Pitchfork Reviews 4/23/08

Gossip
Live in Liverpool
[Music With a Twist; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.9.

Sometimes when you grow up in a very permissive, understanding liberal family that regularly attends a Unitarian Universalist church, and particularly when that part of your upbringing dredged you through the murky depths of 1990s America's post-Rodney King obsession with political correctness and forced diversity, you end up with a very adolescent urge to dismiss stuff like this as being "Shitty Lesbo Rock" and move on.

You will hope in vain that you will be let off the hook by explaining this urge, including the amount of repetition you experienced as a nascent man of stuff like Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls and Tori Amos, the forcefulness of the "we're going to listen to this now" decisions, the amount and extent of your honestly trying to enjoy it, the tongue biting involved in each quiet listen, how it felt like near torture at times, how your respite at the time were male-led bands like Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana who seemed to also incorporate more than their share of non-hetero-masculine elements, such as writing "Pro Choice" on their arms and putting gay porn in their videos and marrying Courtney Love. The 90's were like that.

But you don't want to overdo such victim-speak, because you're not a woman and you have no idea what it is to be a real victim of the penisocracy. This is more truth than joke. In a way this early experience of listening to a bunch of shitty music against your will (and of abdicating to the decision because it apparently represented a necessary feminine viewpoint, and knowing that it was probably important to understand what that gender-based abdication was like) will set you up for a lifetime of being something like a good man, provided you can reasonably contain your occasional adolescent outbursts.

But: you don't have to listen to this fucking shit anymore if you don't want to. Lesbos or not. Which is fine. It's not for you, anyway.

According to Rebecca Raber's Pitchfork review, Music With a Twist is a "Columbia-owned LGBT-themed label." It sure sounds like it too, meaning: this sounds to my admittedly heterosexual male rock-fan ears like ghettoized "here's some powerful-yet-tasteless female vocals that are vaguely about empowerment for the young lesbian demographic" shorthand pandering. If we're gonna validate the "Lesbo Rock" moniker with cynical divide-and-conquer major label subsidiaries, let's at least go full bore with some Le Tigre and put the ROCK part before the LESBO part.

But: if not, I've got no cause to complain about it. I get it. It's not for me. I wouldn't understand. Sure. I'm also free to think Gossip fucking sucks. And that's valid too. For me. And probably also for some poor 15 year old Unitarian boy in Liverpool at the time of this live recording. I need to let him know it's gonna be ok, because unity, ok you guys?


Spoon
Don't You Evah EP
[Merge; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.

Spoon are the band you love to think you hate. But it's just not as fun to heap scorn on them as it is on, say, The Flaming Lips (most talented band member is the drummer) or Wilco (ain't-we-clever songwriting genius for corduroyed grad students) or Radiohead (about as much fun as a holocaust documentary).

There's a certain "why get mad" quality to Spoon. They're not trying too hard to be perfect, there are a few good grabber lines ("he smells like insides of closets upstairs") in there, delivered with the right mixture of nonchalance and urgency, there's a few fun/distracting effects in the mix, some driving and/or predictable rhythms but nothing too cloyingly hookish, the song ends, another one starts, and then when it's over everybody goes home, safe and sound. It's business casual. Which is just not a recipe for hate, no matter how much glowing press they get for their weakest (but still not quite weak) album. It's not their fault. They've been around long enough for us to know that they're pretty much just doing their thing regardless. They get a pass.

Why? They just do. They've managed to wedge themselves too far into the middle for anybody to want them to move in any one direction. And every once in a while they hit the pop song nail right on the head. What are you supposed to do about it?

You can ignore them, sure, but you'll still be perfectly content to sit through it when "I Turn My Camera On" pops into your life for a brief visit during a car commercial. For some reason you won't get angry when that happens. You'll just think, "Ok, that car commercial was a B+ for a car commercial, even though I kind of resent having Spoon played to me in order to insinuate that I'd love to own a Toyota Matrix. I'm not in the market for a car, but I will admit to liking that song because I'm not a liar. So that was just less of a total waste of my time than other car commercials. B+. I remain ready to watch the rest of this sporting event or other television program."

Anyway, this is a "lessor effort" EP for rabid Spoon fans only.

Can you imagine being a rabid Spoon fan? That would be like being a huge fan of air conditioning even though you live in some place that's extremely temperate, like Seattle. You only really need it for two weeks a year, tops. The rest of the time it's just kind of nice.


Tokyo Police Club
Elephant Shell
[Saddle Creek; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.3.

The phrase "too clever by half" has always interested me. If something is too clever by half, does that mean that it's overconfident, insecure, both? Could "bad sense of timing" cover it? What about "can't reign it in?" If you're too clever by half, does that revert back down to 50% dumb again, or is there some extra ground there where you can be more than 100% clever? Is it even possible to be 200% clever, "too clever by all?" What about too clever by a tenth? What's the math on this? Is that percentage of "how clever I can be until I become kind of a pain in the ass" or "how clever any person can be before they become kind of a pain in the ass?" Is there even a difference? Is the implication of "too clever by half" that "too" clever is in fact "not" clever? Maybe, as far as cleverness is concerned, "discretion is the better part of valor." So that 100% cleverness = 55% discretion, 45% valor.

I don't know the answers.

But we've all seen people cross the 100% threshold, where somebody says something funny, you laugh, and then they keep going on a riff until it's not quite funny anymore. And then they keep going until they've clearly gone too far, and then they never reign it in with a real conversation about a real thing, they just keep going off into 100%+ clever territory as if it's some kind of a compulsion and they can't stop themselves. We've all seen that, right? It's horrifying and even kind of sad. Like watching somebody light themselves on fire, but party conversation equivalent.

Anyway, Tokyo Police Club is like watching music do that.


diskJokke
Staying In
[Smalltown Supersound; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it an 8.0.

Things I am a sucker for:

1. Spacey echo "Dub" effects
2. Extra synth elements coming in out of nowhere

Things I am not a sucker for:

1. Techno "buildup and release"-dynamic cliches
2. Techno diva vocals
3. Techno

In other words, this has me a little confused, but "not a sucker" wins 3 to 2.


Pete Rock
NY's Finest
[Nature Sounds; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.8.

I've heard it said often recently that hip hop is in an "era of the producer." Which is like "ummm... wasn't it always?" I mean, when was it the era of "we love shitty beats?"

In other other words: if you didn't get it the first time around, go back and cherry pick the best stuff for downloads.