pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Dunno who Jesse Dorris is but he's really good at writing about techno. Really enjoyed his Shinichi Atobe review today.

Re: E6… NMH is embarrassing now, to me. Olivia Tremor Control are nice acid music.

But the best E6 record is the first Elf Power record, which is a blown-out lo-fi nihilistic masterpiece

Will cosign.

shrug, i liked beulah. saw one of their last ever shows at the fillmore and they rocked. played my request in the second encore shouted from the balcony. i still think yoko is a great record (though that was post-elephant 6 for them).

The first Circulatory System record is really the thing.

Yeah I liked them too, those Beulah records hold up fine imo. Agree w/table about NMH. Looking back now, it’s almost beyond belief for me that there was a time when Aeroplane was commonly discussed as being one of the greatest records ever. It feels like that took place in some kind of alternate dimension.

the nmh fandom was (is?) extremely embarrassing but itaots is still a good album, just not a greatest of all time masterpiece or anything. i still love the two otc albums, dusk at cubist castle is a real favourite of mine.

I saw the E6 people where all the members of a bunch of diff bands toured together and played songs from otc elf power circulatory system etc. They played for a long fucking time, great show, it would be impossible for me to listen to nmh now, I prob need to get over myself about it but that's the way it is

I forgot about that tour - I left after 2hrs and heard they went on for another 2+.

More like Elephant 6 hours am I right?

I like the first nmh album, it’s lofi and weird. I’ve no use for the other one.

dusk at cubist castle is a masterpiece

I revisited Dusk earlier today (per this discussion) - the only one of these I've ever owned. It is still v good, even if not quite my style. (Also tried some of the others, but they didn't hit me the same way... I'll check out the first NMH album)

Bealuh was probably the most conventional indie rock band of the lot but they were very good pop songwriters

Aeroplane is great. Feel like there is an impulse to take it down a notch because it has been considered such an untouchable indie classic and if that weren't the case nobody would be making a point to say it is worse than all the other albums being discussed. That being said OTC is still incredible and Circulatory System is great still as well. Not aged at all imo. The Gerbils are cool too.

I never understood the love for NMH or that album. Always makes me want to listen to Tiny Tim instead, who actually sounds fun.

The only cool Elephant6 band is Of Montreal.

glad you said it, moka. the deification of that stuff always seemed like an ironic joke that went too far.

Another band who took quite the fall from grace are Bloc Party. Every zine seemed to love Silent Alarm and judging by their current single they’re so lame nowadays.

never got the hype around them, either.

shocking, i know.

Another band who took quite the fall from grace are Bloc Party. Every zine seemed to love Silent Alarm and judging by their current single they’re so lame nowadays.

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Friday, January 28, 2022 10:19 PM (five minutes ago)

i mean, that album came out 17 years ago. lol.

they also had a pretty rapid and steep decline in quality though, their third album, intimacy, was only three years after silent alarm and it had some real garbage on it.

of montreal occasionally had tunes but barnes' schtick is so deeply embarrassing it's ridiculous to hold them up as the only cool e6 band

has how terrible bloc party became really affected silent alarm's reputation much though? i don't think so

A lot of groups not so great after their first album or so

I mean I know it’s been quite a while and very few bands remain relevant after so much time, but everyone seemed to love Silent Alarm when it came out and the fallout was almost immediate. The follow-up album completely missed the mark and just like that they faded out.

actually they had two top 10 UK hits off the second album, it did top 15 first week sales in the US and among fans its considered a flawed but inventive and lovable follow up that was underrated by the critical establishment. as ufo said everyone knows they fell off w/ album three, and even then they were still spinning off top 40 hits in the UK w/ that record and after it. you're recounting of history here is just not accurate

your*

& even when they fell off it was telegraphed openly by kele that he was going to make electronic, r&b, & hip hop influenced music the success arc of the band be damned. it was career self sabotage in the name of art. most of the music after the second album *is* bad but nobody has really forgotten them

the critical response to a weekend in a city being so negative at the time is fairly weird to me. it was a decent follow-up, not as good as what came before but not some sort of gigantic misstep either. it wasn't until the next album that they started really being bad (& even then there's some good stuff on intimacy, just some absolute garbage).

and yeah they were still very successful in the uk and australia that whole time & that took a while to fade away, like "ratchet" from 2013 was an alt radio hit here in australia somehow.

I mean I know it’s been quite a while and very few bands remain relevant after so much time, but everyone seemed to love Silent Alarm when it came out and the fallout was almost immediate. The follow-up album completely missed the mark and just like that they faded out.

― ✖✖✖ (Moka)

yeah but so what? Most bands do this.

"I Still Remember" and "Hunting for Witches" are marvelous

the critical response to a weekend in a city being so negative at the time is fairly weird to me. it was a decent follow-up, not as good as what came before but not some sort of gigantic misstep either.

it's an album that you can actually truly say was ahead of its time. kele was citing timbaland as his main influence on the lead single long before we ever got to the full meld between indie & pop that currently exists, before poptimism won the war, before any notion of "alt" R&B etc

yeah i just wish that aspect of it worked at all lol. what could have been!

"i still remember" was a single about an erstwhile teenage gay romance long before anyone in the indie press was really ready to talk about anything like that, let alone celebrate it i.e. frank ocean

i like "the prayer" but the best songs on the album are still the rock ones xp

xp Not sure I quite follow this point… there were “indie” songs involving gay romance long before Bloc Party, and the artists were not shunned or w/e

"the prayer" just has the clunkiest drums, really feels like they had no idea what they were doing trying to incorporate the stated hip hop/r&b influences or anything. they still managed to end up with a decent song out of it somehow but it really foreshadowed the sort of regular failed experiments they had going forward. going with big shiny arena rock producer jacknife lee instead of anyone more interesting surely did them no favours in general.

xp Not sure I quite follow this point… there were “indie” songs involving gay romance long before Bloc Party, and the artists were not shunned or w/e

― Animals must have a name (morrisp), Friday, January 28, 2022 11:08 PM (six minutes ago)

sure. i'm just saying that he was basically right on the cusp of a time period when such a song would be a news story, would be celebrated for its progressiveness and its expansion of notions of identity, when the lyrics could be accurately parsed by a growing number of queer music critics, etc. certainly not saying it was the first indie rock song about gay romance ever, but i think it's easy to see how it presaged a rock critic press that is now actively searching for & elevating black, queer narratives in music

the album is interesting to me because of how it nearly collides head on w/ the current era in indie music but instead just narrowly missed it. they weren't the first indie band w/ a black singer or the first indie band w/ a singer teasing out his queerness in real time or the first indie band talking about pop and rap producers or incorporating black music into its sound, but the album would have been better understood & more accurately contextualized 5-10 years later. moka's post about how they disappeared w/o a trace and nobody remembered them is inaccurate but prob close to the consensus opinion on their career, which is why the album sticks w/ me as something that just missed a moment where the narrative might be remembered differently

silent alarm is one of the best albums of the 00s

just confirmed that half of intimacy is still worthwhile or even great ("better than heaven"!) but the other half is some of the worst and most confused music ever made

I like J0rdan's posts about Bloc Party

The follow-up album completely missed the mark and just like that they faded out.

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Friday, January 28, 2022 10:37 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yeah this seems to be the rule rather than the exception nowadays. There are a bunch of band names I am only familiar with because of a relatively brief PR campaign-length saturation on Pitchfork and the like. Bloc Party being one of them. Also MGMT. But I digress

MGMT kept getting better tho

I've never heard a song by Bloc Party, I don't think.

Of Montreal are abysmal, IMHO.

MGMT kept getting better tho

― Chappies banging dustbin lids together (President Keyes),

This works if we pretend the third album doesn't exist. I find that very easy to do.

I really like the review of the Modern Nature nature record today, I just wish I could understand the baffling decision to release the album solely as a $75 2xLP box set which was already well sold out before I even started seeing reviews for it pop up.

These days it feels like if you don't have advance knowledge of any release there is a reasonable chance you'll miss out. I've lost count the amount of times I've read a fresh review and then found out I'm already too late to nab whatever physical copy might have existed. The more that happens the more impressed I am with people that are on top of everything new way before any reviews run.

^^^this

And to be really real - sometimes Bandcamp links for these releases surface on Facebook just a day or two after release and there’s only like 2-3 copies remaining. It can be frustrating.

BUT

That’s life in an immaterial world with less shops where scarcity is a prime selling point I guess

Yeah, on the one hand, I get that none of these artists want to be sitting on apartments filled with physical copies they can't see, so I'm sure it's a relief to hit a target. At the same time, as a fan who really likes to support artists by buying physical copies, as Evan says, it's annoying to learn about something brand new to only find out you've already missed your chance.

Too true.

Yeah its frustrating but I get it. It potentially leaves money on the table for the artists & labels, but considering how small margins are these days thats probably preferable to overestimating demand and getting stuck.