I never said I haven’t – i just am not arrogant enough to expect people to pay money to hear me mumble into my four track tape recorder, signing off on a shakey take as ‘good enough’. It’s not like Neutral Milk Hotel charge less for the privilege of buying their albums due to their diminished effort in recording, but it will cost you the same amount of money as something that was immaculately produced, such as ‘Spilt Milk’ by Jellyfish.

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There is a reason the expression “You can’t polish a turd” exists. You can produce something to an inch of it’s life but if you’re working with crap thats all you’re going to end up with.
You need the base ingredients to be good in the first place. You can polish Jellyfish as much as you want but they’re still singularly uninteresting with particularly sub-par and derivative hooks.. and I’m a fan of harmonised hooks, falsetto and general pop pomp (even highly derivative, as long as the songwriting is strong).

I’d rather listen to say.. God Only Knows (as an example of a well produced song) that was recorded on a 4 track by playing the original on cassette tape in a working laundromat.. than, say the subject in question here – the Black Kids if Eno or whoever spent 6 months recording the album in several billion bits per second 5th generation digital recording.
It’s the songwriting that matters. Any idiot can string a few chords together and pay top dollar to get it produced well. There is a reason it’s so rare to find a good new band, it’s because even the greats can’t consistently hit the jackpot when it comes to pulling something as ephemeral as an demonstratably great hook/song from the ether.

I liked two songs of the ep, found them severely lacking live, and don’t like the recorded versions.

I think the 3.3 is scaling the 8.4 down to reflect the 4 songs out of 10 on this album that came from the lp. They are saying that the rest deserves a 0, harsh. Then again, not much worse than what some people hear have said since CMJ.

This is logically what is best for everyone, because no two people on earth will have the same taste in music, so it’s pointless me recommending anything for you and vice-versa, so why people put any faith in record reviews is beyond me, especially when most good albums take 8-10 spins to appreciate and reviews are often written after 1 or 2.

If I’ve long ago dismissed sources like the NME and Rolling Stone, then Pitchfork never stood a chance, especially with a truly obnoxious combination of an excessive pump ‘n’ dump hype cycle; pretentious wanna-be ‘gonzo’ reviews by reviewers with little life experience; and a depressingly narrow worldview of what constitutes good music:

1) A couple of college students play basic triad chords on guitar over rock beat whilst namedropping the same influences everyone else names, and just sound a bit like an inferior version of a band you heard in 1981, without the hooks.

2) Same thing, but with added accordion, toy piano and tape distortion to be a little ‘weird’ and ‘old timey’ like ‘the Basement Tapes’, with bonus ‘Ironic’ amateurish playing that co-incidentally also disguises actual amateurish playing.

3) Some collective with 8-10 superfluous members all playing constantly en masse with no sense of dynamics and vanishing into an overcompressed mix.

4) ‘Ironic’ 80′s Electro with Casiotones – this was tired when Regurgitator put out ‘Unit’ in 1996.

5) Lo-fi art noise stuff people claim to like to prove they’re smart enough to appreciate it.

you totally free of entitlement and have never once been guilty of underachieving.

I never said I haven’t – i just am not arrogant enough to expect people to pay money to hear me mumble into my four track tape recorder, signing off on a shakey take as ‘good enough’. It’s not like Neutral Milk Hotel charge less for the privilege of buying their albums due to their diminished effort in recording, but it will cost you the same amount of money as something that was immaculately produced, such as ‘Spilt Milk’ by Jellyfish.

in other news, i just can NOT get into No Age. they are influenced by many bands i love dearly, and i can’t point to any one thing they do to desecrate or be unworthy of those influences. they even seem like nice guys, which i’ve come to not really expect from young bands (it’s all “cool” to be a complete dick now, you know). i’m just having a really hard time enjoying their music very much.

i mean, i haven’t seen a ton of blog posts on ponytail or black mountain, although i could be sensitive about that because i’m really into both those albums.

The point being that we can all just get along by reading fewer blogs and watching more music videos. A lot more. And support yr local music scene etc. etc.

As somebody subject to about as little entitlement as you can get in the good ol’ US of A, my listening habits have been equally shaped by 1) actually hearing said music in question and 2) random encounters made possible by sites like Pitchfork. (And Idolator.)

Not to defend Pitchfork, but: I am all crazed and excited about Free Blood right now, who arrived unnoticed by me but who I found out about by virtue of seeing their video on Pitchfork.tv. Maybe I would’ve found them eventually but maybe not.

Really? Never? I find that hard to believe that you have never been influenced by Pitchfork at some point.

I’m sure you have perfect taste and that are you totally free of entitlement and have never once been guilty of underachieving.

I call bullshit.

“After a well-received EP, Jacksonville’s Black Kids release a Bernard Butler-produced debut that surprisingly hit the Top 5 in the UK”

As all elitist music twat knows, any sign of mainstream popularity means it’s time to hide a band’s records.

Pitchfork’s recommendations are the sound of entitled american college students underachieving. I’ve yet to be turned onto anything impressive by them, let alone vital.

PUG LIFE stomach tat.

I couldn’t believe it when Black Kids were touring in support of a mediocre 6-song EP, but I paid too much to see them play anyway. After that show, I was back-peddling too.