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."

Pitchfork Rebuttal No. 5: Bats and Mice "Believe It, Mammals"

I found another "gem" in Pitchfork Media's review archive today when I stumbled across this piece, in which Alison Fields, who may be the most self-aware of Pitchfork's reviewers that I've had the pleasure of reading, basically talked about herself throughout her entire review of a damn fine album before slapping it with a six-out-of-ten and then going off to do whatever asshole hipsters like her do.

Fields spends way too long talking about the Sleepytime Trio, a loud-as-hell rager of a band that preceded Bats and Mice and included two of its members, (she also mentions that she lived in the town where the label that released their records got its start, and that she went to like, all of their shows in college but doesn't really dig that anymore now, and that she had a totally wack haircut back then) and then laments the fact that Bats and Mice doesn't sound a whole lot like them.

There's not a single instance of extended clanging, shattering guitar, fuzzy, unintelligible samples, or vicious yelping on the whole album.

Well, duh, it was four or five fucking years later. Bands change. Musicians do different things. If these guys had made a Sleepytime Trio album, Fields probably would have written a review about how done "that sound" is instead of longing for it.

But a couple of grafs down, she writes that the album's opener "erupts into a considerable amount of screaming and dissonance at the chorus.

All I can really do here is hold down the 'shift' button on my keyboard and then push the 'forward slash' button. When I do that, it makes this symbol:

?

She also gives the band a few points for their "consistency."

Again: ?

The most puzzling part is how easily Fields could have discovered that Bats and Mice weren't really meant to sound a whole lot like the work of the members previous bands. How could she have done that? Well, for starters, she could have familiarized herself with their back catalogue. Sure, the only thing Bats and Mice released prior to "Believe It, Mammals" was a three-song ep that didn't make a whole lot of heads turn despite its fairly solid nature. But how could Fields have known that, or what it mapped out as far as a sound for the band? Well, she could have read this review of it, which appeared in the publication she works for and which I found by using the web site's simple search feature.

I don't know.

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.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you

Fuck all of you.

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.

Pitchfork Rebuttal No. 2: Challenger's 'Give the People What They Want In Lethal Doses'

Famous for missing the point, Pitchfork Media yet again demonstrated an inability to submit a substantial argument in a review of Challenger's 2004 record, Give the People What They Want In Lethal Doses, which they gave a 5.6 out of 10 rating.

The review, written by Amanda Petrusich in 2004, bears the following intro:

It's always been kinda impossible to isolate the defining ethos of punk rock, but over the course of the last twenty-five years, the genre has been kicked over, dismantled and reinvented so many times that the term itself has devolved into little more than a hip euphemism for "obnoxious." In 2004, dubbing a band "punk" and walking away is, essentially, a completely meaningless exercise.

And thanks for a completely meaningless intro. If it's useless to argue the meaning of punk in that countless bands have stretched the genre's supposed foundations to a blur, why try? And why base the rest of the argument on Challenger's use of "hammering drums, loud guitars, [and] shouting," as signifiers of punk "ethos"? Can there even be a particular punk ethos? Did the Ramones roll out a mission statement? Was Johnny Ramone not a progressive right winger? Does every punk band use the same formula? C'mon. You can't argue the ethos of a genre; only of its bands. Plus, I thought "hammering drums, loud guitars, [and] shouting" were just standards of rock'n'roll.

Anyway, she goes onto say that Challenger has set out to break away from today's fruitless, so-called punk music with a nod to the heavies of the '80s punk underground, such as the Minutemen and Black Flag, but in the process, they end up sounding just as lifeless as the "quasi-authentic nu-punk" of the moment. To drive it in, she says it's not that they aren't full of life and energy, "...[but] that their entire founding principle seems so painfully, tediously borrowed; in sticking to that ever-nebulous true-punk formula, they've abandoned their only shot at capturing an original, non-nostalgia laced sound."

"True-punk." She sounds like an outsider, here. A heavy reader of Spin Magazine. A writer for Pitchfork Media. A person who--oh hey!

So basically, Challenger's crime is that they wanted to write a heavy, naked, bullshit-free album out of an obvious love for generations of good music carrying the punk tag--rather than create "original" work.

The author proceeds to cop out: "Most of Give People What They Want," she says, "is fairly textbook."

Textbook. So over-used. So meaningless.

But let's finish 'er out:

Not too many of these tracks are especially discernable from each other. Which is fine, when you're just thrashing around your apartment in big boots-- but it's not so promising when you sit down to weigh the respective heft of Challenger's own brand of punk rock.

"Big boots." The reviewer is a bonafide outsider.

Challenger may punch up their songs with some exhilarating vocal harmonies and unexpected structural shifts, but in the end, they never really transcend their own love/appreciation for their legendary influences-- a choice which prevents them from making a sizable dent in the ever-flexing history of punk.

Taking into account the respective pasts of Challenger's core members--they left the excelling basics of Hellbender and Griver for the chance to do something a little different/"original" in Milemarker and a number of other non-traditional projects--how can one not understand that this "punk" band was an intentional step away from innovation, for the pure and respectable goal of just having fun playing the type of music they enjoy? Nostalgia can be a sincere drive. It can produce a meaningful effort. It can create great music for people who understand that.

Otherwise we'll just have to eviscerate cover bands for being "unoriginal."

Wheelin', Dealin', Limosine Ridin', Jet Flyin', Son of a Gun

Sometimes you have to go find the crap, sometimes the crap comes to you. Today Yahoo!'s Entertainment page features a fluffy AP about "Chris Lighty: Hip-Hop's Dealmaker." The article felicitates Lighty on having the job of making hip hop's most famous artists very paid. The author uses that term "very paid."

"Lighty didn't get to be hip-hop's go-to dealmaker by accepting the status quo. So while sales may be down, Lighty is still working magic to make sure 50 and other high-profile clientele like Diddy and Busta Rhymes keep getting very paid."

The article baffles me in its ability to overlook the commercialization of music and act like endorsement deals are great for the music industry. "Well, Fiddy was about to sell his private plane, and I was like, hold the phone. That’s when I got him that Cheerio's commercial." That seems to be the mentality the author and Lighty have, screw music as a creative art, we need to maintain our ridiculous and unnecessary extravagant lifestyle.

"As music sales go down because kids are stealing it off the Internet and trading it and iPod sales continue to rise, you can't rely on just the income that you would make off of being an artist."

Yes, let us all blame Mr. Internet and Steve Jobs for the decline in record sales. Perhaps if these artist made records worth buying, and created a fan base that respects their success, then they could make a success of their creative expression. What am I saying, Steve Jobs is responsible for P Diddy not being able to afford a third yacht. And yes, he just referred to people like 50 Cent and P Diddy as "artists."

"During an interview in the swank cafe of the opulent Beverly Hills Hotel, Lighty rattles off various opportunities for 50, including a vitamin supplement deal, a role in a Brett Ratner movie, and his own condom line. Coming soon for another client, LL Cool J? A Chapstick deal for the rapper known for licking his lips."

Ooo! Swank! Opulent! That place sounds nice!

A Chapstick deal for LL Cool J, who is known for "licking his lips." How about a "Icy Hot" campaign for KRS One who is known for pain in his joints?

I still don't understand why hip hop has become the most commercialized brand of popular music. There are many rap artists who struggle and output great expressions of musical creativity. The "artists" that Lighty represent are not known for their creative expression, or for writing songs of any importance. Mostly it involves degrading women, killing someone, or bragging about how much money they have. I have a hard time believing 50 Cent's upcoming vitamin commercials will keep his head above water while he struggles to make ends meet. I'm positive that if he lived a reasonably normal lifestyle the "decline in record sales" wouldn't make much of a difference.