Barry B. Anderberg 2008-12-05
3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
I'm beginning to realize that the quality of any given album is inversely proportional to its rating on Pitchfork.com. This album received an 8.5.
Sorry folks, but this album stinks. Rhythm? Absolutely. Melody? Hardly. This is the sort of album that one might imagine results from heady, bong filled, late night jam sessions by some marginally talented college kids. By that I mean that the album is creative but is completely lacking in coherence and direction.
Another way to describe the album would be with the word "noise". It's simply not pleasurable to listen to. In fact, over the course of the album the music becomes simply annoying.
Which leads one to wonder why it is that Pitchfork raves about it, as do the other reviewers here. I think I know. There is a discernible segment of the music buying population whose primary criterion for evaluating the quality of any given music is whether it defies what they imagine to be the current status quo within music as a whole or within the genre they believe they are experts in. Here it's "indy rock". Whatever that is. That the music actually be enjoyable is entirely secondary, and perhaps for some altogether irrelevant.
So, you get what we have here. A bad album that is sufficiently grating on the ears to elicit praise and applause from the music world's pseudo-intelligentsia whose motives are anything but finding music that's actually good.
Again I ask: Make it stop.
