Pitchfork Rebuttal No. 4: Party of Helicopters' 'Mt. Forever'

Several times already we've charged Pitchfork Media with allowing writers out of their respective elements to review and misapprehend solid and deliberate works of music. To review and critique is one fair thing, yeah, but to misidentify a group's intention(s) and base a foul-ball argument on such to a legion of impressionable readers is some real crap.

I wonder if Pitchfork writer John Dark even gave listen to the Party of Helicopters' divine Mt. Forever before shanking it with a 4.5 out of 10 rating, because, well--his critique was daffy (not to mention it being launched off one of the silliest, most desperate intro paragraphs I've read on the site--check out how he connects his analogy to the Party of Helicopter's sound--hilarious).

But okay. To start with, Dark asserts the less-than-half truth that the Party of Helicopters are a metal band. Not the kinda-sorta metal-guitar-riff-here'n'there-that-suits-their-completely-non-metal-foundation-quite-nicely kind of sound that it is--Dark actually misreads their music as "efforts to reinvent metal."

"They [don't] though," he makes clear. "Their liberties don't amount to much and neither are they convincingly presented."

I guess the best way to deflate Dark's initial boner is to just let him know, nicely, that such isn't the intention of Mt. Forever nor the band that authored it. It just--well, it just isn't.

Guitarist Jamie Stillman digs metal and classic rock, and that's pretty apparent in his playing. But how about J. Mascis and Dino Jr? Or Stephen Eggerton of the All/Descendents fam? Classic metal licks are embedded in abundance across the rock'n'roll plane, and there are a great number of examples to cite. While that's goin' down, the Party of Helicopters have tastefully added that dynamic to the style of music the members had already been playing in the '90s in bands like Harriet the Spy and the Man I Fell In Love With--both of which were pretty advanced for their scene and era.

That brings us to the next bit of funny business with Dark's perception of the Party of Helicopters and its members. Read this:

Sadly, a dash of flat-toned countermelodies and unaligned harmonies aren't exactly grand innovations, even in metal, where new ideas are subject to the same kind of trickle-down cultural delay that causes places like Des Moines, Iowa and [POH's hometown] Kent, Ohio to get "new" fashion trends four years after New York (and six after Milan).

Besides the metal blooper, Dark assumes Stillman and company to be late on cool ideas, waiting in ignorance like 21st century analog boys in Billabong jackets until music trends that have already been disowned in the Big City are able to footloose their ways over. Well, alls I gotta say to that is: dude, check out Harriet the Spy and weigh them against the indie/emo horse hockey NYC and other big cities were enjoying at the time--and today.

Next up:

The Party of Helicopters' tendency to overreach is a shame, really, because their consistently intriguing metal is often undermined by too-earnest efforts at creating a self-styled signature sound.

Weird. Pitchfork's whippits of innovation-pleas have really dusted their skulls. I thought they LOVED bands with supposed "self-styled signature sound[s]." Dark must be the bad-boy of the gang.

Beyond this distance in the review, Dark really doesn't have anything else to say, other than that he digs the songs at the end of the disc that lay off the riffin', which is funny because it's comprised of only eight songs total. Oh, and he gets silly again with that aforementioned analogy.

But let's crunch it down. The Party of Helicopters (RIP), was a more guitar-centered version of the members' past groups. An out-of-his-element music writer at Pitchfork Media doesn't even mention these important, beloved bands. He just readily assumes the Party of Helicopters to be a gang of bored, unexposed kids who sat around the thrift store waiting for their sound to arrive, like a Turbo Grafix 16. He also says their reinvention of metal failed. I guess that bag of Doritos I had the other day failed to deliver a tangy apple flavor.



That's cool though.