it offhand.