pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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.

thought that review was pretty good

I avoided them at the time but always wondered what I missed

listening to them now, Nick Cave was so savage

Paul Ponzi at 5:42 4 Feb 22

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

I think people are rightly a lot less willing to handwave away Nazis like those bands in the name of early 00s Vice style edginess

also xasthur and leviathan sucked

I always confuse the Birthday Party with The Wedding Present.

Haven't done so for years, but when I was in high school, I would constantly mix up the Birthday Party and Beat Happening because someone put their songs back-to-back on a mixtape for me, and I could never keep their names straight.

Obviously I resolved that once I graduated high school and started spending much more time with music.

top news story on the page today:

Snacks, Bethany Cosentino’s Pet Cat and Best Coast Album Cover Star, Has Died

oh yeah and Betty Davis

yeah wtf is that

they do have an article about Davis, but it's below the fold. too bad she was never able to reach the heights that Snacks, Bethany Cosentino’s Pet Cat and Best Coast Album Cover Star did in her career

From the band’s debut album Crazy For You and the iconic lyric “I wish my cat could talk” (taken from “Goodbye”) on through to the artwork for their 2021 single “Leading,” he quickly became integral to Best Coast’s public-facing identity.

ICONIC

INTEGRAL

Whatever subconscious interest might have existed in my brain to someday check out this band Best Coast…

in my feelings about that lil floofer

Paul Ponzi at 4:00 10 Feb 22

top news story on the page today:

Snacks, Bethany Cosentino’s Pet Cat and Best Coast Album Cover Star, Has Died

oh yeah and Betty Davis

jfc on phone at least this is the top story and Betty Davis is way down the page

Wait, are Xasthur and Leviathan Nazis?