pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

dawn richard did a song called 'the louvre' a few months earlier that was about 47384773x better, why don't we talk about that instead

― imago, Tuesday, October 8, 2019

fuck you, my Louvre ain't your Louvre

wish i could post today but i have a ginormous pile of grading and a lecture to prepare before band practice. turning on my app-blocker but looking forward to catching up on this thread tomorrow! 😘

or, as Whitney sang, my louvre is your louvre

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_P2IY8gxZw

Tame Impala - Lonerism was in their top 10 (#7 iirc) in that mid-decade best of list they made and now it’s all the way down in #130. They definitely cooled down on their love for him or got ashamed of hyping him somewhere in the past couple of years.

Tame Impala is a good band

First two albums were alright, everything else is an eldritch horror.

Is Anti in there because it has a Tame Impala song and they’re less ashamed to love him via Rihanna?

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), dinsdag 8 oktober 2019 20:18 bookmarkflaglink

Because that album sucks.

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), dinsdag 8 oktober 2019 20:19 bookmarkflaglink

It appears you’re talking about Anti. That album doesn’t suck. At all.

anti is an amazing album

i am anti people who are anti-anti

so say we all but i don't think that's what moka meant

I like Lana's NFR, but...top 20? Come on.

Not sure if this is the elephant in the room but I don't care: Owen Pallett's absence is criminal.

putting something that came out a month ago on a decade-end list is a fun rhetorical move and should be applauded

Trying to read the blurbs and they're just so dreary. Everything is important, everything changed something or other, even if it's the slightest thing (from Angel Olsen: Her sophomore album, Burn Your Fire For No Witness, was the kind of breakthrough that shifted the scene around it. Now the folkier corners of indie rock are filled with auteur singer-songwriters who are trying to be both timeless and out of time, intimate-seeming yet often fleshed out by a smoky full band, angsty like punk and sad like old country. That’s largely her influence. More people mix punk and country, who cares?) and there's nearly no pleasure and no joy.

lol LBI

I felt “a way” when my 2010 album was the highest-rated new release that year to not be included in P4K’s roundup from that year-- not even an honourable mention-- but I haven’t felt “a way” about being disincluded from any of their lists since then.

I haven’t read the blurbs. What did they say about Syro — “the breakthrough album that shattered our perceptions of Richard D. James, by proving he can be boring?”

imo fgti u should drop the new one December 31st

Anti’s comfortably my favourite album of the decade. It was hilarious and baffling reading Lemonade (5 stars, bla bla..) taking all the credit in the same era while Anti seemed to completely baffle people. Same people who’ll be wanging on about its genius come the 10th anniversary I don’t doubt. Aside from a few fellow obsessives on here, I think I read just one review that ‘got it’ and that was on Dazed.

I was having drinks with a certain well-known musician and my circle of friends and he loudly stated to the group of them: "The best song on Lemonade is still worse than the worst song on ANTI" and he roundly received catcalls for his controp. I actually can see some validity to that assertion, even it's a silly thing to say.

wow, bold statement by richard marx

lol LBI

I felt “a way” when my 2010 album was the highest-rated new release that year to not be included in P4K’s roundup from that year-- not even an honourable mention-- but I haven’t felt “a way” about being disincluded from any of their lists since then.

― i could chug a keg of you (flamboyant goon tie included), Tuesday, October 8, 2019 9:47 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

That's cool! :) You know, we talk about how artists' "stock" has risen or fallen on here, like it's a Wall Street thing: one day you're the hottest flavour, stock rises high, the next you're spat out like chewed out gum and forgotten. I cannot imagine the feeling of dread of ctrl+f'ing their list and not finding yourself, when praise was heaped upon one earlier. Not feeling "a way" about that is thee best though <3

(ps. I'd never call you an actuall elephant, let alone in a room, to your face)
(pps. Your album was - most literally - life changing for me jsyk)

the worst song on anti is the best song on anti tbf

The upper reaches of the album are yawnsome in all the expected ways but there's an almost transcendent lameness in that tepid Jamie XX album placing at #25.

^^ lamest high placing, for sure.

A lot of stuff from the first half of the decade appears to have absolutely tanked in critical reputation but perhaps nothing as much as Random Access Memories.

Random Access Memories is and always has been terrible

Stats for yers

albums Pitchfork liked less over time, according to their decade list

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/albums-pitchfork-liked-less-over-time-according-to-their-decade-list/?fbclid=IwAR14R6dTFPsZYtdqiuRqe1VkjmcyktyBYDqH_2dwL2SX-FFVt0uG4HTjQ9c

i'd be interested in seeing the reverse, too

If anything, RAM's dire placing should make the p4k boys shy with embarrassment. Hyped up so high back in the day, now they don't want to know the damn thing.

Xxxxpost: before I’m being chased by pitchforks I meant the Tame Impala album Currents sucks, not Anti. But I worded that all wrong.

Before I also get chased by Tame Impala fans, perhaps I’m being harsh, it’s not that terrible an album but I understand how his music fell considerably out of favor by the end of this decade. Almost every magazine stopped trying to pretend to like rock by the end of it.

I cannot imagine the feeling of dread of ctrl+f'ing their list and not finding yourself, when praise was heaped upon one earlier

I think you may be overestimating the extent to which artists in 2019 give a shit about Pitchfork lists

lollll voodoo

And @ Paul, you'd be surprised

I'm not. It's being confronted with the absurd "hype u today, drop u tomorrow" ethics of teh p4k that gets to me.

xp

Still think Currents is the most embarrassing review they published this decade: the album reimagines and expands Tame Impala's relationship to album rock—like Loveless or Kid A or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it's the result of a supernaturally talented obsessive trying to perfect music while redefining their relationship to album-oriented rock. There's more care and nuance put into the drum filtering on "Let It Happen" than most bands manage in an entire career of recording.

Yeah I was also trying to point out that thing in how ANTI makes it safe for pitchfork to unashamedly like a Tame Impala song in 2019. Pre-conde nast those two albums would and were ranked very differently.

xp But does the review say anything about the band’s relationship to “album rock”?

They made Currents a BNM 9.3 album, a top 10 album in their mid-decade list and 5 years later it’s in the bottom end of their decade list. If they had released this list a year later or even after Tame Impala releases his new record - which I fathom wont be very well received by them - who knows if it would have even made it. They contributed in hyping him and then sort of felt ashamed of it.

Anti, meanwhile, got a 7.7

?fbclid=IwAR14R6dTFPsZYtdqiuRqe1VkjmcyktyBYDqH_2dwL2SX-FFVt0uG4HTjQ9c

It was a different Tame Impala album that made the mid-decade top ten, Currents is from 2015 :) The thing I hate about that review is that it wants to portray Tame Impala as innovators, but doesn't get that the three albums mentioned, Loveless, Kid A and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was all reacting to new music being made at the time. The best thing they can come up with is that Currents sounds like Random Access Memories. That might be my biggest complaint with pitchfork right now, it wants to seem like it's valuing innovation, but there's no newness there, it's just all going around in circles. Fuzz is in again this season! Now it's filters.

Dang, The Pinkprint blurb is full of shade / faint praise, lol

The Parquet Courts blurb makes the album sound significantly better than it is. The Car Seat Headrest blurb is a total whiff, really inadequate.

"im not like those other kids. i like pop, but like pop that's different."

everything is a band that will change your life.

Also it feels like a profound generational shift took place in the middle of the decade, as opposed to the 90s and the 00s when it happened at the beginning. Artists like Ariel Pink and Sun Kil Moon are definitely on the wrong side of that divide and with good reason.

Seriously 2010-15 might as well be a different world.

(this thread worthwhile mainly for introducing me to "poptimism 2.0" as a concept and fleshing it out much more elegantly than the original thread, which was rapidly derailed)

(i noticed but couldn't articulate something awry when in the midst of the ldr/ann-powers contremps backlash-backlash-backlash people kept discussing ldr as "pop" and the allegedly anti-critical sentiments she espoused as "poptimism" and i was beyond confused)

at the least, i would respect but not understand a list that was all things that sound like avicii

I think the shift happened in 2014 with black lives matter, tbh

Trying to read the blurbs and they're just so dreary. Everything is important, everything changed something or other, even if it's the slightest thing (from Angel Olsen: Her sophomore album, Burn Your Fire For No Witness, was the kind of breakthrough that shifted the scene around it. Now the folkier corners of indie rock are filled with auteur singer-songwriters who are trying to be both timeless and out of time, intimate-seeming yet often fleshed out by a smoky full band, angsty like punk and sad like old country. That’s largely her influence. More people mix punk and country, who cares?) and there's nearly no pleasure and no joy.

― Frederik B, Tuesday, 8 October 2019 19:45 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I haven't written for pfork in ages, but this basically reflects the strong and explicit editorial directives given in respect of the last few polls that i wrote blurbs for: explain the impact of the record, how it changed music, why it remains important; try to avoid wasting wordcount on describing how it sounds, that's what youtube and spotify links are for.

It was always a struggle for me because "describing how it sounds" was basically my sole critical m.o.

But the at times stultifying impact on the writing is much more glaring for a 2010s poll than for an 80s or 90s poll or etc. because it's much harder to construct or evoke a convincing teleological framework for music in the last decade (both because of its recentness and because of changes to music consumption), so you end up with "changed the course of female indie-folk-crossover that dabbles in country and punk".

NFR! will place in the 15-25 zone.
― billstevejim, Tuesday, September 24, 2019 9:47 PM (two weeks ago)

I called this shit so hard.