pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Her voice, when she sings, is usually so low that the words sit just below comprehension

The vibe is wet, sucking mud, freezing toes, a faint mildew smell in the air. The heavy overlay of tape hiss gives it a dismal, gray feel, like a damp chill that has penetrated our clothes.

The piece is spare and uncluttered to the point of stasis; listening to it, I felt sometimes as if I were watching a single-celled organism trying and failing to replicate itself.

Making hard distinctions between Grouper records feels a bit like ranking and classifying heavy sighs

8.3

― Paul Ponzi, Thursday, February 14, 2019 2:28 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

setup... punchline.

tbh i do find it interesting that terms of insult and abuse can be revaluated as terms of praise in the context of different aesthetic regimes.

It's all about context isn't it? I don't see a single 'term of insult or abuse' in the p4k quote, the context being a Grouper album makes that p clear from the get go.

I've never heard a note of Grouper's music, but those first three sentences would make me want to check out whatever band was being described.

uptown, you really think that "gives it a dismal, gray feel" in most contexts would be considered laudatory?
i mean, this is nothing new, it's just funny to me that you can take a description that in a different time and place would be unequivocally negative and in this context it's the equivalent of a (sincere) chef's kiss.
i like grouper btw.

Not in most contexts no, but in Grouper's context mos def. Which was my point.

i'm not disagreeing with you!!

btw more bands should be named after species of fish.

like a prog-rock outfit named haddock

Surely some dumbbells have tried to be oh-so-clever by naming themselves after the humuhumunukunukuapua'a.

it's hard to get a dismal, grey feeling without it being boring! and grouper albums aren't, imo

now for some reason i'm reading the wiki entry on lustmord lol

redskins

damn hatcat is gone :(

I demand the return of hatcat

Huh, me too!

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/offset-red-room/

...

the takeoff album was pretty good...

fwiw i don't read 'dismal, gray" as pejorative. there's a lot of really good music that can be described like that. the review is decent but i think they kind of undersell how dominant the ambient bells (some sort of mallet with patented endless grouper reverb? or just bells? not sure) are. this bit is more spot-on than anything else: "The piece is spare and uncluttered to the point of stasis; listening to it, I felt sometimes as if I were watching a single-celled organism trying and failing to replicate itself. The mood is there, a certain mystery and awe, but it dissipates as the bells chime on and the piece gathers no further momentum and takes no forked paths." i think a lot of that is true, and tbh i don't think this is a good grouper album for people to start with if they're not familiar with her work. that said, i have been listening to a lot of music that evokes a single-celled organism trying and failing to replicate itself (especially Satoshi Ashikawa's Still Way from 1982), so this is exactly what i want to hear from her right now.

this week a learned from pitchfork that films first started having scores in 1958

were they available as LPs before the fifties? Just curious.

I mean, I would argue that anything before Forbidden Planet (1956) really wouldn't be sufficiently "modern" sounding for a P4k list, but then they have two John Williams scores on there and it's like "forget it jake, it's chinatown, and I don't mean jerry goldsmith's soundtrack to chinatown"

Anyway, this list we did in 2013 mostly holds up with the exception of the dogshit redesign that ruined the readability of everything

https://www.spin.com/2013/02/best-movie-soundtracks-list-scores-alternative-music/

Is there really no Carpenter or Goblin on the P4K list? Kind of surprised considering how the revival of horror scores shows no sign of letting up.

Suspiria (1977) is on there, Halloween too. I'm glad that list correctly placed Under The Skin as high as it did, and a shout-out to Jackie too

Escape From New York and Halloween 3 are superior Carpys and Profondo Rosso is superior Goblin, but no one asked me

this week a learned from pitchfork that films first started having scores in 1958

― the scientology of mountains (rushomancy)

I was about to be shocked they didn't include the obvs hipster's choice of The Third Man, but it's #14. Very much the exception that proves the rule though

this week a learned from pitchfork that films first started having scores in 1958

― the scientology of mountains (rushomancy), Saturday, February 23, 2019 12:00 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no prokofiev no cred

hell, who needs korngold or steiner or shostakovich when you can have multiple scores by goddamn jonny greenwood?

Radiohead are aural porridge but Phantom Thread and You Were Never Really Here in the same year is a pretty strong argument

I mean
The Master is really the amazing one

bodysong is still one of my favorites of his

especially when paired with the film - the sounds and images are twins

Greenwood does have some sick scores

minor but ‘house of woodcock’ theme in phantom thread is so cozy and elegant, the swirling orobourous piano melody is just perfect

greenwood scores prob better than radiohead tbh

From today’s largely good Nirvana MTV Unplugged review:

A few hair metal bands came through in an attempt to be taken seriously, as though the lust of teenage girls was not serious enough.

When “don’t belittle the tastes of teenage girls” becomes so divorced from the reasons that’s actually a good and worthwhile idea that it wraps back around into... well... this?

(Totally prepared to learn that this is something that only makes me raise an eyebrow, btw, and it seems like the author of the piece might have posted on here at some point so I don’t want to overstate the negativity of my reaction)

“Wow, calling the 15 year old blowing you under the stage a ‘fangirl’? Do better.”

Listening to it now, I can almost smell the turpentine I used to huff after school. Its popularity should’ve made me feel less alone. Instead, it made me feel like stabbing my stepdad and driving his car into a pole, which, when I think about it now, is probably exactly how a 12-year-old is supposed to feel.

wat

3 out of the 8 paragraphs in this review of the first X album is about how John and Exene use the n-word once in one song.

I'm sure 98% of ILX agrees with the basic premises that "1980 was a different time" and "white people probably shouldn't say the n-word in their songs (even in like ironic Randy Newman character sketches)" and please, please, please fuck off if you don't

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/x-los-angeles/

But is ... this what anyone wants or needs from an album review? Like just doing paroxyms of analysis and linking out to Afropunk and using words like "jarring" and "inherent weaponry" and "dearth of compassion" and "greater violence" and "the buried ugliness of intolerance" and "marginalized people" because some 20-something druggy L.A. boneheads said the n-word to appear gritty in a song 38 years ago?

Like am I just callous and worn out from listening to this album for 20 years and hearing countless rappers and writers and thinkers dictate America's litany of racist realities, or is this actually how people in 2018 should be interacting with problematic art. I feel like I'm losing my mind here.

And I obviously don't want to FIGHT or ARGUE about this approach *existing* because, hey, fighting racism ANY way you can on ANY platform you have is a net positive, so go P4k go. But, man, I do not relate to the idea that this is what a listener or consumer or advertiser or anyone really desires w/r/t contextualizing what the first X album is and means and stands for...

*extremely "the hungry wolf" voice* I am the milkshake duck

Yeah that’s... quite the second half of an album review.

Also, I know what she means (obv.) when she writes “lone actual slur”; but I also wonder if she fully appreciates that the words “Jew” and “Mexican” can be wielded as slurs, without substitution.

and certainly so in the context/delivery of that song

I agree w your posts Whiney, I had the same difficult-to-articulate unease reading that and think you more or less named it

Eh, it could have been much worse. Imagine the review we'd have gotten if the writer had done five minutes of research and discovered that present-day Exene is pretty much a Roseanne-level MAGA crank.

Two thoughts:
1) Agree with Whiney
2) Is it just me or are there a LOT of "7.7"s lately

2) Is it just me or are there a LOT of "7.7"s lately

https://i.ibb.co/4pJp087/Screen-Shot-2019-02-25-at-8-13-22-AM.png

evidence of 77 entering the collective subconscious iirc xp

Review reads like parody, but it's exactly what I expected when I saw that they reviewed this album today. Did anyone really think the review was not going to focus on that one line?

In other news, boy oh boy would I get a kick out of going back in time twenty years and showing this headline to Pitchfork readers in Dismemberment Plan t-shirts: Watch Bette Midler Perform Mary Poppins Returns Song

Does anyone remember that year they trolled readers with an April Fools joke of reviewing an Alannis Morrisette album?
(I don't remember the other 3 reviews from the day, but readers wrote into the mailbag incensed about it)