pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

I wonder if it's going to serve anyone's needs. I don't think a web- only publication can attract readers interested in Alanis Morissette and Kylie Minogue. To my knowledge, no one actually hunts down information about such artists. People just hear about it on tv and that's it. Let's give Pitchfork a few months, until the corporate contributors pull the plug.

QUOTE OF THE YEAR.

the first thing i thought (after, well, this is no all cure all the time) was that i wished they really had "sold out" (what the fuck, is this 93?), because maybe it would mean LESS GODDAMN PROG.

Well, the Albini thing practically is...

Makes sense, really.

Well, the Albini thing practically is... huh???

You have completed your learning of life's lessons. Now, you suck ass just like all the other bores before you. Kylie, Alanis? Whatever, bitch. I am sure you already have the defense mechanisms in place so, this will mean nothing but, another exercise in...oh, who cares. Looking elsewhere for reality...or maybe I can pretend to be a rubber worm like pitchwhore.com...here big fishie, look, I rounded 'em up for you in a arrel. A whole demographic!

Not Funny

Y'know sometimes they really are asking for it:

"White Williams issues a debut album layered with impeccable influences-- including Roxy Music, Beck, and T. Rex-- and a sense of calculated disaffection."

Well shit SIGN ME UP.

Yeah, that was a bit of a repellant blurb if I ever saw one.

Wait, are you saying that doesn't seem accurate?

I read 'White' as 'While' and thought "The Saul Williams album sounds like that?"

it's more that they used that as their _hook_

x-post

The front blurbs are always stripped/condensed summary descriptions from the review inside -- in this case

His songs are thin and languorous, with impeccable influences and the sort of calculated disaffection that comes from an MFA in design and a good weed connection.

omg that is horrorshow

The blurb >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the article quote

I assume that's an article quote; nabisco, if you just made that up then SHAME ON YOU.

why would a critic ever try to guess where a song comes from?

I'm more bothered by beck as impeccable influence

Wait, are you saying that doesn't seem accurate?

The description of "a sense of calculated disaffection", a combination of words that makes me imagine the shittiest band of all time, followed by "recommended" was repellant for me. I guess I like my disaffection to be natural, not carefully planned, so I would never recommend something like that.

Then again, I've never heard it so what do I know and so on.

b-but someone at pfork said "hm, how can we get people to read this review? I know! we'll mention the artist's impeccable influences and calculated disaffection! that'll reel 'em in!"

RIP satire etc

they could have collaged+mis-used _anything_ from the article, and they collaged+mis-used that

The White Williams album reminds me much more of late 10cc and Bread than of Roxy Music. That bit was like the classic "Let's over-hip our influences" review.

The description of "a sense of calculated disaffection", a combination of words that makes me imagine the shittiest band of all time, followed by "recommended" was repellant for me.

See, this sounds like the blurb WORKED for you -- i.e., efficiently let you know you would probably not like this act.

I agree, though, it looks kind of weird to have such a neutral-to-disparaging summary blurb on a recommended album.

I like how they gave the new Babyshambles, which is actually tuneful and a good all around album, a 4.0, but gave the first one, which is dreadful and hard to listen to / bloated, a 7.3,

Yeah, it was definitely TWICE as good as the new one. Fuckin' morons.

ugh, "impeccable influences" is really repulsive.

(xpost) was that a parody or are you really getting worked up about an internet score for babyshambles

He was worked up?

wait, i thought the grading scale was logarithmic. like 5 is twice as good as 4. somebody email ryan schreiber to find out.

shit, now i need to reevaluate all my purchases of the last five years.

It's actually modelled after the Richter Scale, hence the superlative designations of various well-reviewed albums as either "Reccomended," "Best New Music," or "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On."

It’s just the wrong dude to lay into, viborg, Eric is a one-time poster, a friend/acquaintance of many of ours, a fantastic hang, a terrific writer— well worth it to you to use one of your four free pitchforks to read his Bob Marley piece from just days ago. The “thing” about that post is that he’s a fairly frequent contributor to Pitchfork and for him to speak out in opposition to a paywall puts him in conflict with his fairly frequent employers (and curators of decades of his writing on music)

I love that he called out Marley’s infidelities. A lot of those dudes get a pass for being shitty to their spouses

Social media duh hurr referring to “some Dr. Moreau-esque hybrid of Rate Your Music + Reddit + Letterboxd + Rotten Tomatoes” if that wasn’t clear

fyi tomorrow this absolutely wasn’t clear! (bcz his critique has absolutely nothing to do with social media)

I might subscribe. I wish I had confidence that the new revenue would go toward better pay for their music critics. Still, I really liked skimming pitchfork's reviews every morning, I love the Sunday reviews, and — though I haven't had time to look around for alternatives — I'm not sure there are other options that cover that range of music (and do it so well). Eh.

I think the thing viborg missed is that what seems obvious or banal to people who regularly post on music message boards and read a lot of reviews may not be to the majority of people who are casual, if not occasional, readers. I've made that mistake myself in conversation, and it's grounding to hear someone say "I've never heard of any of that"

^^ this. Not every one who loves music's on ILM.

thank god

anyone here ever read Who Got the Camera? I always thought that looked super interesting

yeah I've read it. it's very good!

Eric and I are about the same age (think he's a year or two older) and I have sometimes thought that he has the kind of career that I might have had (or would've liked to have had) if I were more talented/ambitious/disciplined.

yeah straddling popular writing & academia like that is rare and difficult

Yes, Who Got the Camera? is super interesting albeit academic and as such can be a bit dense.

chiming in to say that Eric's Bob Marley piece is one of the best things I've read on pfork in a minute

Who Got The Camera? is one of the best music books I've read in years.

I love that he called out Marley’s infidelities. A lot of those dudes get a pass for being shitty to their spouses

― Heez, Wednesday, January 21, 2026 10:42 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

The book Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer goes into how piggish Rastas were in general with women...I didn't know that Aston "Family Man" Barrett's nickname was ironic because he'd fathered 52 (!!) children with a bunch of different women

book is highly recommended as a history of that era

FYI for further reading, here's Harvey's Substack post on his Legend review:

https://ericdharvey.substack.com/p/print-the-legend?

Gives a peak into how he approaches these:

I consider these to be mini-33 1/3 style pieces, challenging myself to research and write a condensed cultural history of the culture, media and politics of an era that spawned collections of music that we now deem “classic” for varying reasons.

One more hell yes for Who Got The Camera?, which I need to re read at some point.

Eric's Anita Baker and Sugar essays are some of the best criticism those artists I've gotten.

Pitchfork's editors are at their best with longform pieces. I've weaned myself from certain tics thanks to them.

as someone on the outside there’s nothing I read there that rises above the level of a middling ILM effort post or inspires me at all to pay to see more of his writing.

god, this is hilariously embarrassing, given the target

Yeah, Eric's great people and a sharp thinker, so I don't get what the original criticism was even about?

I think Viborg has a beef with Substack in general

Bah. I subscribed. I won't have to think about it for another year now.

So this week's reviews of albums from 1996 are brand new reviews, right? They keep calling them "Sunday Reviews," which makes it sound like they're re-running reviews that were originally run on Sundays. I even saw a post from them that said "Our week of Sunday Reviews from 1996 continues with Outkast's second album..." which makes it sound like they're re-running reviews from Sundays in 1996!

It's TGIF all week!

https://scontent-ord5-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/539384836_1324373513030633_3548221073021314296_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg_tt6&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=SEkNIy1_glIQ7kNvwHLQb9o&_nc_oc=Adm_nSwqf26uHIXYvnUwOugxBfbXb9CxrYyX5QzIwWq811I-jd9PpIqBS8SpwEBEnbE&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-2.xx&_nc_gid=OfMQMoMRA7LcRhhScxaOaA&oh=00_AfoRpAGX13aQuMC1lJqlSJTxq1HzrxGYoQrIeamsPRMI0Q&oe=69799A19

it's Low retrospective weekend

I loved that review. It reminded me of low's music itself. Most Pitchfork reviews are so packed with hyperlinks to other bands and concerts and songs that it is dizzying. There are some hyperlinks in this review, but mostly it's about this band and this record. It moves along deliberately and slowly. It's really beautiful. It's a slowcore review for a slowcore classic.

Album not streaming?

The Life of the Record podcast had a really good special on Things We Lost In The Fire with Alan and Mimi talking all about the recording and history of it.

i can't speak for streaming, crypto— i noticed a reddit thread saying it had been removed from Apple Music last week— but it is on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ruU-MohvMY

Great review, fwiw— still my favorite band.

Yeah, I think it's been pulled from most streaming service. It's on YouTube but not on YouTube Music.

Apparently the rights revert back to Alan in a year or two, so hopefully a reissue coming. This goes for stupid money on Discogs and is the only Low album I don’t own.

It's on YouTube but not on YouTube Music.

that channel is explicitly labeled as being illegal uploads of full albums

okay, problem?

I mean, I didn't listen to it, but if you search for the album on YouTube Music, that's what comes up (as a "video").

Apparently the rights revert back to Alan in a year or two, so hopefully a reissue coming.

oh are they? that's great news. he's talked about wanting to do reissues for ages but universal previously refused offers to buy back the rights

it's still on streaming here in australia

and in the UK, on Tidal at least.

but if you search for the album on YouTube Music, that's what comes up (as a "video").

this feels alarming tbh

if ever there was a site where if you're going to paywall people into music, going old-school and citing/linking sources for the article would be great.

where did this intro "corona" story come from?! jackass links are probably easier to cite.

does anyone know much the switch to subscriptions hurt readership of reviews?

i checked in on a daily basis for many years, just to see what was being reviewed if nothing else, get a general feel. but i haven’t dropped by since the switcheroo. i know you get a few free reads per month, but it introduces this weird “but what if i need to save this read for something big later in the month” scarcity mindset that is exactly the same as finishing a final fantasy with hundreds of unused powerful potions, just to make sure you had enough for later. and i know how archive.ph work but it’s just too much hassle.

i spend my free read tokens when friends of the pod are reviewing

i guess they probably get most of their views/ads revenue through the “news”? and then there’s this other, much smaller audience of heavy review readers who are willing to fork over money in order to continue reading all of them, give modest mouse a 9.4 whatever

I'm in the same boat as you. I checked every day out of a habit and I haven't bothered since the change.

I do check it still pretty often, but I read next to nothing. I read the Seefeel review a few days ago, first one I've read in months. It was a good review. If I trusted the people running the site with not making it worse in a few months, I'd probably consider paying.

give modest mouse a 9.4 whatever

― z_tbd, Monday, May 11, 2026 6:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

that's an incredibly unlikely scenario tbh

A P4k subscriber giving Modest Mouse a 9.4 is unlikely?

heh, yeah that’s what i was referring to, very vaguely - the addition of reader review scores. i assume there are a lot of 9.4s

ah sorry misread

I subscribed, because why not, and I leaf through the reviews once a week, reading pieces about artists I like, or by writers I like, or anything that's getting a BNM. Just yesterday I did a hate-read by a writer I really don't like and was pleasantly surprised at how cogent and thoughtful the analysis was, which was nice to read, always good to feel like somebody you've written off is upping their game