Part-Time Music created this histogram of Pitchfork’s album ratings over the past year. The most frequently awarded rating is 7.0. Read the post for his thorough and compelling analysis of the data, particularly the discussion of the ever-shifting definition of what qualifies as “best new music.” (Also: if you ever wonder how influential Pitchfork is, imagine anyone doing this analysis on the record reviews in Spin or Rolling Stone.) (via)
Posts tagged pitchfork
Selected lines from Pitchfork’s guide to their favorite albums of the year.
- At first, you feel kind of embarrassed for Trevor Powers.
- It’s not hard to see why detractors might have underestimated Cults.
- Volume has long been Ty Segall’s thing, but craftsmanship? Eh, not so much.
- In the last two years, detractors have been all over Liturgy founder and frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix.
- As an album, it doesn’t really do anything new, and a few of the signifiers that Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma plunder on Sepalcure were, to some, reaching their expiration dates.
- Space Is Only Noise isn’t dance music. What it is, I’m not sure.
- At a time when economic disparity seems to bisect every cultural and political paradigm, the least sensitive thing you could possibly do … would be to release a record that often reads like a Kardashian sister’s letter to Santa.
- Bradford Cox is hardly the first artist to maintain a primary band and solo career concurrently.
- For such a skilled and prolific artist, Kurt Vile sings an awful lot about being lazy.
- Every generation gets the MF Doom it deserves.
I wrote this piece for TwentyFourBit, but on the off chance that any of you have yet to discover that great site, I’m cross-posting it here.
Late Sunday night, the boys in Frightened Rabbit fired a shot at their reviewers at Pitchfork. “Har har!” they wrote on Twitter. “Pitchfork compared us to Muse… Fucking idiots (both).” The tweet belonged to a proud tradition of artists lashing back against the era’s most influential indie tastemaker. Over the past decade, Pitchfork’s reviews have caught flak from musicians famous and obscure. Ryan Adams’ Rock ‘n’ Roll got such a bad review that he demanded (and received) an interview with the site; “Some of the stuff was so mean that I was laughing out loud,” he told Amanda Petrusich. After a 3.7 review of their album a few years back, an Austin band named Sound Team filmed a clip in which they stab a dummy with a pitchfork, throw it off a cliff, then set it on fire. Jet, whose album Shine On was “reviewed” with an embedded YouTube clip of a monkey drinking its own urine, last year wrote a song about how much they hate the site and its followers: “You little Pitchfork whore, at your thrift store / You are a fucking bore, you make me sick!” In keeping with Jet’s tradition of understated social commentary, the song was called “One Hipster One Bullet.”
Compared to those artists, Frightened Rabbit’s aggrieved tweet may seem quaint. But it struck me as a little daring, given both the site’s influence and its role in helping to bring them into the indie mainstream. Pitchfork gave the band’s 2008 Midnight Organ Fight their coveted Best New Music designation, and after raves from Spin, Paste and even ABC News, Frightened Rabbit played a host of sold-out club shows and festival dates. Anticipation for the band’s next album ran high, especially after the release of an advance single last year. “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” is an anthem about leaving behind an awful past and starting over, even though the future seems even more dangerous and uncertain. At its heart lies a taunt that Scott Hutchinson repeats endlessly in an effort to goad himself into moving on: “Are you a man, or are you a bag of sand?” This song, as good as any the band has done, is the sort you pound along with on your dashboard. And yet Pitchfork — a site that has introduced me to more great music over the past decade than any other, and is home to some of my favorite writers — was now comparing the band to Muse. Had they missed something?
Here’s one of those the-world-is-upside-down moments: Pitchfork has been quietly supplying weekly video reviews of new albums to ABC News for at least the past three months. So far as I can tell, P4K has never mentioned the collaboration, and there’s no RSS feed for the reviews. But they’re worth seeking out. Pitchfork’s writers, so often dismissed as pretentious blowhards, come across in video as thoughtful, relaxed and conversational. Tom Breihan makes the case for Girls; Ian Cohen hypes the Big Pink; and Brian Howe celebrates Antlers’ Hospice (and turns out to be the cute one). Best of all, each review is introduced by a completely baffled Charles Gibson.
“Pitchfork’s position as indie kingmaker was cemented at the decade’s mid-point, but kings don’t always last in indie rock. The twin peaks of the Forkhype range were Arcade Fire’s Funeral, which showed up at No. 2 on the decade list, and CYHSY’s self-titled debut, which was left off entirely.”
A pretty interesting take on Pitchfork’s decade list and the changing shape P4k took over the decade it helped define by comparing previous year end lists. Music nerdery at its finest, reducing music and music criticism to a science. I love it.
**
Fascinating look at P4K’s changing tastes.
- Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold on Radiohead’s Kid A: “This is the record I would put on the stereo in that same car, my mom’s old Subaru Outback, on summer nights watching my friends skate at the skatepark; this was the record that I had on in the car during my driver’s test and the reason the hip instructor threw out the checklist and just drove around with me listening to it for 20 minutes. (And thus maybe the reason I once drove the car into a ditch.)”
- New Pornographers’ A.C. Newman on Okkervil River’s The Stage Names: “When we began touring with them, and I saw them for the first time, I was filled with a Salieri-like sadness for a few days. The best records, I find, fill me with that envy, that self-loathing. Sure, I’m friends with them now, but I still hate them for making this incredible album.”
- Matthew Herbert, the British electronic musician, on Timbaland: “It would be easier to just come up with one thing that was musically great about the decade, because it would probably be Timbaland. I still propose that “Get Ur Freak On” permanently stopped experimental instrumental electronic music in its tracks. His casual brilliance in the studio has humbled us all at some point. His rapping, on the other hand….”
- Laurent Brancowitz, of Phoenix, on Amerie’s “1 Thing”: “One of the most mysteriously amazing songs of the decade, it gives the illusion that some crucial secret is about to be revealed.”
- The Thermals’ Hutch Harris on ranking Kid A his No. 2 of the decade: “Here you go Pitchfork, I hope you’re happy.”
