Pitchfork Rebuttal No. 6: Pinback's 'Blue Screen Life'

One of my confreres here at Something Vexes brought up the fact that amidst the wide concourse of album reviews posted at Pitchfork Media, there just isn't much of what we like. Sure, I realize we're different people with superior taste and knowledge in music, and if we could run that excrable website our way, we'd just delete the account altogether.

But the difference in mentality doesn't excuse their knack for misunderstanding a band's/artist's work to the point where a staff writer goes longwind on a hairbrained critique, which thousands and thousands of young idiots (they don't have to be idiots, though!) will adopt as their own, personal views on the matter. Music taste is subjective. We know that. But reviewers out of their elements claiming authority over an album on first kiss just doesn't make a grain of sense. Give something simple, like Chuck Berry's St. Louis to Liverpool, to a neglected Somalian teen and have him write a critical view on the music and its intentions; see what you get, then. That's a wild exaggeration, I know, but you see my point: You can't get sex tips from a newborn.

Going back to the call that there just isn't much at Pitchfork we, here, can get into, we're left to defend abused works of the underground's upper crust (the staff writers don't look much deeper than that). This time it's Pinback's not-bad-at-all full-length, Blue Screen Life (Ace Fu, 2001).

In the silliest of assertions, reviewer David M. Pecoraro pins (harhar) band members Rob Crow and Armistead Burwell Smith IV (an unnecessary name, I'll admit) as going "emo," picking, specifically Jimmy Eat World as influence.

But first, well, here's how the review tees off:

Did I miss something here? Is emo the next big thing?

No? Then I'm totally stumped. How else can you explain so many excellent bands turning whiny all of a sudden? First Death Cab for Cutie, now Pinback. I swear, if the new Flaming Lips album so much as mentions heartbreak, I'm going to shoot myself.

Pecoraro has, very early into this review, flashed us with a laminant devoid of any credentials through his fairly fingerless grasp on "emo," making it also safe to assume he's a reader of Spin Magazine. But, but, but I guess I can't assume that too early: I'd be a hypocrite! I don't want to claim I know what he's all about.

But--

Aside from his cute misunderstanding of the word "emo" and his application of it to anything dealing with love and heartbreak, he cites Death Cab For Cutie as another group to slip in the sap. Was DCFC a ragin' rock band at birth? AC/DC-type stuff or something? DC/FC? Meanwhile it's hipsters like Pecoraro (am I assuming too much?) that laud classic country singers and portend fandom of their wrenching songs of love and loss (which is, by the way, great stuff, but I don't buy everyone's applause--seems too convenient to like that stuff these days).

I'll grant his saying "I'm going to shoot myself" as sarcasm, though cheap and predictable.

Movin' on, here's his next chunk:

For the sake of total disclosure, I'll admit the following. There was a period of about six months when I was kind of into emo. Back then, those off-kilter repetitious chords meant enough to me that it didn't matter that they never changed. And something about the way the singers tried so for harmony but never quite made it hit me hard. And then, somewhere along the line, I grew up. Ambition supplanted self-loathing, and with each passing day I had less of a place for emo. I watched as, completely independent of my own musical evolution, the same thing happened to most of my friends. The days of pumping the volume and getting all cathartic to the Get Up Kids were gone. Nowadays when we hung out, we all kicked back in our La-Z-Boys, chillin' to Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto.

I don't understand his tense in that last sentence, but whatever. The Get Up Kids are his frame of reference for "emo" music. And he's attaching their stylings to Pinback. Because of common instances of heartbroken lyric writing. I mean, that's the commonality he's pinpointing (harhar) right? I mean, they sound nothing like eachother. So it's the subject matter, which he identifies in his opening bit.

If you don't see where I'm going with this, then here: Pinback and Willie Nelson and Elvis Presley and Elvis Costello and every blues musician there ever was are all, evidently, emo. Emo is one of the most strained copout terms in all of music journalism. And aside from the purists who deem Rites of Spring and Embrace and such as emo proper, no one can boast a definition.

Okay, so after he quotes a few lines of sentiment from Blue Screen Life, he's all like:

This happens a lot on Blue Screen Life. "X I Y," "Prog," "Tres" and "Your Sickness" all have long, dragged-out, whiny vocals that sound a hell of a lot like Mr. Lucky Denver Mint. Not only is the sound unoriginal, but it also leaves me wondering: of all the people in our rich musical heritage that Zach and Crow could've ripped off, why the fuck would they choose Jimmy Eat World?

He sounds pretty positive that Jimmy Eat World is the turning point for Pinback's lyrical (and perhaps musical) direction, rather than say there's a perhaps innocent similiary that turned him off. He also condemns it for its alleged unoriginality, but using Jimmy Eat World as the diving board is pretty darn funny. It infers that Jimmy Eat World are a world their own, without acknowledging that Jimmy Eat World is open about borrowing heavily from Christie Front Drive.

After smiling on a few moments that resemble Pinback's earlier, less "emo" songs, Pecoraro drops his gavel and deems Blue Screen Life "fucking boring," and that "nothing grabs [his] attention." Weird, I had assumed otherwise based on his review. "All the songs sound alike," he then says. But, but, wait--aren't some songs good, like their earlier material? And some songs lean to emo-dom? Didn't you just say that, Pecoraro? Coulda sworn.

But that's nit-picky. I'll let that go. What I will comment on is what he kicks up next:

Frankly, I wouldn't recommend this to fans of Hey Mercedes any more than I would to those who run screaming at the first mention of the word Kinsella.

Dude, you're misleading everyone! Whether you like the work or not, don't infer a connection with the sound or subject of Hey Mercedes. They're completely different. Drastically. Black and white. McDonalds and Outback Steakhouse. Kinsella? Closer, but which Kinsella? And what band? He's making a generalization about fans of the Kinsella fold, but altogether a weak call. 'Uninspired,' some would say. Speaking of which, here's Pecoraro's closer:

It seems sad to me that a perfectly good pop group would deliberately choose to emo-fy themselves, even though I concede that it's all just a matter of personal taste. But even sadder is a perfectly good pop group putting out an album as boring and uninspired as Blue Screen Life. Come on, guys, really.

He saves himself an inch or two by acknowledging "personal taste," but it comes a bit late after a length of lambasting Pinback for supposedly making a voluntary, intentional move to "emo," instead of an INSPIRED progression away from their earlier sound--and I might add that had Pinback repeated themselves for Blue Screen Life, some horn-rim from Pitchfork would've said something like, "They're just one trick ponies, unable to pull themselves from the sound of their debut album, therefore they're just uninspired."