pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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.

on the other hand, Target has a vinyl section now

everything is insanely upside down from a few years back

I thought that Nala Sinephro Space 1.8 LP was sold out but Best Buy had copies in stock so thats where I ended up getting it from, lol

they did a repress of it a month or so back I think.... so i also got my copy 4 months after it came out despite trying on week of release. they def. underpressed it at first.

This is a great piece, but also simultaneously affirms the "too much music" hypothesis and also underscores the "keeping up with music" struggle.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/a-new-wave-of-dark-ambient-artists-wants-to-make-you-uncomfortable/

Sherburne is such a good writer and knows a lot, so of course it makes you want to listen to what he's writing about. At the same time, it's such a challenge when you come across 'grafs like this:

Collaborations, in fact, are second nature for this crew: Tug a loose thread on a cryptic-sounding project like Ghostride the Drift or Micro Incubus, and you’re more likely than not to discover that it’s a fresh configuration of the same names. Shy’s labels Experiences Ltd., bblisss, and xpq? have spun off a dizzying array of projects, many of them collaborations—Ulla Straus and Perila’s barely there duo LOG; Shy and Exael’s shoegaze- and nu-metal-influenced duo hoodie; the Blessed Kitty, a trio featuring Straus, Streator, and Brooklyn’s prolific Ben Bondy.

Like, where to begin? Or when he drops this revelation:

I recently put together a playlist of all the West Mineral Ltd.-related music I could find on my computer, and it turned out to be 29 hours long.

So, how could any human hope to do this stuff justice when it's literally a full-time endeavor?

I'm planning on reading that piece this afternoon. I'll have to be wary, because I just bought the entire output of a small Colombian techno label for $20 on Bandcamp a day or two ago — 53 releases, roughly 25 hours of music — and obviously I've barely scratched the surface of that.

what label?

more labels and artists should do deals like these, there have been at least a few that I've had my eye on

Business Class Records. I was drawn in by their cover art but the music's really good so far.

This is not a helpful observation - I have no doubt the PS piece is great and thorough and I’ll read it sometime over the weekend - but it reminds me of something a friend asked me in college (mid 90s).

He was the editor of the school paper. I was a features editor who wrote a lot of album reviews. We both loved Might Magazine, and had been amused by the profile of a fictional rapper named “Down Boye”.

My friend said, “hey, the records you review - they’re all real, right? You’re not making up bands and records and pretending to review them?” I promised him that it was all legit and it was (we had different tastes on some things so they would’ve been alien to him).

Point is that there is so much music that a thriving diverse scene in the Bay Area could be meaningful to locals/writers but someone ranting about this scene to me would be met by a patient but very blank stare. Unless you’re an AI there’s no way to know everything, every band, scene, record, sub genre, etc etc

I think of this anecdote a lot lately, especially reading through various year end lists. “Who?!?”

That's one (of many) reasons I stopped doing year-end lists entirely. Like, folks (including some of us all, lol!) that rank the top 100 or 50 or hell 25 records of the year? At a certain (low) point it becomes pretty random and arbitrary, because no way is anyone going to remember at least half if not more of those top 50 the next year, when another 50 is added to the list of "best" albums, and all of those collectively added to an ongoing list of "best" albums that very quickly numbers in the hundreds just in a couple of years. And this is all new, contemporary stuff, too, not even factoring in the hundreds and hundreds of albums from the past 50 years. So we can all pretend to keep up with this stuff, but it's just that - pretending, imo. An impeccably researched article like the one I posted is always welcome, and it exudes expertise, but hats off to him if he's able to spew that stuff out at a moment's notice in, like, just a couple of months without a host of spreadsheets and notes at the ready. Even Robert Pollard probably doesn't know the names of most of his songs.

This seems like a permanent state. If I had started trying to listen to every new tape uploaded to Datpiff in February 2011 I'd probably still be at it today.

Ghostride the Drift

BOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I don't think anyone's pretending to have listened to all of the records in a given year, or even a plurality? Lists are an aggregate, and imo the more interesting ones either poll across a very large base, meaning there's more of a chance people who are into more obscure genres and subgenres will have peers in a poll, or they're very targeted at a specific type of music and you get a handful of devotees making a targeted list.

Aggregate year end lists are just, like, these are some albums that some of us found interesting at this point in time. Maybe you'll listen to them in the future, too.

lol who's talking aggregates, I'm talking individuals!

The Ghostride the Drift album from 2018 or so is really good fwiw.

It's interesting to me that Sherburne doesn't talk more about how black metal and dark ambient are fellow travelers— Dischord is mentioned as a nod to the underground/punk nature of the scene he's describing, but dark ambient is much closer to black metal in terms of its prolific nature, anonymous rotating musicians, and general vibe.

I got into the west mineral etc stuff through huerco s, whose first album is one of my favorites of last decade. a lot of that stuff just really hits me in the right place. i guess you could call it dark but to me it’s more like cloudy/overcast.

dim? no

ha yes I like that

black metal definitely isn't as cool as it used to be. Pitchfork publishing Xasthur and Leviathan reviews feels like a century ago

This Birthday Party review is a piece of shit:

"Of all the bands that fit loosely under the umbrella of early-’80s “post-punk” bands, the Birthday Party was easily the sexiest. This is both obvious and the faintest of praise. As far as primal concerns went, being sexy wasn’t a big one for, say, Gang of Four. Only Bauhaus, fellow princelings in the “Don’t call us goth!” boyband olympics, came close. But Peter Murphy’s glam quartet was practically obsessed with being sexy, and even the most performatively minded sex-haver will tell you that too much effort can be a real turn-off. Couple Bauhaus’ preening with Peter Murphy’s somewhat ooky lifelong oedipal relationship with David Bowie, and the field for sallow-cheeked hip thrusters really opens up."

Blah blah blah...

That's 2002-quality PFork right there.