Pitchfork Reviews 5/15/08

Subtle
ExitingARM
[Lex; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a totally inexplicable 8.3.

I cannot come up with one thing about this that I think is good.

Like if these guys were my friends and they asked me what I thought, my head would explode trying to come up with a white lie.

Edited to add: man, I just remembered that this guy is paralyzed for life. And he was on the album anyway. I rescind my previous statement. This is a triumph of the human spirit that I don't like much, but still. Triumph of the human spirit. (The guy got 18 million, so you don't have to guilt buy it.)


The Charlatans UK
You Cross My Path
[Self-Released; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.0.

This is pleasant enough for a bunch of out-of-touch old guys out to show the world that they're still every bit as mediocre as they were almost 20 years ago.


Pattern Is Movement
All Together
[Hometapes; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 7.9.

You know what band I haven't thought of in a very long time? Shudder To Think. This band makes me think of Shudder to Think, and that moniker is now totally appropriate.


Cloudland Canyon
Lie in Light
[Kranky; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.4.

There's a lot of bands out there in the nows that sound like they're trying to sound like Can. I can't tell what I think of this, mostly because I've never gone through a serious Can phase. I like Can, I just don't know how serious of a phase I need to go through. I kind of feel like I get it already.

Sometimes I feel like I should print up t-shirts that say "Never Got Into Krautrock" and pass them out so I'll know who my friends are. It's a strange corner of stonerdom, Krautrock. It exists in the overlap between "psychedelic" and "progressive," where at any arbitrary moment according to your current medication cycle the music can either totally entrance you or annoy the holy living fuck out of you. To be fair, being annoyed out of your living fucking skull is technically an out-of-body experience. Very psychedelic. Maybe this is what people are shooting for when they get into Krautrock, which would make sense because they all seem to be older dudes with gray-streaked beards and a bad case of irrepressible pot-chuckles. And I'm not that far gone. Yet.

I like Can well enough because they at least go groove-based more often than not, and I need that as a life raft if things are gonna get weird. Maybe I'm too high strung. It bears investigation. I know that I'm definitely more into Tago than Mago, and high strung or not I don't feel a need to apologize for it.

Cloudland Canyon do a pretty decent job of copping Krautrock ideas here. They're over 30 years late to the party, but that's ok. This stuff is resurgent at the moment, and Cloudland Canyon are doing the Krautrevival about as good as anybody, including, as far as I can tell, the originals of the genre. Maybe a step down from the originals. Some of that stuff was pretty effing good. But some of this is too, if by "good" you mean "either great or awful, depending on what mood I'm in."


Dragged By Horses
Deep in the Woods
[Highwheel; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.3.

The fact that lala.com is shutting down is really going to fuck up my will to do this blog that nobody reads. As it is, I often have to track things down all over the godforsaken internet. Sometimes I only get to hear snippets. Most of the time for any given band that's really insistent about scrubbing the internet of all traces of their music even two years after the fact, snippets are enough.

I don't get it, because who is even talking about Dragged by Horses at this point? Wouldn't it behoove them to let it ride? I can understand being too lazy to put a lot of stuff out there yourself, but the complete lack of stuff out there looks like the result of active suppression. Are they hoping to earn mystery points? Foolhardily protect their music-businessguy profits? Or do they just know how much they suck and are ashamed? Maybe these guys just suck so much that nobody in the entire world cares enough to link a file of theirs to a blog.

From what I can tell, they certainly do suck. I think they're British too. And they sound like they're trying to sound like Shellac, which is a ridiculous goal. Shellac is a joke band. I think. I might not have all my facts straight about that one either, but from what I've been able to pull off of the internet about Shellac (everything they've ever done), I'm pretty sure they're a joke band.