Rate all of their albums (1 Viewer)

hermie said:
Who actually does good album reviews these days? I love blogs but by their nature they're not very comprehensive and there's an element of pot luck to them. Even though I've tried not being cynical about Pitchfork etc for years, it (and the others) have really gone to the dogs lately. For movies I just have my go-to journos who are pretty reliable, and even here does good movie criticism. Harder to find with music for some reason though.
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This is a good point. I think there's still great music journalism out there (possibly less due to NO MONEY IN IT) but I'm not so sure reviews as recommendations are really that relevant.

The music journalists I do follow are usually because I like their writing or ideas rather than their tastes.
 
Music journalism has been fucking shit since everyone worth their salt jumped ship from the NME during the late 90's. Not that the NME was ever particularly great to begin but there was a few that wanted to be either Hunter S Thompson or Lester Bangs and if nothing else that was admirable they wrote with their hearts on their sleeves at the very least. They could see the way things were going when IPC was sold to Time, it was turning into a fashion magazine and they didn't like it. For the most part that's where music journalism is now. Blogs are grand but the major players like Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound et al are just too self important to be trust worthy.


Like Lili said ideas are more important than the actual taste and most of the "curator" type sites want to shape your taste far more than discuss ideas, which is a fucking huge problem. Imagine if film or visual art was discussed in the same way as music,

"What's cool right now ?"

"Well movies about pirates seem to be in"

"Okay lets really get behind pirate movies from now on and really push them, yeah,"

"Great, we can so a retrospective about the influence of Under Siege on Captain Phillips and A Hijacking"

"Great, can we work Noah into this some how ? How can we make it a scene?"

"Sea core ?"

"Not quite but I like it"

"Eh ... how about Marine core?"

"Perfect, right we've got a name for it lets, sell it, right excellent. I hear there's an illegal silent disco tonight in the stock room of a kebab shop in Shoreditch later so let's knock off early so I can get my fixie cleaned"


Incidentally before the NME turned totally and utterly shit it did champion a lot of post rock like Mogwai, Godspeed and Don Cab as well as stuff like Arab Strap, one lad even had a soft spot for Anal Cunt. It's virtually impossible to imagine anything as faceless and unfashionable as that getting onto a front page of a website let alone a print magazine now.
 
Lili Marlene said:
This is a good point. I think there's still great music journalism out there (possibly less due to NO MONEY IN IT) but I'm not so sure reviews as recommendations are really that relevant.

The music journalists I do follow are usually because I like their writing or ideas rather than their tastes.
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Obviously they're a whole lot less relevant now that you can frequently just go sample the music for yourself but I'd hate to see it become a lost art altogether. Pitchfork, it is such a shame what happened to it. Their reviews used to be at least a week behind everyone else's which was great because you knew the reviewer had really listened to it. Then they were often more narrative than critique but somehow you felt you knew the record better than by any other standard review. As cattle says, heart on their sleeve, die for the love it types. Jenn Pelly and the PhD'd hype-engines they have working for them at the moment couldn't be further removed from their older stock. The revisionism of that editor of theirs is pretty disgusting as well. Drowned in Sound seem to be seriously understaffed or something their review section is a joke these days. Very few of the big broadsheets have even semi-respectable music sections these days. What's Wire like these days, haven't bought it in years?
 
I'm going to set aside a couple of hours of mismanaged resources to write a John Carpenter list for this.

Had a couple of his later (lesser known but great) soundtracks sent my way recently and I feel like writing a bit about them.
 
Cornu Ammonis said:
Same here, overall ranking would be:
Kid A/Amnesiac (impossible to separate for me)
Hail to the Thief
OK Computer
In Rainbows
King of Limbs
The Bends (though "Street Spirit" is probably in my top three Radiohead songs, rest of the album hasn't dated quite as well)
Pablo Honey
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King of Limbs has some great shit on it (Separator, Codex & Bloom are some of my favourite tunes of theirs) but it always seemed a bit too slight to me.. a 37 minute album has no business having something like Feral on it, that'd be pure B-side material on any of their other albums.
 
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