Pitchfork Reviews 6/13/08

The Beach Boys
U.S. Singles Collection: The Capitol Years (1962-1965)
[Capitol; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it an 8.3.

So this is a limited edition CD box set of the Beach Boys' 45rpm singles from 1962-1965, released 2 years ago. If you want to buy it, it'll cost you like $200. For a CD box set. Or you could get all the songs you like the most on it from downloads. Or else you can just turn on oldies radio for half an hour. Other than that, I'm basically here to talk about the merits of "Surfin' Safari" and "Little Deuce Coupe" and "I Get Around." They have merits. The end.

Oh, and is there a more natural fit for a product advertisement than "409?" I think about it every time I clean my kitchen, even if I'm using Fantastik.


N.E.R.D.
Seeing Sounds
[Interscope; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 4.6.

I was thinking recently about the Beastie Boys, and it kind of blew my mind. Not that the music is mindblowing or anything, I mean it's fun and it has its moments. I was thinking about their career trajectory. It's astonishing. Basically all they've ever done for a living is had fun fucking around, and for some reason everybody respects them for it. They're not at the top of the cred ladder or anything, but if Ad-Rock showed up at some obscuro-noise loft party, it would not feel especially calculated. You'd just be like "oh, that's cool, I guess" and go about your business. If anything it'd make you like him more. In other words, almost nobody on Earth hates the Beastie Boys. Why bother? That would be like hating fun.

The Neptune guys are a different matter, though. I feel like they're aiming for the rarefied Beastie Boys trajectory, but got too hung up on looks and sex and fashion and the math of sparse beats with snapping and syths in them, and in the process lost their ability to find or express joy. They have to leave that to the people who collaborate with them. They're never gonna be the Beasties, though they will try and try.

And the reason why, theory alert, is the Beasties had that early indoctrination into punk rock and hardcore. It's the most vital set of aesthetic values in the history of American Music.

I don't mean to imply that the punks invented it or anything. Maybe the colonized it and codified it and made it into a manifesto that could then be followed to the letter by endless waves of quickbuck artists, and so in that way they overdid it. It might have been better as a secret. The good news is it doesn't really work unless you live it. You can't do punk from the penthouse. You have to say "fuck it" and forget about yourself and the world and everything in it and just do this thing all the way with everything and not care especially about anything else, or at least you have to have a sense of humor about how ridiculous everything is. It can even be a grim sense of gallows humor if you want. And that guiding punk principle of "fuck it" is both too big and too specific to go away forever, and I believe it's the common string of anything that's good, and has been since Louis Armstrong and Robert Johnson came walking out of the primordial ooze of the early recording industry and first said so with their respective "fuck it" statements of this is how good I am.

The Neptunes don't have "fuck it." They have "eclectic" and "hey, I'm into 'punk rock,' let's do a collaboration with Good Charlotte." They have "I'm telling you--fuck it," and they have "I'm gonna do a track with Snoop, whose delivery is so lazy-sounding it could qualify as hip hop's most singularly 'fuck it' voice, and in the process I might get a little 'fuck it' spillover onto me," but they don't have "fuck it." And if they ever do, it'll be because they're reading it off the instruction manual. They don't really need "fuck it," though. They're rich. "It" has been good to them. And they can fuck pretty much anything they want.


Richard Pinhas
Single Collection 1972-1980
[Captain Trip; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 7.4.

I don't read Pitchfork every day. I mean, I read two-years-old Pitchfork every day, but as far as keeping current and on top of everything they do, I haven't done that in years and years. I'd feel maybe a little guilty about this if it weren't so trivial, based on the fact that I trash them fairly often here, and do so mostly out of laziness and/or ignorance. The fact is: I do not envy their task, and also I don't begrudge the fact that their task is not making sure I always love what they're doing. Making fun of Pitchfork is easy. It's like a bottom-rung comedian saying "I don't even watch Saturday Night Live anymore, it hasn't been good in years." Oh really? You mean to say you're not 13 years old anymore? Who cares, it's just a TV show. They're just people doing a thing for money. If it's not your thing, great, do your thing.

Well here I am, doing my thing. Which is, loosely, making fun of their thing. Whatever. I'm not particularly creative, and I'm lazy as shit. I like music. Those are my qualifications.

I did not know about this Japanese-only CD compilation of Richard Pinhas's early 70's output. I also did not know who Richard Pinhas is. Pitchfork told me. I am grateful to Pitchfork for exposing me to his work, especially this very early stuff. Not that it's the best thing I've ever heard or anything. In fact, from what I've heard it's out-of-the-lineup psyche/prog/Enoworship whose main draw among those capable of passing a field sobriety test lies in its obscurity. But I admit it's built from some of the same materials as went into the construction of my wheelhouse, and it's not like I'd necessarily always pass a field sobriety test with flying colors.

Regardless of whatever potentially false musical merit might come from simple obscurity, this is the kind of stuff that you'd expect to find out about every once in a while from a site that seems like a repository for knowing and caring about all music. Removed from the question of musical merit (a difficult surgery, but one often enough managed by Pitchfork for analysis of dozens of musical artists who defiantly refuse to be interesting on anything but nonmusical grounds) this release is in fact fairly obscure. It's at least difficult to find, to the point of being a Japanese import CD that some bozo is selling for $52 bucks on Amazon and some Dutch guy is selling for 15 Euros on Discogs, and that's just about it. That's a rare occurrence indeed these days, when something is only available on the CD format. I won't lie, I kind of like it. Or at least I like that I know about it now. Learning is FUNdamental.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is the Pitchfork equivalent of one of those "we're out of ideas this week" oddball sketches on SNL that happens at 12:50 and is somehow actually very strange and funny in a way that shows how capable these writers and performers are of running rings around your average bottom-rung comedian.


Bryan Scary
Flight of the Knife
[Black and Greene; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.6.

Stuart Berman posits, based on this album that "prog-rock is really just psychedelic pop with the between-song gaps removed." I disagree with it.

I think as far as this goes, "prog-rock is really just pop with too many ideas and showoffy musicianship crammed into it."

In fact, that's a fitting enough epitaph for the entire genre. I've always thought that the only drug it accurately replicates is Ritalin. And in the case of this specifically, it's rocketing between otherwise very palatable straightforward pop precepts. Maybe even too palatable. It's like being tossed around by a kids coaster after too much cotton candy. No thanks.


Paul Haig
Go Out Tonight
[Rhythm of Life; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 5.2.

So this guy was the front man for an obscure Scottish new wave band. Joshua Klein uses this solo album's existence as an excuse to talk about the obscure Scottish new wave band, which is actually pretty decent in a direct-predecessor-of-the-Strokes way.

It's good move, because there's no point in focusing on this new stuff, unless you want to set the mood to be creepily leered at by a lecherous old homosexual.