I’m interested to read some opinions on Pitchfork here.
I started reading it when half the reviews were kinda funny/abysmally unfunny diatribes by the author. The DiCresenzo era. It’s became quite a well-written and more serious site since Conde Naste bought it.
Sometimes it infuriates me (ongoing beef with Mark Kozelek) and other-times it’s helped me discover a great new band (a lot of reviews by Ian Cohen).
I’ve also heard rumours it is going behind a paywall which would be suicide for it.
Anyone else read it/care enough to share opinions?
Content on the main page has gone to shite. Absolutely no-one needs to fucking know what beer goes best with Dirty Projectors Rise Above or whatever wank article they have this week.
Losing the opinion columns was a big mistake I think. Used to love ‘Resonant Frequency’ and the regular contributions in that vein. The 5-10-15-20 series is fun but a bit lacking in content compared to the very high standard that some old articles set.
To add to this; I really liked Joanna Robinson’s Game of Thrones content on Vanity Fair, but this season I’ve been told I need to pay for it, and as such I have not read anything by her.
When they give high scores to albums and artists I love (Kendrick Lamar, Big Thief, Radiohead, Yves Tumor) then I champion Pitchfork as a signifier that I’m listening to the right stuff.
Conversely when they give high scores to albums I don’t think much of (Currents, Sweetener) I ridicule them as having lost their touch and identity.
Shitty attitude I know but I think that’s probably how most of us engage with it/reviews in general
the reviews used to be almost always awful but that’s a good few years ago now. remember when they used to all be far too long and the writer would always go on 5 paragraphs of self indulgent stuff about themselves before getting to the point. but they’ve been fairly standard reviews you’d find anywhere for a good while now so they’re fine.
don’t really read the news page much unless i’ve been linked to something. but i noticed when Radiohead were touring they’d post any old shite up - “Watch mobile phone footage of Radiohead playing [song] for the first time in 5 years (when they were last on tour)”. this might not even have been them though, i think most of the bigger music sites have resorted to shite clickbait for a while. probably their primary source of clicks.
Their insipid slide into covering mainstream celebrity news via tenuous links to musicians e.g Kim Kardashian being pregnant is becoming increasingly frustrating.
It has definitely become more fun to complain about Pitchfork (with either sincerity or irony/humour) than it is to read their articles and reviews.
Content has definitely got worse in recent years, but do quite like the Sunday review. Mix of different record choices and strong writing on more obvious classics
Overall they infuriate me due to a strong bias against certain artists and their need to take random shots at those artists in unrelated reviews. It’s really weird.
The reviews on DiS, Pitchfork and Goldflakepaint have kept me in the loop about new releases for years. Even when I disagree with the reviews, it’s interesting to have a barometer of trustworthy critical consensus for me to react to. Now one is gone, one is about to hide behind a paywall and the other limits me to a very expensive period of album purchases when its quarterly journal comes out. I’ll be left with websites I can’t be arsed with and newspaper album reviews (which seem to attract the worst kind of career critics).
Music news has always been pointless/shite when not announcing new albums or tours, so I have no strong feelings about Pitchfork’s news trends.
