pitchforkd

    • The Science of Living Things : A-Set  6.0
    • Everyone in music bears the uneasy burden of the cole slaw of rock. Everyone. What am I talking about? Well, take any artist who makes music and assess their relative strengths and weaknesses in terms of what kind of cole slaw it represents-- then maybe you'll see what I'm getting at. Oh, an example? Fine. We'll demonstrate on A-Set's The Science of Living Things. A-Set is the latest vision of one Albert Menduno, which is worth pointing out, if for no ot... [ full review ]
    • Bitter, Bitter Weeks : Bitter, Bitter Weeks  7.0
    • Brian McTear is known primarily as a producer, having manned the boards for Burning Brides, Mazarin, and a host of others, including orchestral indie popster Matt Pond PA, so his debut album as Bitter, Bitter Weeks comes as a bit of a shock. The same guy who's spent a career bricking and mortaring walls of sound for other musicians, it turns out, has a soft spot for the minimal, getting his strum on with almost no adornment over the course of a 35-minute long-player. ... [ full review ]
    • Transcendental Blues : Steve Earle  8.1
    • I could begin this review by invoking one or two of the more renowned transcendentalists of the 19th century. You know how it would it go: "In Walden, his masterpiece of transcendent ideology, Henry David Thoreau wrote, 'I went to the woods because I wished--" I don't even need to finish the sentence, do I? Quoting from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature might be more tactful, but barely. His lecture, The Transcendentalist, is a more obvious, if less-cited source, but the q... [ full review ]
    • Souljacker : Eels  4.9
    • Beyond the melodies that don't stick in my head and the beats that don't make me want to dance, the only real problem with Souljacker, Eels' fourth album, is that it just seems like an underachievement. I've never been a big fan of artists who play it cool on record: that is, appear to toss off musical ideas when their fans, their press releases and even signs hidden in their own music suggest they should be doing a lot more. Take someone like Prince: a guy with tale... [ full review ]
    • Forms and Follies : Lonesome Organist  5.2
    • Writing up an original review for any Lonesome Organist release might be best described as playing a solitary game of critical Taboo: it's instantly apparent that there exists a specific set of unavoidable descriptive clichés and overly pitched idiosyncrasies chaperoning all previous and current press for this band-- often due to an inability to creatively parallel the level of the phenomenon: the more unique the spectacle, the less inventive the appraisal. So, in hon... [ full review ]
    • The Best of 1993-1998 : Moby  3.2
    • Richard Hall likes to caricature himself as a little idiot. The artwork of his Bring Back My Happiness single bore this cartoon, and during his astounding rise to stardom, it's proved to be strategically expedient for Hall. It's effective because he can step out from behind this self-effacing graphic he's been able to make his pro-choice, pro-vegan, pro-crimpolene, pro-dandelion pronouncements, and then retreat rapidly with a disingenuous shrug of his shoulders. He thinks he ... [ full review ]
    • Nymphomatriarch : Nymphomatriarch  6.6
    • Many questions arise when you hear that Venetian Snares and Hecate literally made an album out of sex. Am I in a dream? Wait, isn't that what this year's Winter in the Belly of a Snake was made of? When did these two become IDM's J-Lo and Ben? Most pressing of all, why has no one ever thought of recording sex sounds until now? Oh wait, they did: it's called pornography. I think we can all agree that sex records are always a good idea, in any environs, under any guidance,... [ full review ]
    • Another World : Paul Oakenfold  2.9
    • Every Wednesday I commute all the way up to East 72nd Street and follow it until I hit the East River. The very last apartment is the office of a literary review where I evaluate manuscripts from the "slush pile." Given its sizable reputation, the quarterly magazine handles a burdensome daily flux of unsolicited fiction, nonfiction and poetry manuscripts. While a gem occasionally surfaces, I usually find myself weeding through unexceptional prose (I don't even touch the... [ full review ]
    • Gerroa Songs : Archer Prewitt  7.3
    • This eight-song, 27-minute LP is clearly of a particular time and place-- not so much historically as personally. It's an intimate moment captured in sound. As Archer Prewitt himself accurately phrased it, these songs are "documents." Recorded live to eight-track in March 1999 (with a little post-production overdubbing), Gerroa Songs arose out of a vacation of sorts. Tony Dupre, a friend and engineer, invited Prewitt and others to a haunted, dilapidated ex-Nunnery by ... [ full review ]
    • I Love Dubstep : Various Artists  7.4
    • Even for dilettantes, late 2008 seems like odd timing for anyone to drop a so-called "definitive" mix of dubstep tracks from the last couple years. Maybe it's because the genre's most exciting developments this year were the revelation of Burial's identity and the rise of offshoot genres like funky and wonky, meant largely to combat the stagnancy of a scene left to a war of darker-and-harder attrition. Still, Americans whose interest was piqued by Untrue deserve to have a few more names to p... [ full review ]