pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

xp- agree but i don't hear it on any other song on slanted & enchanted

I like all these bands but nobody can touch The Fall, MES is the trump card that wins the “which English-speaking country produces the best rock lyrics” contest

And come now SM is doing-uh the thing-uh that MES is always doing-uh on many early songs-uh

Yeah-uh, his delivery-uh owes a bit to Mark E. Smith-uh.

agree but i don't hear it on any other song on slanted & enchanted

my friend, scroll up for the note-for-note comparison of Conduit For Sale! and New Face in Hell

There's a lot more SY influence obvious in Pavement's early stuff imo, esp Westing. Some of it sounds like Thurston covering The Clean.

I do think their SY and Fall influences are overplayed, and their Kiwi jangle pop influences are underplayed. Early '90s Pavement and 3Ds don't seem so different to me either in terms of sound or influences (although 3Ds obviously sound a lot more like an Antipodean Pixies). But you can tell Malkmus was really into this stuff on their early records.

Really savoring the casual pavement breakdown of a pitchfork sux thread after an up anniversary review editorial fuckup.

I like all these bands but nobody can touch The Fall, MES is the trump card that wins the “which English-speaking country produces the best rock lyrics” contest

all this talk is very comforting for me because i've tried repeatedly, and failed, with the fall, pavement, AND gbv and i always come to the same conclusion: this is alright as long as i never have to hear it again, i guess.

I guess it's cool we're having this argument 30 years later.

why not

gbv

At least the songs are really short.

Pollard is king

I'll just leave these choice Pollard lyrical triplets here for consideration:

My automated spouse
Has a bug in her blouse
Invading my private space

Oh, tropical robots
When you come of age you'll reach the sun
And when you go away you won't come back no more

ok sorry to recenter rem but this whole discussion made me want to reach for the rem records i never reach for, and i think i and most of you have been gravely underrating green for a very long time and for no good reason

It’s my favorite!

green is really good! the one that everyone seems to love that i find dreadfully boring is life's rich pageant. very meh.

I dislike Green! R.E.M. are at their best for me when they’re either being propulsive-oblique or surprising-sensitive. I don’t like goofy R.E.M. (“Stand”) and I don’t like when songs like “World Leader Pretend” hinge themselves on Stipe lyrics that don’t save the song

But I mean… it’s R.E.M. post-Document that makes me speak the unutterable but absolutely true: The Tragically Hip are a better band

green is really good! the one that everyone seems to love that i find dreadfully boring is life's rich pageant. very meh.

Otm. I've never got the hate for Green, or the hype for Pageant.

World Leader Pretend is fire.

I agree w/Austin that Pageant is fairly meh (relatively speaking).

do think their SY and Fall influences are overplayed, and their Kiwi jangle pop influences are underplayed

i distinctly remember when they visited dunedin (must have been very early 90s?) and appeared on an afterschool kids show & they were all omg we love the clean et al

& damn here it is !!!

What a great clip! I don't remember that show, I would've been 10 at the time. I do remember the 3Ds Outer Space video played a lot at the time, and was a staple on Max TV. But I didn't get into Pavement until a bit later, at least around the time of Wowee Zowee.

Thread's going a bit dormant. Someone should come and tell us they've always disliked Low.

hey hey hey I like being stoned

Lol

Just a reminder that today (Nov. 15) is the last day to vote in the Pitchfork 2023 Readers' Poll.

What possible lessons can we learn from 2023’s second re-edition of Daft Punk’s third-best album, in which every sonic detail is the same, other than the absence of drums?

making a very gutsy call with RAM being the 3rd best Daft Punk album

Particularly as its their 4th best (still very strong)

Remembering when they lamented the album's impact earlier in this year just weeks after giving Jessie Ware BNM

(yehyeh all the usual responses/clarifications/explanations to go here)

jessie ware isn't a couple of helmeted french dorks?

lol

doubt much of the "throwback vibe" music presumably in mind was either

seriously p4k (and I disapprove of this less than some might) has always judged music more on its perceived cultural connotations than on the literal sound of it. its criteria have always changed with the times. I think music criticism (especially rock criticism) has done this more often than not, exaggerating or downplaying differences or similarities between music based on the critics' associations and assumptions about the artists and their audiences

*maybe* the chainsmokers listen to jessie ware but you *know* they listen to daft punk. that's the problem

no doubt. it's an intricate business and i'm inconsistent. but it puzzles me that the recent disco/funk favourites (in the UK stuff like this occupies much ground on commercial radio and Radio 2's saps to the present and feels like it has for years) would be seen as a separate development. i remember the demand arriving many years ago and then never leaving. though i guess many (if not me) would say - as silently avoided in the ram review - that the amount of quality revival music has increased.

This site has had the most insane relationship with Daft Punk

“What are we doing here? Honestly, what are we doing with this “drumless” edition of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories? What possible lessons can we learn from 2023’s second re-edition of Daft Punk’s third-best album, in which every sonic detail is the same, other than the absence of drums?”

“...brief moments of drumless enlightenment and acoustic revelation are just about enough to rescue it from the vast cosmic bin of pointlessness.”

vs.

“At times the transformation is revelatory.”

The cat’s cradle cobweb of acoustic guitar and increasingly elastic one-note bassline that briefly surface in “Motherboard (Drumless Version)” are enough to make this the definitive version of the song, even if it took a decade to get there.

I haven’t read this Daft Punk review, but as much as I think “why put out this version of this record,” my next knee jerk is “why *review* this version of this record?”

trust your knee

Like, think of all the other reviews that could’ve occupied that slot, maybe even a new record

But which would get more clicks?

Kevin Shields and Jimmy Page are outspoken fans, and it’s been claimed that Nirvana borrowed the melody of “Come As You Are” from “Eighties.”

none of our reliable journalistic avenues could pin down this "Eighties" rumor.

also, maybe pedantic, but it wasn't a melody they borrowed, it was a chord progression

in other pitchfork-is-dumb news, it's a shame that the otherwise quite good Motian / Bailey review today is marred by the "jazz is like a conversation, man" chestnut

actually, it's a guitar riff. the chord progression is pretty simple and wouldn't be noticeably similar without the riff on top.

It was actually a rip off of Life Goes On by the Damned, anyway

and the damned was just a ripoff of my mate's old band that played on the same bill once before they ever made any records. `course m'mate's band was just rippin off bowie, who was just rippin off lou reed, who was just rippin off random r+b records. go figure.

Actually a YouTube comment on the Damned song led me last night to this tune, which I had never heard (and totally rips!):

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

Yo, that’s Eddy Grant of “Electric Avenue” fame :O

The Equals, Baby Come Back LP Sunday Review needed

and in the 90s Pato Banton covered Baby Come Back and took to no. 1 (which CAYA never managed) and brought it full circle (!!)

Dunno if anyone else listens to the Pitchfork podcast, but I thought you sickos would be interested to know Pitchfork's process for its year-end lists, as articulated on a recent episode featuring editor-in-chief Puja Patel and editors Ryan Dombal and Jeremy Larson:

PUJA PATEL: So, we basically start this late September, early October. And honestly, bless everyone at Pitchfork -- shout out our fellows, shout out our associate editor, shout out our executive assistant -- because they spend so much time literally pulling from the reviews archive and from Forktracks, which is our internal kind of tracks uploads and message board, everything of note that has happened, year to date, which ends up being thousands of albums and songs collectively.

Then we send out what we call the long-list ballot to the entire staff and I would say, 40 or 50 contributors. They do a round of voting. Internally, meanwhile, on the inside of Pitchfork, we have litstening rooms by genre, we have listening rooms of underrated staff faves, lots of listneing, lots of talking. Then a select group of people, I would say the people in this room right now, in conversation with other editors and staffers, cut that down by two-thirds. That's when the knives come out, that's when we really take the shears to the hedge.

Then the short-list ballot goes out, to the same group of people. More listening, more internal staff conversations. That's when the whole thing gets fun, not to say that this whole thing isn't fun. But this is where we start, like, needling at the music, which is the thing that we all came here to do. ... Second ballots go out, they come back in, and then it's a couple of editors in the weeds, looking at spreadsheets, talking to staff, and doing what we call a "this or that" Slack battle.

RYAN DOMBAL: Yeah, so it's basically if there's an artist who has a bunch of songs that everyone likes, or if their album is so good that there's three or four songs that people all voted for, we will go into our listening rooms, which is either listening IRL or over Zoom and talking back and forth on Slack, and people will fight for their favorite song on the SZA album, let's say.

JEREMY LARSON: And another point that we should note is that, like the Grammys, we have a window of eligibility, so it's not January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2023. So the eligibility for this list starts, what, December 9, 2022?

PUJA PATEL: I would say once our lists are locked and loaded, it's very rare that they change. So let's say like the 1st of December.