Pitchfork Reviews 6/20/08

Religious Knives
Resin
It's After Dark
[No Fun / Troubleman Unlimited; 2008]

Pitchfork gave them a 7.6 and a 6.9.

I wonder how often the Pitchfork people cheat. I often dash one of these off in a big hurry without actually listen to whatever it is I'm talking about. Hey, you can't like everything, and I'm pretty sure it's not even worth trying to. Very often I have no particular thoughts on the subject of either the music or Pitchfork's coverage of it. They say "this semi-good rock album gets a 7.2 out of 10" and I say "yes, for me too" and that's all anybody can say about the subject. I at least try to listen. But sometimes I don't. And the stakes are pretty low here anyway. Couldn't get lower, in fact.

Does that mean that the stakes are somehow high over at P-Fork? They aren't actually high, but I'm sure there's a lot of tightly wound people who treat it that way. Throw in the money involved in some of these acts and the fact that P-Fork has legions (?) of devoted, possibly mindless, followers, and I'm sure the contribs over there feel something akin to pressure to get things right. Which is more dayjob than rock, but what are you gonna do? There are several thousand minor music businesspeople whose livelihoods probably hinge on what mood somebody's in when they write a review for Pitchfork. That's probably why the tone of the music writing is usually so somber. They have people's mortgages in their hands. Nice people. Leeches, but still. You can't blame any of 'em. It beats workin'.

So even though their only job is to know things about what's going on in music and have an opinion about what's good that people can agree on or at least hazily see the merit of, I'm sure the job seems a lot more urgent than that. Mostly because there's money to be made in inflating the worth of such an enterprise to the point where it can be toppled and subsumed by savvy insiders with some back-end points hoping to line their pockets by joisting up the next Radiohead. You get the "indie" press in your pocket, you can sell a lot of records to a nation of condo owning end-result-of-urban-gentrification trendjumping wannabes (that I'm WAY cooler than, understand me? I RENT from an OLD LADY: I'm at the most a gentrification middle-man) based solely on "it" factor, even if the band you rep is a fairly straightforward shitty pop enterprise like Franz Ferdinand. So if you're Pitchfork, the odds are stacked sky high against keeping a cool head for too long.

But huge hindsight-is-20/20 whiffs on major acts (it was not entirely unreasonable to make a case for Franz Ferdinand and even Interpol at the time--we thought they might have been stepping stones to some sort of Strokes-based Velvet Underground DNA takeover of all of pop music, rather than just pop music eating all of us alive; it was mildly exciting in the moment and we got carried away) and insider money laundering aside, Pitchfork generally does ok as far as rock crit goes. They just, I think, cheat sometimes.

The boiler-plate template for these Pitchfork reviews is, roughly: share insider-sounding history of the band, gauge expectations for current release based on either previous releases or said history, postulate thesis about the release's ultimate effect in relation to those expectations, prove thesis using concrete examples from the release, hedge bets to show lack of bias, conclude. I don't know if that's cheating, but it sure feels like it sometimes. And I don't blame them, they have to listen to a lot of music. They HAVE to. For proof of urgency, they have about a million A&R reps and PR agents on the phone waiting with baited breath and probably a little implied payola in the form of ad sale bucks. I'd cheat. I'm cheating now, and my phone hasn't rung in hours.

But I wonder if they cheat. I know I do. If I find an angle, I'm off and running, and who cares if it has anything do to with the music (confession time: at this point I have not yet listened to Religious Knives' Resin or It's After Dark). The above-linked review of these two Religious Knives releases seems cheat-y. The cheating is most visible when the formula is at its most transparent, usually when the review is long on history and short on opinion. Or, as in the case of this one, when reviewer Marc Masters drops a little bomb like "Bernstein-- an unabashed fan of Neil Young and the Grateful Dead-- pours his guitar like syrup over pancakes." "Syrup over pancakes": shudder. But also the open sourcing of the Young and the Dead thing indicates that Masters is this guy's friend and knows first-hand how often Bernstein listens to Harvest. Or else Masters read about the Young and the Dead fandom of this obscure noise band's guitarist in some obscure fanzine and passed it off as common knowledge. Either of which indicates either obsessiveness or coolpoint hunting, and both are cheating.

The review is a cheat.

But it's not a swindle.

Now that I'm actually listening to Religious Knives, I'm glad this one got sneaked in there and even received the day's top billing. Even if they cheat (and again: I'm cheating right fucking now) Pitchfork at least slide some of this wonderful, half-assed go-nowhere pretentious druggy noise in with the rest of the up-for-consideration slop as an indication of, "Hey, this is also a part of our collective DNA, you fucking twats, it's not all marketable twee bands and cutesy-wutesy bedroom pop and tongue-in-cheek techno and earnest throaty yelping about loss and regret over indierock jugband accompaniment. Some of this stuff you have to stumble into your local terribleneighborhood artloft for because it's intentionally vague and annoying, and yes, even kind of (totally) sucks. But it's out there too, kids. Go forth and live it if you're curious and bold."

Of course that's quite possibly a part of a larger swindle, the "trust us, we're hip" token review. It's not like these Religious Knives guys are a totally inaccessible wall of ear-destroying noise or anything. They're more in the realm of too loose noodling, searching out the diaphanous border between trance-inducing and just boring, but at least without any overt attention to pop structure. It's not great, sure, and nobody's saying it's great, but it's at least there where it doesn't have to be. If that's who Pitchfork cheats for, even if their reasoning is a part of a larger "hey, we get it" con, then all is not lost.

Good for them. Anyway, this semi-good rock album gets a 7.2 out of 10. Yes, for me too.


My Brightest Diamond
A Thousand Shark's Teeth
[Asthmatic Kitty; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.1.

What is it about musicianship and tastelessness that makes the two of them go hand-in-hand so often? Is it just me? Do I begrudge people for having talent in the first place, or just for wantonly displaying it?

Is it a more objective phenomenon, something more like how incredible technical talent is less rare than a singular vision for how such talent as one possesses should be harnessed? If so, what happened to all those technically gifted musicians (you know the type: Dave Matthews Band members, all of prog rock, Eric Clapton, etc.) to make them end up sounding so awful? Was it money? Lack of motivation? Passionlessness? Abusive parents who listened exclusively to Barry Manilow? Svengali boyfriends who were super into Sevendust? Talent only going so far?

What is it? You know? WHAT IS IT?

Anyway, this is a band fronted by a classically-trained opera singer. Their songs suck.


Dan Friel
Ghost Town
[Important; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.

In retrospect, the guitar sound from the first :30 or so of The Strokes' "Last Nite" in 2001 caused all kinds of trouble. The Strokes were a simple rock band (that guitar sound is incredibly simple elemental rock) when we needed simple rock, and they were huge almost immediately. So then people took the simple things they did, including that specific guitar sound and simple rhythm, as being "the way to make it," tightened the vintage jeans on it, and repeated it until it became the pied piper's call to gullible neuternative rock fans.

But almost nobody took the fact of stripped down rock simplicity itself and ran with it. Including the Strokes themselves. They just repeated the guitar sound, processed through 48 track digital ProTools studio techniques. It was a huge disappointment. "Last Nite" was/is a fundamentally good rock song. The verses had a bounce and, dare I say, a swing to them. Julian Casablancas even looked like Richard Hell, for crying out loud. What a waste it is that returns ended up diminishing rather than building into something awesome after those guys came through.

Not that this thought has anything to do with Dan Friel, really, it just popped in there while I was listening to this one song, "Buzzards," and I think it's accurate. "Buzzards" has that exact guitar sound in it, buried under the "harsh" electric drivel that Dan Friel is dishing out. Listen for yourself, you'll know what I'm talking about. The rest of this album is all the "harsh" (read: annoying) electronic drivel without the Strokes-by-numbers this-is-the-sound-of-guitar-excitement® basis.

But it's strange to me that that sound would rear its ugly head even here, in some guy's "look how little I give a fuck, I'm avant-garde" electro-spazz odyssey from 2008. Enough that it'd give me pause and be the most interesting thing about this. And the electro-spazz itself is too complex. Meaning everything I've heard from this is trying at least two things at once ("cute" and "brutal," "loud" and "pretty," "poppy" and "fucked up"), which is a pretty see-thru compositional attention-getter trick. So I've got to run with it if I've got a thought here.

I'm cheating a lot today.


Stars Like Fleas
The Ken Burns Effect
[Hometapes; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.

To jump off from what I was saying about The Strokes and Dan Friel, I think just about every creative effort does best when it's simple. Do the one thing that you do. Do only that thing. Learn it, do it well. Find a way to make something that's that. And if you succeed, you will end up making something that only you could possibly have made. Don't shoot for "I want to do something nobody else has done." Shoot for "I want to do something that's so much what I do, that nobody else could do it." And "I do everything" is a copout bet-hedge. It's not going to work. It's not practicable. You're never gonna find a way to do everything. And you don't do everything. Sorry, but there are some things you don't do.

These guys do everything. They do their extreme fucking best at it in a quixotic way that's almost admirable, but it doesn't work.


Twine
Violets
[Ghostly; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.

Here's another thing I put on and then forgot was on and now I feel better because it's over. Maybe (probably) this is just a shitty example of it, but I do not understand the point of ambient music. You could save a lot of time and effort by just going someplace that's quiet. That goes for both listeners and musicians.