Pitchfork Rebuttal No. 3: Cinemechanica's "The Martial Arts"

I can safely speak in truth when I say all of us here at Something Vexes have enjoyed nearly every minute of recorded output from this Athens, Ga. four-or-five-or-six piece (depending on what night you catch them on) rock band. They're inventive, they're monster players, they're super nice guys (and gal), and they understand that for all their chops, a good song is not based on how many notes they can cram into a musical passage (and it's quite few with these guys). They're just as apt to dazzle you with a break-neck math song structure as they are to make your head bob by kicking into a fist-pumping Sabbath-style groove. It's good stuff.
So, of course, the talentless hacks over at Pitchfork Media went and missed the point by spending four agonizing, wordy paragraphs trying to figure out how to label what I'd simply call an awesome rock band. To give reviewer Cory D. Byrom some credit, he did rate the album at an impressive 7.5 out of 10, showing a rare convergence of quality music and the misguided-at-best opinions of Pitchfork's self-important review staff. But then he. Well. I'm not sure what he did.

Genre labels have become so divided and sub-divided over the years that it's virtually impossible to identify a band's style without resorting to comparisons, vague descriptions, or complex strings of abbreviated, one-syllable tags to offer a general idea of the various styles a band might be dabbling in. Forget simple terms like rock, punk, or hardcore; we've already soared past to post-rock, post-punk, and what seems like a never-ending list of "-cores."

Athens, Georgia's Cinemechanica are a product of this sort of puzzling problem. As I listen to the nine tracks on their debut full length, The Martial Arts, reference points flash from all over the place.

Okay, so he uses quite a few too many words to point out that this is a unique band. And the review takes a promising turn when Byrom starts dropping a few names for reference. Doing that can be a cop-out, but I'd rather hear him mention Don Caballero, Q And Not U, and Drive Like Jehu than insult his readers by throwing terms such as "brooding bass lines," "chaotic chords" and "screamed vocals." Oh, wait, he did exactly that.
Following up, he jumped into a throwaway paragraph where he did that rock-writing cliche thing. You know the one, the one where he identifies each member of the band and lists their instrument. It made my nuts shrink into my belly for a little while:

Along with Joel Hatstat's bass, drummer Mike Albanese's frantic beats create a powerful rhythm section that, despite being in constant motion, leaves room for Andy Pruett and Bryant Williamson to interweave their dizzying guitar lines in the foreground.

The last line of the review drove me the most nuts, though:

Hell, if not for the straightforward instrumentation and the brevity of the songs-- the average length is about three minutes-- even prog-rock could be a descriptor. But really, genre labels rarely aptly describe the bands they're attached to, and they certainly do little to explain the spastic, razor-sharp music on The Martial Arts.

Well, Cory, neither do you.