It's when they write those fawning 9.5s that I find them at their most pretentious and overwrought. Moving back from the cynicism just a little bit, they do cover some quite interesting music that I haven't heard from time to time, and when they really slate an album, even one I like, I find the writing inventive and hilarious. Anyway, for a lot of people, music is tied in with identity, and having a publication out there telling you what is the Acceptable Music For The Trendy Thinking Man is quite a useful resource. Presumably they'll all start wearing Emperor t-shirts and listening to Burzum in a few years.
#Kate bush hounds of love pitchfork free
When you have no free time to just indulge and explore, having a corporate publication spoon-feed you often interesting music from their Best New Music feed is quite handy.Īside from that, I find it amusing that a lot of the hipster guys I used to know at Uni who would give me a slight teasing for listening to heavy metal are all banging on about how fantastic the new Deafheaven album is. The only times I found Pitchfork useful outside that was when I was first getting into indie music and when I was massively busy with studying for my masters degree. I don't really care what they have to say, but I do scour their reviews, skim-read them to get an idea of the genre and then listen to the album to make up my own mind. Also, it's fun for a music critic to flex their muscles and point out similarities to obscure acts of the past and present.ĮDIT: Here is an interesting article from 2006 on "The Pitchfork Effect" which is quite relevant to this thread: I'm not the greatest writer, but I did try to be creative with my reviews and not just roll with a slew of adjectives. I did it in college for a relatively popular website and it really wore me out. Hell, they gave Save Ferris a 9.5! I don't know how Pitchfork reviews their records, do they rate them as a committee or is that solely up to the individual reviewer? People also like to point out how Pitchfork wasn't too favorable to early Daft Punk reviews or that they worshiped Radiohead a bit too much. I don't see that too much anymore, the reviews are generally quite readable and aren't too fluffy. Pitchfork has changed over the years, but for the early part of the website's existence the reviews were quite obnoxious, this is why everyone throws out the pretentious tag when talking about Pitchfork. Almost everyone who genuinely cares about music is familiar Pitchfork, but not everyone loves the music that they cover, so it's a low hanging fruit to pick at. A few decades ago everyone slammed Spin or Rolling Stone, but those rags are quite irrelevant now - well, they might be a tad bit more relevant since the music that they cover now is often quite similar to what Pitchfork covers. I think a lot of the hate stems from them being the top dog of online publications when it comes to reviewing and writing about music.