pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

so I'll defer to others on that point - but of the three Tame Impala songs I own I'd be hard-pressed to point to a "jazz influence"

King krules is p great

lol meant "three Tame Impala ALBUMS" there

xp

4.8 for Madonna.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madonna-madame-x/

If I wanted someone to write a witty pan, I'd hire Rich.

par for the course

4.8 is way too generous. I bet the editor bumped that score up a couple points after the review was turned in.

it is hilarious to me the way they are still trying against all odds to push frankie cosmos

RichJuz madonna review is so well-written damn

I stopped reading at "grotesque wealth"...

that's the second sentence

she's more than halfway to a billion. only like 300 bernies

Their 2001 song “Everybody Got Their Something” sampled a guitar hook from George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass while also bringing to mind a then-current Faith Evans hit.

anyone care to point out where this reputed sample (it links to "I Dig Love") is? cuz I sure don't hear it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/business/puja-patel-pitchfork-work-diary.html

3:30 p.m. One of two weekly reviews meetings, where we go over our album review schedule, scoring, Best New Music designations and assignments. This is usually the easiest or knottiest meeting of the week, depending on the releases and how strongly the editors in the room feel about them. We try to have at least four people on staff listen to every album reviewed before landing on a precise score. Today, two editors have differing opinions on the score of a smaller album, and we talk about some existential issues with scoring against the legacy opinions of Pitchfork past.

Next day:

1:30 p.m. My weekly meeting with Anna Wintour, the creative director of Condé Nast. Anna is a sounding board on anything big or small. We talk about everything: new developments on major editorial plans for the site, design updates, artists who are releasing new music, ideas around covers, the staff, navigating every kind of business change or hurdle while being true to the site’s spirit and point of view.

Diary of a Madman

1:30 p.m. Our video lead tells me that Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers are on their way to the office studios to shoot for our “Over/Under” series. Last week we ran into the “Queer Eye” cast in the cafe and taped them for the series, too. It’s one of my favorite franchises because of how genuinely funny and random it tends to be.

Funny and random. Can't wait for that one.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-burial-became-a-meme/

Just funnin' around w/ some Burial memes

http://i63.tinypic.com/5frzna.jpg

The article really neither convinced me of this purported phenomena nor Burial's withstanding legacy (tho I am a fan)

OI MEMBA BURIAL WAS SOME BLOKE INNA HOODIE INNIT

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Tuesday, October 4, 2016 5:27 PM (two years ago)

Sherburne is a good writer, but this is a good example of my personal Pitchfork bugbear — analysis/praise that focuses almost entirely on lyrical content, with just a few words about music and performance: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/rosalia-fucking-money-man/

Surely the “yin/yang” thematics of this “two-tracker” (theatrically flexing about wealth, then lamenting its evils) aren’t enough, in itself, to make it a Best New Track? But that’s largely what the review rests on.

(Further to my point, I guess, is the fact that you apparently need to understand Catalan — or read a translation — to even appreciate the lyrical content.)

lol as if 'best new' has anything to do with anything except pitchfork exercising its clout to magnify trends in its target markets for its own benefit

Buy: Rough Trade

(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

how long has pitchfork been earning commissions?

Since they’ve been telling you where to buy the albums in the footnotes of their reviews, which is afaik also a fairly recent development?

reminds me of when pfork would link to insound

Impressive Sunday review, beautifully written, well-informed, etc.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/koji-kondo-the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time/

Maybe so, but the logic of the opening sentence is suspect.

Sherburne is a good writer, but this is a good example of my personal Pitchfork bugbear — analysis/praise that focuses almost entirely on lyrical content, with just a few words about music and performance: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/rosalia-fucking-money-man/

Oh man, I hate that style of criticism like you wouldn't believe. (and yes, Sherburne is usually well worth reading)

Paul Nelson did an infamous review of a Jackson Browne album in (I think) Rolling Stone in the 1970s which expended about 1000 words on the lyrics and made not a single mention of what the record actually sounded like.

i think writing about the lyrics - most lyrics - is SO much harder than writing about the music. i don't know why anyone would ever do, for example, that ^

really? lyrics are the biggest part of Jackson browne’s songs (besides his voice). The backing is tight and the music is fine, but his records are just like “here i am, Jackson Browne”.it’s not like Joni or something with weird chords and thangs

writing about lyrics isn’t this just literary critical? seems way more valuable then whatever the hell most record reviews are trying to do.

criticism not critical

maybe i shouldn't have written my second sentence ... i don't really know Jackson Browne's music, so maybe it makes perfect sense.

i just find writing about lyrics harder than writing about music.

I gotcha

I don't think it's a pitchfork-specific problem -- I haven't read Rolling Stone in years, but I gave up on it largely because they were always reviewing the lyrics rather than the music. Unless you're David Berman or Bill Callahan or something, I'm just not that focused on the lyrics.

For me it comes off like — you didn’t have anything interesting or insightful to say about this as music, or you weren’t critically equipped to write about it as music*, so you took the easy way out and mostly talked about what’s on the lyric sheet.

*again, not the case for Sherburne

Sherburne is mostly a dance writer!

When I wrote my book about Slint, all my research and interviews screamed that they thought of themselves as an instrumental band and that the words came at the last minute, usually revealed to the rest of the band right there in the studio. And yet on my first pass of trying to analyze the album, I wrote pages and pages dissecting the words--especially because they come off as little short stories. Thankfully my editor told me to cut most of it out. And, while I ultimately didn't ignore the words entirely in the final draft, I tried really hard to give them the appropriate amount of emphasis relative to the music. Anyway, yeah it's hard not to default into that mode.

and a question for you: as a pure listener / consumer of music, how much weight / attention do you give to lyrics?

For me, usually about 15%, except for those artists that are all about sharp lyrics, when the weighting goes way up.

But bad lyrics rarely interfere with my enjoyment of a good tune.

and a question for you: as a pure listener / consumer of music, how much weight / attention do you give to lyrics?

At this point in my life I mostly listen to instrumental music, music in languages I don't speak, or music with indecipherable vocals (death metal). When I'm stuck listening to mainstream pop/rock, where the vocals and lyrics are given prime space in the mix and basically shoved at the listener, I do what I can to ignore them. Consequently, they almost never sink in, unless they're really terrible. There are songs and albums that I listened to obsessively in high school to which I still have the words memorized (most of Double Nickels On The Dime, Big Daddy Kane's "Raw") but nothing new sticks with me that way.

good post

I'm always trying to change the lyrics of songs I really like in my mind to better suit me, it's been a strategy for staying interested in popular music

and a question for you: as a pure listener / consumer of music, how much weight / attention do you give to lyrics?

― alpine static, Monday, July 15, 2019

I don't actively read lyric sheets, but I love to sing along with songs if I can. I just sort of absorb the words over time. So as a listener/consumer of music, my bar is set to "not hopelessly stupid". If they can surpass that then I'm good. If they truly are great lyrics, then I tend to love the album/song even more.

Digression: about ten years ago my dad was dying, and then he died. At the time I was obsessively listening to Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs; it was like a little burrow I would go into by myself, just putting on my headphones and taking long walks, never playing the record around anyone else in my family. I was just absorbing the lyrics as I listened, never truly trying to understand what Bird was singing about but picking it up in fragments. So I was picking up phrases here and there. Also, Bird is someone who makes weird turns of phrases or invents words just because he wants the sounds to fit just right, and he also doesn't always enunciate. So based on the melancholic nature of the music and the fragments of lyrics I picked up, I ascribed all sorts of meaning to that record--it's all about childhood, mortality, and longing, as far as I'm concerned.

Years have passed and I sometimes suspect that that's not at all what the record is about; like, if I were to meet Andrew Bird and tell him all this he would say "nope I was just riffing on Kafka, Wagner, and BDSM." But I simply can't hear it any other way. His lyrics are just gnarled and elusive enough that I've bonded to it in my own way. As far as I'm concerned I'm not mishearing anything; if Bird intended something else then he just doesn't know his own meanings. It's become too personal for me to be wrong.

<3

Varies wildly - I have a great appreciation for narrative songs but I don't really care about lyrics (beyond 'oh, that's catchy') in other contexts.

Like Jason Isbell would be pretty much unlistenable to me without the narrative, so in that case it matters 85-90%. Golden age rap is generally somewhere around 50/50 on what makes me love it (lyrics/sound). Angel Olsen has some sharp writing but I don't realy like her acoustic stuff and love the full band/rock songs so I don't know where that puts the split.

tumbleweeds on the Torche thread I bumped so I'll put this here:

The metal band’s latest album retains the sludgy ferocity of its best work while opening up to include elements of shoegaze and dream pop

Umm...they've been doing this for at least a decade?

Also, I've listened to Torche off and on over the years and never would I have used the words / phrases "menacing," "punishing," "chugging doom," "brutalizing," "teeth-gnashing," or "grizzled" to describe them; writer also uses some variation of the word 'sludge" at least three times. Was he working from a Words That Should Appear in Every Metal Review checklist?

call me a stick in the mud but I think people who clearly know nothing about metal shouldn't be writing metal reviews