Exceptional Reviews

[Smeraldina Rima]

Jeff Buckley - Sketches for my Sweetheart the Drunk (reviewed in Spin magazine)

Jeff Buckley - Sketches (For My Sweetheart the Drunk) (Columbia)

Jeff Buckley's death was so rife with rock-star symbolism — he drowned after playfully jumping into a Memphis marina only to get swept away by a Mississippi undertow — that it's easy to forget that he never quite became one. He made his reputation with mesmerizing East Village solo shows, keening like the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan of Eddie Vedder's dreams and navigating the fine line between sublime and over-wrought. He tried to juice his wounded torch songs with full-band arrangements for his debut, 1994's Grace. with only partially successful results. Buckley supposedly hated the results of early sessions with ex-Television guitar god Tom Verlaine for My Sweetheart the Drunk. At the time of his death, he'd sent his band back to New York so that he could refine the songs and demo new ones.

The two-disc Sketches collects Buckley's work-in-progress — selections from the awkward Verlaine sessions plus the aforementioned demos — into a typically mercenary and reputation-tarnishing memorial. Tempering his bluster into sultry quiet storm probably seemed like a smart move for this sad-eyed sex symbol, but  "Everybody Here Wants You" is strictly sub-Spandau Ballet balladry. The demos, like the embarrassingly salacious "Your Flesh Is So Nice," are mostly dismal. The more promising moments here show that he was still finding his path. But releasing the material in this form only freezes Buckley's memory in the middle of the road. Sketches is more unneeded proof that, in rock'n'roll, dead men ultimately tell whatever tales they've committed to tape, no matter how inconsequential or unfinished. GREG MILNER

[Smeraldina Rima]

Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American (reviewed in Pitchfork)

Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American [Dreamworks; 2001] 3.5

Are you a 15-year-old TRL addict looking for a step up from Sum 41 and American Hi-Fi? Something you can connect to on an emotional level that won't sacrifice that mindless accessibility you've been force-fed all your life? You liked the new Weezer album, didn't you? Well, this is like that, but better! Never will Jimmy Eat World venture into "too much information" territory like that Rivers what's-his-name and his "Hash Pipe." You want love, happiness and "whoa's." You want to cruise around the housing development with the windows down, doing donuts in the cul-de-sac with your newly obtained permit, blasting music so empty and sincere even you could have written it.

You're getting to the age now when you're bored a lot. You're angry. You're frustrated with it all. All of it! You hate it! You hate this life, you hate your friends, you hate yourself. Why can't it just be fun, like when you were a kid? Something needs to speak to you, but not speak really hard or anything like that. After all, you weren't put on this earth to think! Well, Jimmy Eat World are there for you. They don't think, either!

These guys are the best friends you can imagine. They know what you're going through, and they care. They care like a million hearts wrapped up inside a teddy bear holding a bouquet of understanding in one hand and an undying torch of reassurance in the other. They keep the flame of rock alive while giving you advice about the most important thing in your world: yourself.

Their new album, Bleed American, is the best at that. Lead singer Jim Adkins reels off lyric after insightful lyric, facing you with tough questions like, "Are you gonna live your life wonderin' standing in the back lookin' around?" and "Are you gonna waste your time thinkin' how you've grown up or how you missed out?" Serious words, my friend. You better consider what this guy is saying, 'cause you "gotta make a move or you'll miss out." He's right! If you don't make a move, whatever that might be, you'll miss out on whatever you might miss out on, and that could be anything! You don't want to miss out, do you?

The best thing about Bleed American is that all of the songs sing directly to you. These guys don't fuck around with any of that storytelling, third-person bullshit. You are misunderstood, goddamnit, and when your friends aren't there for you, Jimmy Adkins always will be, rockin' out while lifting your self-esteem: "Hey, don't write yourself off yet," he sings on "The Middle." "It's only in your head, you feel left out or looked down on/ Just try your best/ Try everything you can/ And don't you worry what they tell themselves/ When you're away." I'm seriously gonna cry! That really hits home.

And the music. Whoa. Don't even get me started! These songs will never test you or judge you. Every song is as straight-on as you can get, filled with the power of distorted, chugging guitars, pummeling 4/4 drums, and bass playing so precise it could be programmed. There are no fancy production tricks or effects, just four chords of awesome pop music. Plus, their acronym is JEW. That's funny!

But Jimmy Eat World don't rock all the way through Bleed American. They know exactly when to slow it down for that heart-wrenching, sentimental ballad: track six! "Hear You Me" is the song you'll cry yourself to sleep with when you get a B+ on your science paper, or your girlfriend tells you she "needs some space." The song is really about the death of a friend, so it will help the tears come when you need them most. Adkins quietly intones the saddest words ever put to paper: "And if you were with me tonight/ I'd sing to you just one more time/ A song for a heart so big/ God wouldn't let it live." Now I really am gonna cry!

Yes, it's definitely time to grow up. Rites of passage are coming, if they haven't already-- sex, heartbreak, the loss of everything you own in a housefire, birth defects, and genocide... or at least things that seem that big! So do the best you can, listen to your favorite band, bury your head in the sand, before it all begins again. Hey, I just wrote a Jimmy Eat World song!

— Ryan Schreiber, August 21, 2001

[PlanktonSideburns]

Do you need a permit to do do donuts is a culdisac in America?

Really weird review

[Smeraldina Rima]

I think all the reviews in this thread will be really weird reviews in some way, but maybe there will be some that aren't obnoxious and some that are unusually insightful. Some reviewers must have recognised a later appreciated album when other critics didn't see it, or criticised a popular album in aniticipation of a later normalised shift in taste. I found good examples difficult to find after starting the thread. The most interesting thing to me in these first two examples is how people who knew they were being iconoclastic and thought they were clear sighted styled themselves at those times (1998 and 2001).

[PlanktonSideburns]

Yea sorry read it properlly now and I see where you're coming from, it's a Lovely bit of writing describing the dizzy naffness of Jimmy Eat World

[Smeraldina Rima]

Sorry, I don't understand and it looks like I haven't made myself understood. *head in hands* *plays the pipes of peace*

[chocolate teapot]

I can't find the review aggregator you're using. The box thing. You know.

I did think this was a strange thing to put in to a review of Nellie McKay Home Sweet Mobile Home

As a songwriter, McKay's mischievous sensibility has always been her greatest asset, and the smarty-pants songs on Home Sweet Mobile Home allude not only to the cuchi-cuchi of the Spanish-American actress but also to Mussolini and the French Revolution. McKay wields a sharp wit and deep knowledge of 20th-century pop culture, which certainly enlivens the album, yet her vocals often fail these songs, sounding somewhat distant and detached-- either too cool or too blue. The hiccups at the end of "Dispossessed" sound rehearsed, and "¡Bodega!" sounds like a nervous dress rehearsal. It's as if [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| the melancholy of "Bruise on the Sky" and the lovely lament "Coosada Blues" has pervaded every song, with little regard for whether it demands that tone.

BTW Bodega is one of the best songs on the album.

[Smeraldina Rima]

I can't find the review aggregator you're using. The box thing. You know.

They're screenshots from the album wikipedia page. Don't have to include those it's just a quick way of showing whether it's an unusually positive or negative review and what the consensus was.

[chocolate teapot]

Cool thanks

[ProvanFan]

Pitchfork gave British Sea Power's Do You Like Rock Music? a score of U.2 but it's been changed to 8.2 (seemingly in error given the tone of the review).

[The Mollusk]

At the risk of turning this into a Pitchfork thread...

The Mars Volta - De-Loused in the Comatorium



Pitchfork review (4.9/10):

When Mars Volta member Jeremy Ward died shortly before the release of their debut album, some heartlessly snickered about the relevance of a "sound manipulator" passing on. After all, it's not like the guy was playing a guitar or bass, right? But after forging numerous times through the dense De-Loused in the Comatorium, the severity of the loss screams blatantly; The Mars Volta focus most of their energy on sound manipulation. Watery vocals, phased synths, reverbed guitars, reversed bongos, and countless other dub twiddlings drench each busy, triathlon-long song.

Ward is the second person close to The Mars Volta who has died. Julio Venegas, a close friend of the band's, committed suicide in 1996, and as the media has repeatedly pointed out, De-Loused in the Comatorium is supposed to be a chronicle of his life and death. This is a monumental case of the media blindly reviewing off their press kits-- there's absolutely no way of gleaning this story/idea/topic/concept/whatever in the hilariously awful, sub-Burroughs, refrigerator-magnet montage of dark PSAT words that make up this album.

The song titles-- "Drunkship of Lanterns", "Televators", "Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt"-- merely hint at Comatorium's purblind "poetry." Follow Venegas' footsteps as he makes his "ritual contrition asphyxiation half mast commute through umbilical blisters and boxcar cadavers!"* Weep while he's "rowing shit smells for the dead"* before the "pinkeye fountain"* and "three half-eaten corneas!"* At least I think that's what happened.

The only sensible summation of Venegas' demise seems to be that he proclaimed, "Now I'm lost," then "searched" for "something" for a "long time," then cried "Is anybody there," and finally "took" the ol' "veil cerpin taxt." Huh. Reprinting these lyrics in the liner notes might have helped to clarify the story, but that could as easily have ruined the experience-- dissecting the cryptic babble is half (or more) of the fun. These lyrics, like At the Drive In's before them, are pure stream-of-consciousness. Only now they're delivered in a Geddy Lee castrato, treading helplessly in a tumultuous Great Lake of unplotted neo-prog.

"Inertiatic ESP", Comatorium's first real song, stands out as the only memorable track, probably due to its succinct, 4\xBD-minute runtime. Afterward, every song follows a pattern: roar out of the gate with the main riff, stop suddenly, float in reverby space where one can hear the smoke machines and laser shows, bring back the opening riff with added guitars noodling away, slurp up the noise in a sucking sound, hit the pachanga 'n' guitar solo movement, slowly fade in a swarm of dub effects, and, BAM, repeat step one. Think of a San Diego hardcore band. Think of ALL of the San Diego hardcore bands at once whipping through ELP's "Karn Evil 9" without practice.

The Mars Volta mistake sonic piling for complex architecture. No melodic themes are carried. Often you'll find yourself lost in a epic passage of dripping noises ("Cicatrix ESP") or a robotic bleepdown ("Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt") where the song even forgets itself, before the opening riff and chorus blare back in an "oh, right, this one" kind of way. Even acoustic interludes, like the one during the opening of "This Apparatus Must Be Unearthed", can't pass without Amazon bird recordings and distant e-bow.

Rick Rubin has produced masterfully before-- from the surging density of Slayer's Reign in Blood, to the clean funk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik, to the crisp acoustics of Johnny Cash's American recordings. Here, he's been asked to mix all of the above with added jam aplomb. He must have felt like John Cage telling his disgruntled punk grandsons to "do whatever." Some editing and afterthought would have gone a long way. Each song sounds like if Led Zeppelin had released the 25:25 version of "Dazed and Confused" off How the West Was Won instead of the concise 6:26 cut on their debut.

De-Loused in the Comatorium will undoubtedly rekindle prog, or at least spur a reassessment of the genre. Somewhere, kids will proclaim The Mars Volta to sound like Fugazi's End Hits mixed with The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (which it sort of does)-- the Comatorium title "Eriatarka" even sounds like Spanish for "Aquatarkus"-- but few will confess to actually liking Genesis or ELP. Though The Mars Volta may be prog in the traditional sense, they're in no way "progressive," just as The Hives do not record their music in a "garage." So it boils down to whether you're one to cherish the originals, keep up with the newbies, or forsake it all as fustian garbage.

The other band often evoked in The Mars Volta press is Santana. That's just offensive. Omar and Cedric's last names are Rodriguez-Lopez and Zavala, right? They use bongos? They must sound like Santana! That's like comparing Living Colour's Stain to Love's Forever Changes. The percussive break on "Drunkship of Lanterns" just as shallowly traces back to the Miami Sound Machine.

If any, the album constantly recalled during Comatorium listens is Mansun's 1998 sprawl, Six. The seagull-screaming guitar solos on "Roulette Dares" mimic Dominic Chad's playing on tracks like "Negative" and "Shotgun". The magic-trick studio transitions sound eerily similar on both records. Mansun even shared The Mars Volta's goal of fusing punk and prog. The difference: Mansun realized the entertaining bridge between the two is glam-rock. It's a preposterous fusion to begin with, since both genres were originally seen as reactions to one another (see: Johnny Rotten's t-shirts), and Mansun barely pulled it off with knowing camp; The Mars Volta just straddle the chasm on a cracking rope woven of dour attitude, showers of effects, and Latin percussion.

My biggest complaint is that De-Loused in the Comatorium just isn't fun. Virtuosity-to-a-fault was the death of prog in the 70s, but The Mars Volta's aimless hammer-and-wail tactics-- whether performed with deep-seeded passion or not-- is just as regrettable. This record bursts with vim and accelerates breathtakingly. Audiophiles will sop both sides of the headphones for the additive-laden gravy of sounds. Cedric and Omar play with such intensity and soul. What they lack is any ability to convey where their passion comes from, either lyrically and musically. As such, De-Loused in the Comatorium swirls around as a galaxy of inexplicable sturm and angst. If they can find ways to deliver this music convincingly and lucidly to their listeners, The Mars Volta might be on to something.

Embarrassingly juvenile shortsighted dog shit, which was their favourite card to play throughout the 2000s.

[chveik]

4,9/10 is very generous

[The Mollusk]

Listen mate I'm in a very warm car stuck in traffic on the north circular as I write this, do NOT test me

[sardines]

I suppose the following lives and dies by how much you can stand Paul Morley's prose but for those who like him, I feel there have been few opportunities for Paul to really wax lyrically over the last decade.

His Guardian 'live review' of Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' is a good fit for this topic but arguably his OK Computer review reaches peak levels of incomprehensible nonsense to the point that even I, a fanboy, accept defeat halfway through.

HELLO. It seems that I am meant to give Radiohead's new album – their "other" album, their brainwashed nerve-scathed translunar completely assumed third masterpiece where exhibitionism and effacement hold fleshy hands in jerky descriptive time and where the whole tremendous rumpus knots and rots in the viscous membranes between gorgeous neutral pauses and sudden ecstatic rushes of motion which provisionally combine scenic frameworks with intimate detail – some stars to denote, I guess, its merit or morality or manliness or whatever.


Is OK Computer homework? Is it a toaster? Is it a lasagne? A B&B? I don't think so.

Is it possible to mark such self-flagellating blarney, such perforated indifference, such weird-boy fancy? I don't think so. Is this magazine the Which guide to the cosmic range of Nausea? Not quite. How can you mark feverish worldliness, filmy fatalism, famished nerves, a profoundly preoccupied pop sound like the fermentation of formlessness, the rank intertwining of plants, the swarming of insects, the foam of the sea leaping landwards, how can you mark bugged lyrics that are thoughts on thoughts on thought? How can you mark murk? Even if the murk does come with its own flopped kind of beat, a hindered sort of swing and a series of lazily superior melodies with their attendant consumptive harmonies that act like they've heard of the sun even if they've never actually seen it.

How can you mark an album that has as one of its basic messages, "Nothing is where it belongs"?

But it seems most everyone wants everything rated these days. Who am I to disagree? So if I had to mark Radiohead's scrupulously shapeless new album – where pitiless gloom, demented sentiment and scabby poignancy tease out and tear apart your bleak dream avant-pop assemblage of Samuel Beckett, Lou Reed and Harry fucking Nilsson, where compressed desolation, deadpan pain and mirrored pop meet up to compare bent notes on the general destiny of futility, where great pop is luminously demonstrated as being the fitted and startled miscellany of apprehension and transcendence – I will give it a star.
A star for an album that has as one of its basic messages, "I was born under a wandering star."
I'll give Radiohead a star for their defiantly indefinite new album, a glitter star, a liquid star, a chiming star, a star at night, a shooting star, a new born star.
I'll give this star a name.
This black star.
This prettiest star.
The star could be called "Eclectic", because, if you think about it, and such thoughtful albums as this tend to make you think about it, in a world of such things as random values, metaphysical inconsistency and the constant unavoidable interruption of pure aesthetic perception by random events from within and without, eclecticism is the only valid position. So Radiohead, being so amplified and petrified, being strivers and divers, being pure past and mere future, sound like everything you've ever heard and nothing you've ever heard. They sound very familiar and very unfamiliar at around about the same ringing time.
They ghost cliches and follow leaders – from Kevin Ayers to Neil Young – and end up beginning to invent their own cliches and be leaders themselves. This is a neat trick that involves a whole lot of other neat tricks. It may not even be a trick. It might be magic. So the star could be called "Magic".
It could be called "Mutant Fictioneer", because if I had to use two words to describe Radiohead I might choose, being choosy, "mutant fictioneers".
If I had to use two words to describe OK Computer, I might murmur "It's different," but I wouldn't want to call the star "Different", because that would be naming things in a rush, and you must never do that. One of the basic messages of this album is that "you must reckon with time."
I would rather, timing it better, call the star "Theory", because clarified avant-pop artists like Radiohead have acquired immunity from the Terminal Death dysfunctionalism of a Pop Culture gone awry and are now ready to offer their own strangely concocted elixirs to cure us from this dreadful disease ("information sickness") that infects the core of our collective life. Theoretically speaking.
In some states, the star would be called "Misery", because one of the basic messages of Radiohead's deliriously maintained album is, "What a misery sensation is."
You could call the star, "And the bass and drums do what bass and drums do which is body bass and kick drum around time and through space moistened by milky bulky studio effects in a way that's doubly appropriate and loopy and leaky and local and freaky," but that's quite a mouthful, but then again, why not? The kind of star I'm giving Radiohead might have a planet orbiting it which would be capable, curiously enough, of supporting life, and it's nice to think that such a star might have a name that's more of a mouthful than just "Sun".
I'm beginning to think that the star should be called "Deep Blue", because even though there will be those who think the computer voice that elegiacally recites the words to "Fitter Happier" sounds like Stephen Hawking, it is, in fact, just as likely to be the "voice" of the computer that recently beat the chess world champion, Gary Kasparov. The star could easily be named after one of their new songs, 'Airbag' or 'Electioneering' or 'Lucky' or 'Karma Police' – songs which incidentally present a frightening ambiguity between arrogance and the possession of a unique vulnerability. The star could be named after 'No Surprises', because of its bitter beauty, its sliding paleness.
Let's call the star "Guitar", because they're all over the fourth dimensional shop. Greenwood and O'Brien seem to make up chord structures by looking at the sky at night, tracing the patterns of stars in the sky to produce notes and riffs and a variety of threats and shocks. Guitars fight free of gravity, fall to the ground, shatter into a thousand gleaming shards, support Yorke's sombre zest with careful unhidden disarray.
The guitars echo the things and presences which furnish the world, the guitars are a fluctuating matrix for intangible Verlainian energies, the guitars are guitars in the way that guitars are guitars and sometimes they're not.
One of the things I love about Radiohead is the way Yorke is buried soul deep in these drastic and radiant guitars. The star should be called 'Paranoid Android', not least because the first single off Radiohead's chronic masterpiece is seven-and-a-half minutes long, a 'Bohemian Rhapsody' for morbid introverts. It's full of eaten promise, and it's as close as a commercial pop song is ever likely to get to being a solar inversion of satanic denial. Beautifully speaking.
The star should be called "Yorke", because he is a star, like Celine, Chaplin and Herman of the Hermits, because his point of view is so ridiculously stretched between the mind's need for coherence and the incoherence of the world, and because his ideas clearly come to him as he walks.
The star could be called "Blighted".
If I had another two words to describe this album it would be "electric wind". Look, says this noise, at what electricity has done for us and to us.
One of the basic messages of this album is, "Love the beauty of speed." Radiohead, looking at times just like a rock group, are unhinged cybertravellers.
So where are Radiohead now, then, apart from being illuminated under the unforgettable big star that I have given to them, a star to guide you towards this tangled classic?
They are getting better than themselves, and show every sign of getting even better, which is no mean feat thinking about what they've already been up to.
They are beside themselves. They're hurrying into a perpetual vanishing. They're casually shrewdly making the kind of plagued absurdist action music that U2 are practically faking on Pop.
They're quite serious. They're English, British, European, American (West Coast and East Coast), Australian, a little bit Japanese and they're a flicker or two of something African.
Most of all, they haven't lost their nerve, and they're attacking the commercial world instead of submitting to its banal commercial pressures. They've turned left. They've turned themselves up.
Their promiscuity of sound sources, image sources and stylised sources releases a play of signs in which free association generates constantly shifting meanings.
If you've got the right kind of imagination, you'll laugh a little – to yourself of course – as well as cry, inwardly, with a wonder that such provocative approximation as this goes on, first of all, and then that it actually gets to Number One in the pop chart.
It must mean something.
I'll call the star "Five".
Goodbye.

[Steven88]

The Airborne Toxic Event - The Airborne Toxic Event 1.6
Lyrically moody, musically sumptuous, and dramatic, this L.A. band's debut has commercial prospects-- it shows a surface-level familiarity with early 00s critics lists.

Iprobably couldn't get anyone here in Los Angeles to admit it, but the city lacks a flasgship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way-- one both a little fresher than Spin cover stars Beck and Rilo Kiley and with more mainstream potential than the bands from the Smell. The onus would likely fall on the folkier, cuddlier Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene, but over the past three years it feels as if the area's bands have failed to rise to the occasion.

It's no surprise that many are betting the house on the Airborne Toxic Event-- their debut album is lyrically moody, musically sumptuous, and dramatic. Their name is even a transparent DeLillo reference, and every one of the 10 tracks sounds like it can be preceded with radio chatter. The Airborne Toxic Event have done their homework. But unless you're a certain French duo, homework rarely results in good pop music, and The Airborne Toxic Event is an album that's almost insulting in its unoriginality; while the sound most outsiders attribute to Los Angeles has been marginalized to Metal Skool and the average customer at the Sunset Boulevard Guitar Center, TATE embodies the Hollywood ideal of paying lip service to the innovations of mavericks while trying to figure out how to reduce it to formula.

Throughout, the Airborne Toxic Event show a surface-level familiarity with early 00s critics lists, but aren't able to convey what made those much-lauded recods emotionally resonant. Can't convert unthinkable tragedy into cathartic, absolutely alive music like Arcade Fire? Just steal the drum pattern from "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)"? Can't connect with the listener with the same fourth-wall busting intimacy as Bright Eyes? That's when you trot out the run-on sentences and get all tremulous when you mean it, man. And that's just the first song. Not privy to the Strokes' accidental poetry and concise songwriting? Get a distorted microphone. Want a hit as big as "Mr. Brightside", but take yourself too seriously to conjure a semblance of juicy melodrama? Grab a half-assed disco beat and boom, you're now ready to write the limpdicked cuckold behind "Does This Mean You're Moving On?"

And while it's understandable that a debut should owe such enormous debts, what really rankles is the unrelenting entitlement that assumes cred via sonic proximity-- it's the musical equivalent of showing up to a bar with a bad fake ID and throwing a hissy-fit when you get carded. While lead singer Mikel Jollett can alternately sound like Paul Banks, Win Butler, Conor Oberst, or Matt Berninger, what ties the LP together is quite possibly the most unlikeable lyric book of the year, rife with empty dramatic signifiers, AA/BB simplicity, and casual misogyny. If Social Distortion did Bruce Springsteen instead of callow Johnny Cash fan fic, you might get the lock-limbed anti-rock of "Gasoline", but my god-- "We were only 17/ We were holding back our screams/ Like we tore it from the pages of some lipstick magazine." Before you can comprehend just how clichéd and yet somehow meaningless that line is, by the next hook he's replaced "screams" with "dreams" and "lipstick" with "girlie," before he's "only 21 [and] not having any fun." Then something about "bullets from a gun."

If only that were the low point. It pains me to pan "Sometime Around Midnight" on concept alone because, man, we've all been there. Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before: There's a club if you'd like to go...except maybe when you go home and cry and want to die, and it reduces you to putting your thoughts on paper in rhyme form. The next morning, you thank god no one's seen it but you. The Airborne Toxic Event aren't so private, alas. As the ill-fated narrator sees his ladyfriend in a "white dress" "holding a tonic like a cross" while "a piano plays a melancholy soundtrack to her smile" (what bars do these guys go to?). He imagines holding her naked "like two perfect circles entwined." After five minutes pass, she leaves with "some man you don't know" and then your friends look at you "like you've seen a ghost." There's a possibility this is just a po-mo exercise, writing a song about writing a song about how some girl not wanting to fuck you is some sort of epic human calamity, but judging by the out-of-nowhere string section that opens the thing for the first minute, I doubt these guys are playing. It begins a stunning about-face that finds the band spending the rest of the record trying to be Jimmy Eat World.

In a way, The Airborne Toxic Event is something of a landmark record: This represents a tipping point where you almost wish Funeral or Turn on the Bright Lights or Is This It? never happened as long as it spared you from horrible imitations like this one, often sounding more inspired by market research than actual inspiration. Congrats, Pitchfork reader-- the Airborne Toxic Event thinks you're a demographic.




What a dick. It's a better album than anything Arcade Fire have ever put out, plus they wanked off over the '59 sound which came out around the same time which bored the shit out of me.

[The Crumb]

Autechre - Untilted

Absolute quality word-count stuffing this

(Sitting in the dormitory room just after class on Thursday, Achilles changes into his gym clothes as his roommate Tortoise bursts through their door in a fit of happiness.)

Tortoise: Achilles, have you seen this?

Achilles: What?

Tortoise: Do you see? Yes? I'm referring to the object, though small in size, quite interesting in stature, I am holding in front of you now.

Achilles: It's a CD.

Tortoise: Brilliant! I can see I have come to the right man.

Achilles: ...

Tortoise: Never one for suspense, I'll begin the next phase of our conversation: It is a new album from one of my country's most respected groups of musicians, Autechre.
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Achilles: Okay.

Tortoise: And I am holding it in my hands.

Achilles: Okay. Yeah, I heard a new one was coming out or something.

Tortoise: Or something indeed, for I think it may be their best. Better even than the fine Confield. Do you remember the one?

Achilles: Yeah, to be honest, I kinda stopped listening to them a few years back. I liked the first one, I think I liked EP7. I don't really remember much about it.

Tortoise: I would happily grant you a very big favor in return for a moment of your time as I explain to you my thoughts on this record. Might you humor me?

Achilles: Hey, hand that to me. Over here. Thanks. Yeah, whatever.

Tortoise: Thank you. For starters, it's called Untilted. Isn't that funny? "Un-til-ted." They really do have a good sense of humor, don't you think?

Achilles: Um, not really. It's kind of stupid.

Tortoise: Well, I think it's a decent title all the same. But funnier still, I will admit, is that it's comprised of eight letters.

Achilles: Oh shit, yeah, that's hilarious.

Tortoise: Which is to say, funny when I recall that their previous album's title was also comprised of exactly eight alphanumeric characters (not counting the colon, of course). As was the full length before that-- Confield. Don't you think that's strange?

Achilles: No.

Tortoise: And even stranger still, Autechre-- A-U-T-E-C-H-R-E-- has the identical number of characters. Why, when I happened upon this, I was struck by the similarity in form.

Achilles: Okay, way to go off the deep end. Are you going to tell me now that they're geniuses and I can learn trig faster by listening to them? I mean, what's funny is I might actually study to them more if I could hear a beat somewhere.

Tortoise: As it happens, I do believe they are masters of form. But then I also believe they are as instinctively driven as any other musician, if that's not a contradiction (and I don't necessarily believe it is). Take "Pro-Radii", the third track: It begins with pounding, industrial-machinery sounds, as if stomping through a foggy alley using meter-thick blocks of iron as shoe souls. Yet, it slowly mutates into something lighter, with stuttering snare and what sounds like a digital sitar drone in the background.

Achilles: You sound like a critic.

Tortoise: And I haven't even gotten to the punchline! As it changes into something even further removed from the weighty opening, as eerie overtones ring above the pinging, metallic percussion, I realize the piece has arrived at this point in segments, lengthy and subtle, but obviously delineated to be sure. This, or course, is exactly the same scheme much of the dance music-- that with a "beat"-- follows. Measure by measure, units of 8, 16, 32, 64-- it proceeds formally, yet changes its "colors" quite unpredictably.

Achilles: Hey, hand me my bag.

Tortoise: And the first piece, "Lcc"--

Achilles: haha

Tortoise: --"Lcc", with its rapid-fire artillery precision, tight snare, and clear, metered rhythm, could easily be mistaken for dance music. In fact, I'd move some limbs for you, but would hate to influence your judgment negatively.

Achilles: Next.

Tortoise: Achilles, if you'd listen, you'd hear that the beat you are looking for is here, and an especially well-put-together one at that. Autechre are rightfully accused of being influenced by hip-hop, even as I imagine a rapper laying behind the beat might find himself on the wrong side of "1" from time to time.

Achilles: So, you're saying it's got an interesting beat as long as you don't expect any kind of groove. And you know what? It's not even like I'm turning to Autechre for "grooves." Where the fuck did all the cool IDM even go? Like three years ago, you couldn't stop finding cool shit, shit that nobody'd ever heard before.

Tortoise: I'm saying that interest is found where you are sufficiently motivated to look. "Fermium" would fit perfectly in the Berlin mix you made for your nephew. A little busier, perhaps, but...

Achilles: Oh man, I forgot I was supposed to copy that for that board chick. Fuck, hey, can I use your computer? The library's closed today.

Tortoise: The point is, despite their abstraction over the last few years, Autechre aren't an altogether different beast than when they started. In fact, they're smarter, more refined.

Achilles: Look, I'll grant you they sound more complicated, but so the fuck what? I mean, I heard Draft 7:30. I liked it at first, until I realized all this form and content or whatever you're talking about is totally transparent. Dance music? Come on man, you need a more than "beat" to make dance music. If anything, I think they're out of ideas; throwing in a bunch of random shit to hide the fact that they peaked about seven years ago.

Tortoise: My point is, I am still moved by this music. Not just the form, not just the hidden beats and seemingly chaotic shifts in meter. I believe artists are those who instinctively recognize the ways of things, and translate them in ways ultimately true to their spirit. Ours is a "seemingly chaotic" world, but underneath the maze of people and opinions, there is order, truth, and beauty. And maybe, just maybe, Autechre have the rare gift of showing us just where we stand, turbulence and all.

Achilles: And my point is, if it's driven by form, it's a pretty messy, lazy form-- certainly no more structurally sound than any other software wank music. On top of that, if I'm supposed to "feel" this, to pick up on some obscure metaphysical in-joke, I'm not-- isn't it the job of a good artist to make that shit clear? Either way, it fails for me. Autechre decided to go their own way, fine, you know, just don't expect me to call them "geniuses."

Tortoise: [Sigh] Alright, Achilles, I can see we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm sorry to have wasted your time.

Achilles: Oh don't worry, dude, just wear headphones when you play that stuff.

[McChesney Duntz]

I think a moratorium should be declared on all Pitchfork reviews in this thread. The place was largely insufferable until the mid-oughts; no need to be reminded of those dreadful days.

How about a legendary review, one cited (and quoted extensively) by Lester Bangs in his printed eulogy and most recently in the title of a song on the new Mountain Goats album? Here's the late great Peter Laughner on Lou Reed's Coney Island Baby...

This album made me so morose and depressed when I got the advance copy that I stayed drunk for three days. I didn't go to work. I had a horrible physical fight with my wife over a stupid bottle of 10 mg. Valiums. (She threw an ashtray, a brick, and a five foot candelabra at me, but I got her down and sat on her chest and beat her head on the wooden floor.)

I called up the editor of this magazine (on my bill) and did virtually nothing but cough up phlegm in an alcoholic stupor for three hours, wishing somewhere in the back of my deadened brain that he could give me a clue as to why I should like this record.

I came on to my sister-in-law "C'mon over and gimme head while I'm passed out." I cadged drinks off anyone who would come near me or let me into their apartments. I ended up the whole debacle passing out stone cold after puking and pissing myself at a band rehearsal, had to be kicked awake by my lead singer, was driven home by my long-suffering best friend and force fed by his old lady who could still find it in the boundless reaches of her good heart to smile on my absolutely incorrigible state of dissolution...I willed her all of my wordly goods before dropping six Valiums (and three vitamin B complexes, so I must've figured to wake up, or at least at the autopsy they would say my liver was OK). Well, wake up I did, after sleeping sixteen hours, and guess what was running through my head, along with the visual images of flaming metropolises and sinking ocean liners foaming and exploding in vast whirling vortexes of salt water...

"Watch out for Charlie's girl...
She'll turn ya in...doncha know... 
Ya gotta watch out for Charlie's girl..."

Which is supposed to be the single off Coney Island Baby and therefore may be a big hit if promoted right, 'cause it's at least as catchy as "Saturday Night"...if they can just get four cute teens to impersonate Lou Reed.

Now, when I was younger, the Velvet Underground meant to me what the Stones, Dylan, etc. meant to thousands of other midwestern teen mutants. I was declared exempt from the literary curriculum of my upper class suburban high school simply because I showed the English department a list of books I'd glanced through while obsessively blasting White Light/White Heat on the headphones of my parents' stereo. All my papers were manic droolings about the parallels between Lou Reed's lyrics and whatever academia we were supposed to be analyzing in preparation for our passage into the halls of higher learning. "Sweet Jane" I compared with Alexander Pope, "Some Kinda Love" lined right up with T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men"...plus I had a rock band and we played all these songs, fueled pharmaceutically by our bassist who worked as a delivery boy for a drugstore and ripped off an entire gallon jar full of Xmas trees and brown & clears. In this way I cleverly avoided all intellectual and creative responsibilities at the cleavage of the decades (I did read all the Delmore Schwartz I could steal from local libraries, because of that oblique reference on the 1st Velvets LP). After all, a person with an electric guitar and access to obscurities like "I saw my head laughing, rolling on the ground" had no need of creative credentials...there was the rail-thin, asthmatic editoress of our school poetry mag, there was the unhappily married English teacher who drove me home and elsewhere in her Corvette...there were others (the girl who began to get menstrual cramps in perfect time to the drums in "Sister Ray"). Who needed the promise of college and career? Lou Reed was my Woody Guthrie, and with enough amphetamine I would be the new Lou Reed!

I left home. I wandered to the wrong coast. (Can you imagine trying to get people in Berkeley, California to listen to Loaded in 1971? Although maybe they all grew up and joined Earthquake...) When Lou's first solo album came out, I drove hundreds of miles to play it for ex-friends sequestered at small exclusive midwest colleges listening to the Dead and Miles Davis. Everyone from my high school band had gone on to sterling careers as psych majors, botanical or law students, or selling and drinking for IBM (Oh yeah except the drummer became a junkie and had a stroke and now he listens to Santana). All the girls I used to wow into bed with drugs and song married guys who were just like their brothers and moved to Florida or Chicago, leaving their copies of Blonde on Blonde and White Light in some closet along with the reams of amphetamine driven poetry I'd forced on them over the years. By the time Metal Machine Music came out, I'd lost all contact. The only thing that saved me from total dissolution over the summer of '75 was hearing Television three nights in a row and seeing The Passenger.

So all those people will probably never pay any attention to Coney Island Baby, and even if they did it wouldn't do much for what's left of their synapses. The damn thing starts out exactly like an Eagles record! And with the exception of "Charlie's Girl" which is mercifully short and to the point, it's a downhill slide. "My Best Friend" is a six year old Velvets outtake which used to sound fun when it was fast and Doug Yule sang lead. Here it dirges along at the same pace as "Lisa Says" but without the sexiness. You could sit and puzzle over the voiceovers on "Kicks" but you won't find much (isn't it cute, the sound of cocaine snorting, and is that an amyl popping in the left speaker?). Your headphones would be better utilized experiencing Patti Smith's brilliant triple-dubbed phantasmagoria on Horses.

Side two starts off with the WORST thing Reed has ever done, this limp drone self-scam where he goes on about being "a gift to the women of this world" (in fact this whole LP reminds me of the junk you hear on the jukeboxes at those two-dollar-a-beer stewardess pickup bars on 1st Ave. above 70th). There's one pick up point, "Oo-ee Baby" with the only good line on the record "your old man was the best B&E man down on the street," but then this Ric Von Schmidt rip-off which doesn't do anything at all.

Finally there's "Coney Island Baby." Just maudlin, dumb, self pity: "Can you believe I wann'd t'play football for th' coach"...Sure, Lou, when I was all uptight about being a fag in high school, I did too. Then it builds slightly, Danny Weiss tossing in a bunch of George Benson licks, into STILL MORE self pity about how it's tough in the city and the glory of Love will see you through. Maybe. Dragged out for six minutes.

Here I sit, sober and perhaps even lucid, on the sort of winter's day that makes you realize a New Year is just around the corner and you've got very little to show for it, but if you are going to get anything done on this planet, you better pick it up with both hands and DO IT YOURSELF. But I got the nerve to say to my old hero, hey Lou, if you really mean that last line of "Coney Island Baby": "You know I'd give the whole thing up for you," then maybe you ought to do just that.

[chveik]

dunno i really like that album and i find "Coney Island Baby" pretty devastating

[Egyptian Feast]

Autechre - Untilted

Absolute quality word-count stuffing this

Reading that bad Autechre review has brought to mind another, NME's 'review' of Gantz Graf:

Autechre records are purchased solely by bald men in expensive anoraks who would masturbate to a car alarm if it was re-mixed by a German. This impenetrable curtain of misanthropic noise – released with an accompanying three-track DVD that features a squabble of hopelessly pretentious video "interpretations" – is typical of the menopausal electro-manglers' dogged refusal to bow to convention and produce anything of interest to anyone not either a) bald or b) German. It bleeps. It skronks. It krrraaaanks. But mainly, it blows like a ruddy awful hurricane. Remember, kids; if it sounds like a festering hillock of tune-shy bum-wank, it's because it IS a festering hillock of tune-shy bum-wank. Avoid as you would a bald German.

[turnstyle]

Pitchfork Jet Shine On Monkey Piss Mouth Cheers

[Pauline Walnuts]

Can't argue with

Autechre records are purchased solely by bald men in expensive anoraks

[PaulTMA]

Sebadoh
Harmacy
[Sub Pop]
Rating: 8.9

"My opinion could change today / I'm responsible anyway..."

So opens the new Sebadoh record, and I swear they get better with every release. Lyrically and musically, these guys are rocking my damn house down. Harmacy is 19 tracks of pure musical genius from the beautiful melancholy of the opening track, "On Fire," to the upbeat-ness of the hit single, "Ocean," to the clever throbbing headache that is "Crystal Gypsy" and... well, everything.

Lo-fi indie rock is probably the greatest thing since ejaculation, and I'm not taking any chances. I'm loving it full-on. Show no mercy. No holds barred. Full-on, baby. I mean, come on! Home recordings of people mixing the pop sounds of '60s with the firey glam-rock of the '70s! What's not to love? And Sebadoh clearly stand out as indie rock champs along with other home tapers like Guided By Voices and Jack Logan. These are the guys that are going down in history as The Real Shit. Harmacy just further proves Sebadoh are among the rulers of the rock-n-roll wetdream they call "independence."

-Ryan Schreiber

[PaulTMA]

Jim O'Rourke
Halfway to a Threeway EP
[Drag City]
Rating: 8.0

Last March, I had the opportunity to interview Chicago uber-producer Jim O'Rourke at his place of residence. I snatched it up. While I wasn't nuts about his latest release, Eureka, I was a fan of his other albums, his production techniques, and his collaborations with David Grubbs as Gastr Del Sol. That I finally had the chance to meet and talk with O'Rourke seemed a great honor.

The interview went smoothly enough. We talked about his fascination with Japanese artist Mimiyo Tomozawa (whose actually- pretty- gross artwork adorned the cover of Eureka), Portuguese artist Nuno Canavarro, O'Rourke's work on the then- forthcoming Stereolab, Superchunk and Aluminum Group LPs, among other things. Later, O'Rourke asked what I thought of Eureka. I told him I thought it was pretty good, which I did, for the most part. (The album had its share of great tracks along with its share of mediocrity.) We moved on.

Later that day, Jim logged onto Pitchfork to read what I'd said about Eureka. If you'll recall (and if you don't, the review is in the archive), the review was about how I was disappointed in the album because I knew that O'Rourke was capable of better things. In fact, I went out of my way to say that the album had some genuinely awesome moments. Sadly, Jim took the review very personally, and is apparently unwilling to discuss the issue any further, as he no longer responds to my e-mails.

What a sad shock it is to meet someone you have a tremendous respect for and realize that they're not exactly the person you hoped they might be. Of course, now I come at Jim O'Rourke's albums from a different perspective-- I still respect him as one of the great musicians of late '90s, but I have very little respect for him as a person.

That said, Halfway to a Threeway succeeds where Eureka failed. (Maybe Jim actually took my advice.) Threeway trims away the saccharine Bacharach stylings and aimless experimentalism flaunted by Eureka, opting instead for beautifully arranged orchestral pop and lighter- than- air percussion. The opening track, "Fuzzy Sun," does bear more than just a passing resemblence to Eureka's standout track "Ghost Ship in a Storm," grabbing a bar or two from that track's melody, but O'Rourke works enough magic in to make the song its own hummable entity.

It's followed by the summery instrumental "Not Sport, Martial Art," whose intertwining guitars and muted horns recall a less artsy Tortoise, and reflects O'Rourke's work on Sam Prekop's solo debut. But the EP concludes with what is arguably some of Jim's best material to date-- "The Workplace" is a musically autumnal ode to an office enviroment with playful lyrics ("Women look good here/ With their suits on/ It suits them"), and the gorgeous meloncholy title track, a gently- strummed acoustic ballad that beats even Archer Prewitt's stellar "I'll Be Waiting" at its own game.

Listening to Halfway to a Threeway reminds me what a complete shame it is that Jim O'Rourke's kneejerk reaction to my review of Eureka should spoil what comraderie we might have had when crossing paths at local venues. It won't ruin my appreciation for the bulk of his catalog.

-Ryan Schreiber

[chveik]

if you're after some exceptionally dumb reviews, head over to Christgau's websites. the guy's a grade A jerk

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Does the Schrieber Miles Davis review still exist online?

[Shaky]

I suppose the following lives and dies by how much you can stand Paul Morley's prose but for those who like him, I feel there have been few opportunities for Paul to really wax lyrically over the last decade.

His Guardian 'live review' of Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' is a good fit for this topic but arguably his OK Computer review reaches peak levels of incomprehensible nonsense to the point that even I, a fanboy, accept defeat halfway through.

Jesus Christ. Reminds me why I couldn't make any headway with his Bowie book either.

[madhair60]

shit sandwich

[dissolute ocelot]

I agreed with all of these till that guy liked Sebadoh's Harmacy.

It's weird how you go on Wikipedia and look at the summaries of reviews in the little boxes, and albums you know lots of people hated at the time (e.g. Dog Man Star) are all 8/10 and 5 stars. Censorship!

Anyway, here's Nik Cohn on Abbey Road.

The badness ranges from mere gentle tedium to cringing embarrassment. The blues, for instance, is horribly out of tune, and Ringo's ditty is purest Mickey Mouse. The only interesting failures are two numbers by John Lennon, ``Come Together'' and ``Oh! Darling.''

As it stands, ``Abbey Road'' isn't tremendous. Still, it has 15 fine minutes and, by rock standards, that's a lot.

[Famous Mortimer]

I agreed with all of these till that guy liked Sebadoh's Harmacy.

I'm just playing it at the moment, as I don't think I've listened to since it was released, and...I don't know. It's of its time, probably?

[kngen]

It's weird how you go on Wikipedia and look at the summaries of reviews in the little boxes, and albums you know lots of people hated at the time (e.g. Dog Man Star) are all 8/10 and 5 stars. Censorship!

Anyway, here's Nik Cohn on Abbey Road.

Speaking of Beatlesy things, I don't think there's ever been revisionism on quite the scale of Double Fantasy's critical reception. Panned when it came out, but then Mark Chapman popped up and did his thing, and a lot of the big papers (both music and broadsheets) spiked their scathing reviews, and it was all over the critics' choice lists at the end of year (which was only three weeks later of course).

Cowards.