Ponderous word-choice in Pitchfork's review of the new Boards of Canada

Here's another gem from the same review:

That feeling of nature's green as gold, the stream of sunlight through fluttering leaves, the communion with the environment that always involves a confrontation with death. There's a reason people bring weed with them on camping trips.

What?

This is just bad editing; that period should probably be a semicolon.

Boards use of guitar on tracks like "Chromakey Dreamcoat" and "Hey Saturday Sun" makes explicit something about the band's sound that was always just beneath the surface: the connection of the music to the pastoral tradition of British folk. That feeling of nature's green as gold, the stream of sunlight through fluttering leaves, the communion with the environment that always involves a confrontation with death. There's a reason people bring weed with them on camping trips.

the only way to edit that is to strike out the teenage attempts at Walden (though the semicolon would help).

Unless that is just a long lost 10,000 Maniacs line that the teenage me would have been charmed by.

Scrolling down I read that as "Ctrl-Shitfit"

I've read far worse on there, punctuation errors or not. I understand what that 'weed' paragraph is getting at fine.

I was impressed especially by the phrase "nature's green as gold" until I did a Google search and discovered that it's lifted from a Robert Frost poem:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

It's florid and teetering perilously close to overwrought but Brent-D-talking-about-Radiohead-circa-2001 still wipes the floor with this in the "if I wring my hands hard enough, a review will magically appear" stakes. I've also not seen anything on the site in recent years as astoundingly offensive as that infamous Air review.

(btw, i got the casey kasem reference. hope i get some points for that.)

Anyway please don't blame Mark Richardson just because you didn't pay attention in ninth grade English.

Cheers.

My use of the word "lifted" was unnecessarily provocative - I didn't mean that he literally plagiarized it. I recognize that it was an allusion - and clearly an appropriate one to the feeling he was talking about.

then you should smoke some listen to some boards of canada

Forget about the pastoral bit -- what about the use of the word "macro"? I just don't understand what he means.

xp

i do want to read reviews like this. but they arent easy to write damned well so i don't end up loving too many of them.

At what point did inferring meaning from context become a lost art?

And also I imagine an immediate choice for

POO: Worst Frost poem.

At what point did inferring meaning from context become a lost art?

I think the point is: something equivalent to "the big picture" would be better in this case.

But Jesus, Mickey, it's like three tossed-off image references. And there's a term for pieces of paper that talk talk about "actual music" instead of emotions and images: they're called "sheet music."

Nigel, you're right: that word is going to be a little confusing to anyone who's not kind of already-immersed in the ways people talk about electronic music. The way Mark's using it, in context, is the traditional lay sense -- "macro" as the largeness, the totality, versus "micro" as the details, the constituent parts. He's saying he doesn't care much about the details of the group, the stories and the who-does-what, because the totality of the music feels complete and impressive in and of itself, without specifics attached.

(The possible point of confusion with that is that during recent years there's been the development of the term "micro" -- like in "micro-house" -- to talk about what electronic music-makers do with the small details of their work: the timbers and placements of little clicks and washes, the intricacies of the textures and filigrees and tweaks. Calling that stuff "micro" suggested a complementary "macro" level, having more to do with the overall shape of the music, its movement and build and release and such. And so when I saw the quote out of context I thought maybe Mark was referring to that.)

That argument is a gigantic pile of horseshit and you know it.

Again I reiterate that I don't think this criticism applies to this review. There are a bunch of music-specific things that someone could write about beyond "How Song X Makes Me Feel: A Poem At The Fifth-Grade Level", however, and as you say it's just as spurious and unfair to broadly describe anyone wanting to read actual music analysis or description as wanting "an endless page of zeroes and ones 'reviewing' the CD" as the misreadings/criticisms of Mark's review on this thread are. Except the semicolon thing, because I said that and I'm perfect.

But yeah, you're right: I'd definitely like to see more attempts at actually talking about musical form itself. (Look at Dominique's Delia & Gavin review on Pfork today -- he starts differentiating between keys and modes!) I wanted to try this over the weekend -- talking about the kind of elaborately formless songs people start writing once their bands have been around for a few decades -- but I couldn't quite isolate the structures going into it.

There are 2 problems here: firstly, that there are too many smartarses looking to criticise P-fork at any opportunity; and secondly that BoC don't do much more than refine their own sound on each album release. I don't have a problem with the latter, but the peeps that indulge in the former better be impressive writers if they don't want to look like moaning wankers.

A) written by someone I've talked to here;
B) awesome.

If you read it today, you'll find a review of someone you've talked to right here. Tee hee.

(BTW: Rereading Mark's review makes the editing point strike even more close to home for me; everything is well-argued but the grammar is haphazard.)

ain't nothing wrong with that.

to chime in on the whole "well, how should we write today" discussion:

after taking about a month off from writing or editing anything (and granted i was already lazy before that), i have a tendency to agree with Dan and Nabisco in looking for some more knowledge. At the same time I still need to stand up for my old argument for the more floral style. (which is, theres no use in writing something if it isn't amusing to read, because most serious music buyers don't much care for a critics take anyway). of course ballance is the key. I salute the various Pitchfork writers for often being the more exploratory writers out there. At the same time, I question how editing gets done because some pieces really do seem half-baked.

(to de-rail this thread even further)again we have seemed to stumble on the question of "what is the critic's role?". untill we get that figured out, the best way to write shall remain paradoxial.

Does Pitchfork have an editor? How could the following two faulty sentences which disturb my flow of reading be posted?

When music possesses such an uncomplicated immediacy, the story of how it was made and by whom it is less crucial.

Boards could previously could be counted on to offer a display of crisp, forceful drum programming to jar you out of your narcotic haze ("Telephasic Workshop" and "Gyroscope").

I tend to agree with the general image the review conveys of the album (pastoral, sluggish, dreamy, repetitive) though I think that it is the one where they have perfected their sound and it is therefore their best.