Best Ever Albums

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

hairymarx1 — Mon, 4 Jun 2012 23:18:58 GMT

Author: hairymarx1

Posted: 06/05/2012 03:18

Yourselfisntsteam wrote:

What is somewhat bothering me is the underlying attitude in this thread (maybe I'm just imagining this) that Pitchfork is somehow an obscure/different/edgy/publication that will expose you to all sorts of weird new music. Thats not really true. Sure if you listen to the radio or read uhhh rolling stone, then Pitchfork is comparatively horizon expanding and obscure, but after a while it should become obvious that Pitchfork covers for the most part the same stuff most music publications cover (see for example the ones that Jhereko listed on the first page of the thread). The albums Pitchfork acclaims are a good portion of the time just as much music marketed towards a certain demographic as everything else. It survives on the current overriding assumption among the music world that "indie"="arty". Pitchfork makes many safe choices which do not challenge that overriding indie rock aesthetic which dominates their readers. Reading only Pitchfork to keep informed on different or "obscure" music will do quite a bit to limit your musical horizons.

I totally agree.

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Anonymous — Mon, 4 Jun 2012 19:20:02 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 06/04/2012 23:20

What is somewhat bothering me is the underlying attitude in this thread (maybe I'm just imagining this) that Pitchfork is somehow an obscure/different/edgy/publication that will expose you to all sorts of weird new music. Thats not really true. Sure if you listen to the radio or read uhhh rolling stone, then Pitchfork is comparatively horizon expanding and obscure, but after a while it should become obvious that Pitchfork covers for the most part the same stuff most music publications cover (see for example the ones that Jhereko listed on the first page of the thread). The albums Pitchfork acclaims are a good portion of the time just as much music marketed towards a certain demographic as everything else. It survives on the current overriding assumption among the music world that "indie"="arty". Pitchfork makes many safe choices which do not challenge that overriding indie rock aesthetic which dominates their readers. Reading only Pitchfork to keep informed on different or "obscure" music will do quite a bit to limit your musical horizons.

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

vegetable man — Mon, 4 Jun 2012 18:54:17 GMT

Author: vegetable man

Posted: 06/04/2012 22:54

Link

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

paladisiac — Mon, 4 Jun 2012 18:18:43 GMT

Author: paladisiac

Posted: 06/04/2012 22:18

rollingstone is so last century. the review perspectives are just so dated catering to regular rock'n'roll.

pitchfork closest suits my tastes between the two, but i'm not an avid follower.

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Jimmy Dread — Mon, 4 Jun 2012 16:11:05 GMT

Author: Jimmy Dread

Posted: 06/04/2012 20:11

Pitchfork out of the choices allowed, but to be honest I've found blogs of better quality for discovering new music (Skatterbrain.org for indie pop and twee especially).

If you're stuck for some non-biased opinions on a whole bunch of new and recent albums, this site does a very good job of collating reviews from all over the place (web, print, blogs, music rags) and working out an average. Well worth a read.

http://www.anydecentmusic.com

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Happy — Mon, 4 Jun 2012 13:13:56 GMT

Author: Happy

Posted: 06/04/2012 17:13

In general, I think that professional music reviews suck. I always feel like they're less focused on explaining why the album is good or bad and more on making some poetic crap in order to somehow make themselves look like they're a good writer. Sometimes it's hard to understand why someone thinks an album is bad. If my English teacher saw some of those reviews, he'd probably draw a bag that says "SOS" on it, with some fumes coming out the top.

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Boogn1sh — Mon, 4 Jun 2012 11:41:42 GMT

Author: Boogn1sh

Posted: 06/04/2012 15:41

Mr. Shankly wrote:

During the 90's my roommate had a subscription to Rolling Stone and during that time, they were definitely covering alternative and indie music.

RS probably hit it's peak in the early 90's and actually made some good calls that stood the test of time. But even then they said things like:
"Sadly, the schizzy Midnight Marauders suggests that at this point the band might more accurately be called A Tribe Called Flounder." 2 stars (Glenn Kenny, 11/25/93 Review)

Championing? "Maybe this album is a radical message to the corporate-rock ogre — or maybe Pavement are simply afraid to succeed." (Mark Kemp, 4/20/95 Review)

"...by Spirit of Eden, Mark Hollis's Pete Townshend-on-Dramamine vocals have been pushed aside by the band's pointless noodling." (J.D. Considine, 1992 RS Album Guide)

Granted hind sight is 20/20 but damn did they miss the mark on a lot of stuff early on such as:

Songs of Leonard Cohen "I don't think I could ever tolerate all of it. There are three brilliant songs, one good one, three qualified bummers, and three are the flaming shits." (Arthur Schmidt, 3/9/68 Review"

Axis Bold as Love "...his songs too often are basically a bore,"

They weren't alone in hating Paul McCartney's Ram when it came out, but wow they REALLY hated it
"Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far. For some, including myself, Self-Portrait had been secure in that position, but at least Self-Portrait was an album that you could hate, a record you could feel something over, even if it were nothing but regret. Ram is so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant you can't even do that with it: it is difficult to concentrate on, let alone dislike or even hate." (Jon Landau, 6/8/71 Review)

Led Zeppelin I "...alternates between prissy Robert Plant's howled vocals fronting an acoustic guitar and driving choruses of the band running down a four-chord progression while John Bonham smashes his cymbals on every beat."

Last but not least, my favorite of all:
"Neil Young devotees will probably spend the next few weeks trying desperately to convince themselves that After The Gold Rush is good music. But they'll be kidding themselves. For despite the fact that the album contains some potentially first rate material, none of the songs here rise above the uniformly dull surface. In my listening, the problem appears to be that most of this music was simply not ready to be recorded at the time of the sessions. It needed time to mature. On the album the band never really gets behind the songs and Young himself has trouble singing many of them...The song "After The Gold Rush," for instance, reminds one of nothing so much as Mrs. Miller moaning and wheezing her way through "I'm A Lonely Little Petunia In An Onion Patch." Apparently no one bothered to tell Neil Young that he was singing a half octave above his highest acceptable range. At that point his pathos becomes an irritating bathos. I can't listen to it at all." (Langdon Winner, 10/15/70 Review)

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

BrilliantDisguise — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 22:34:49 GMT

Author: BrilliantDisguise

Posted: 06/04/2012 02:34

I went with Rolling Stone.

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Mr. Shankly — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 22:19:12 GMT

Author: Mr. Shankly

Posted: 06/04/2012 02:19

Boogn1sh wrote:

If all you read is rolling stone you'll never get any deeper than stuff that's on the radio.

That's not always true. I remember one year, The Moldy Peaches debut was picked as one of the albums of the year by Rolling Stone, and the Moldy Peaches (years before the Juno soundtrack) were about as indie and obscure ( Pitchforky?) as you could get. Granted, they were a New York band and RS is based in New York, so that might have been part of the reason.

During the 90's my roommate had a subscription to Rolling Stone and during that time, they were definitely covering alternative and indie music. I remember they championed Pavement fairly early on, gave a good review to Guided by Voices' Bee Thousand etc. In fact, Rolling Stone used to be considered quite hip. For example, they were one of the first mainstream publications to recognize R.E.M.'s greatness naming Murmur album of the year ahead of Thriller, for example. I suppose over the last 20 years or so though, RS has gotten lamer and lamer and gotten further and further away from covering music off the beaten path.

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Hayden — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 13:55:07 GMT

Author: Hayden

Posted: 06/03/2012 17:55

Boogn1sh wrote:

Rolling Stone has good political stories, that's about it. I check PItchfork and Tinymixtapes for music reviews, don't necessarily agree with Pitchfork on all their reviews but they make me aware of a lot of things I otherwise wouldn't have heard of. If all you read is rolling stone you'll never get any deeper than stuff that's on the radio.

Basically this ^. And Rolling Stone normally get it right with movie's too.

Pitchfork has been giving some of my favourites of 2012 bad ratings 🫢 Valtari, Among The Leaves, 4Eva In A Day....Kinda sad.

This is going to be an even weirder year than 2011 for 'year-end lists'. 🤣

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Boogn1sh — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 13:42:37 GMT

Author: Boogn1sh

Posted: 06/03/2012 17:42

Rolling Stone has good political stories, that's about it. I check PItchfork and Tinymixtapes for music reviews, don't necessarily agree with Pitchfork on all their reviews but they make me aware of a lot of things I otherwise wouldn't have heard of. If all you read is rolling stone you'll never get any deeper than stuff that's on the radio.

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Anonymous — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 13:42:15 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 06/03/2012 17:42

I like pitchfork. I'm able to discover a lot more interesting new albums and bands thank to them. I hate rolling stone. In every issue, it seems like they give half the albums they review 3 1/2 starts and all of their reviews are statements of fact, never opinions. Also, their opinions are always very safe when they actually state one.

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Hayden — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 13:38:18 GMT

Author: Hayden

Posted: 06/03/2012 17:38

Pitchfork.

Rolling Stone typically have no clue what their doing 🤣

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

junodog4 — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 12:49:19 GMT

Author: junodog4

Posted: 06/03/2012 16:49

I don't care for either of them, but while I find Pitchfork a little more accurate in terms of quality, I find their hipster pretentiousness nauseating. Rolling Stone is safe and bland, but entirely tolerable.

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

GeevyDallas — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 12:04:14 GMT

Author: GeevyDallas

Posted: 06/03/2012 16:04

I generally get most of my musical suggestions from friends.But Pitchfork does keep me up to date with modern Hip-Hop,Electronic music and Indie like no other blog or magazine around.

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Anonymous — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 10:48:58 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 06/03/2012 14:48

Out of the 2 definitely Pitchfork (although they're both better than NME 🤮 ) I just find them infinitely more interesting and I have to thank them for at least a handful or 2 of discoveries. But it'd obviously be foolish to get your recommendations from one source so other sources I like:
Drowned In Sound
tinymixtapes
Coke Machine Glow
Stereogum
Uncut
Spin

and obviously BEA charts, although most of the time you're just indirectly disovering things from Pitchfork or RS, etc, whether you like it or not 😁 . For example I think Scaruffi is a dumb cunt but I wouldn't have discovered some albums I really really like from members on BEA if not for Scaruffi. So there's no point in any of us complaining about music critics because no individual finds music out of thin air (as much as some people might sometimes like to make it seem that way).

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Anonymous — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 10:45:23 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 06/03/2012 14:45

If I have to choose Pitchfork's charts and opinions are more tolerable to me. However I can't stand either, and don't want to give either a vote. I think pitchfork is just this generation's rolling stone anyways. In thirty years aging indie kids will read it to desperately hold on to their musical values the same way Rolling Stone tries to keep the old classic rock values alive. Neither publication is particularly relevant at all to me.

I barely trust actual music publications at all anymore. Reviews read like press releases, do nothing to actually analyze the music, and the biases of publications are boring and obvious. Their opinions seem to box people's tastes in more than actually expand them. There are far more interesting and intelligent opinions written by random people online totally unprofessionally. Despite not having an rym account myself, I have the pages of some interesting users bookmarked and mostly refer to them now. For general critic response I look at metacritic. And I use BEA of course too!

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Mr. Shankly — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 10:31:07 GMT

Author: Mr. Shankly

Posted: 06/03/2012 14:31

Crap! I misspelled the title. 🫢 🤣

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

Anonymous — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 10:29:07 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 06/03/2012 14:29

Mr. Shankly wrote:

Maybe it's not recommendations so much, as which opinions and overall albums charts you respect more. Let me rephrase this: Is Rolling Stone's top 500 albums list better or is Pitchfork's best of the decades lists (and single years) better? Which one holds more credence overall?

Bleugh they are both awful though

Mine is the best 😁

Probably would prefer the RYM chart though, much better than RS or Pitchfork

As for opinions... Well I don't read anything from either of them so...

Re: Rolling Sone or Pitchfork?

SquishypuffDave — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 10:27:29 GMT

Author: SquishypuffDave

Posted: 06/03/2012 14:27

Between the two, Pitchfork for sure. Not sure how I'd find good prog or metal though, since they don't seem to want to acknowledge its existence.