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JonnieCache

For a taste of the archetypical pitchfork style, read any of their radiohead reviews:

http://pitchfork.com/artists/3512-radiohead/

The classic is the Kid A one: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6656-kid-a/

Boomkat is a close second, but at least theyre trying to sell the records: https://twitter.com/boomkat_ebooks

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I say this as a fairly regular Pitchfork reader: The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax is one of at least the top five worst sentences I've ever read.

(IMHO, their earlier reviews generally were of lower quality than their more recent ones, and they've benefited from discarding/discouraging the more experimental/informal review formats. The irony of this sentence being a hipster antithesis does not escape me.)

You take the bad with the good, like Zanzithoph, elephant of bizarre and archaic instruments.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5950-horse-and-elephant-...

I think you could pull the other four sentences from this article too:

"The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard's cap."

"Kid A sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction."

"It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes."

"A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage."

It makes the vice record reviews seem positively lucid, doesn't it? Picked at random from a google search for "vice music review":

Holy shit, dude. Sometimes you just want to punch God in the face. Every time these fucking krauts spew out another aural queef nugget I try to give it a chance, but the second I hear the singer’s thin monotone melodies backed up by lifeless, pointless beats, I remember how few shits anyone would give if these dickweeds were from Chicago. Yeah, yeah, Neon Golden. Sure. I’d sooner give Udo Kier a standing 69 under the Brandenburg Gate than hear this album again. Actually, that sounds fucking awesome, that guy’s a babe.

Not that I'm trying to defend the ridiculousness of that sentence, but Brent DiCrescenzo was pretty notorious for being sarcastic and witty. I was always under the impression he was writing that infamous Kid A review intentionally gratuitous

Yes, Brent had a fairly famous meltdown known as his Beastie Boys / To the 5 Boroughs review.

http://bbs.beastieboys.com/showthread.php?t=21070

(retraction info here: http://bbs.beastieboys.com/showpost.php?s=1da97f1e4c1a2a3b6d...)

there's a good chance that absurdity was deliberate.

You can take that as a given. I've always thought Brent's Lateralus review was the high water mark (low water mark???) DiCrescenzo piece. http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8104-lateralus/

The best thing ever written on Pitchfork was David Cross making fun of Pitchfork: http://pitchfork.com/features/guest-lists/6044-david-cross-a...

Honestly that's not the archetypal style, most reviews are more measured and often have thoughtful things to say about the record. If anything, the Onion article in which Pitchfork gives all of music a 6.8 is a telling parody and fun summation of their style.

For what it's worth, Kid A really is one of the best records of the 2000's, so if you're going to be histrionic about one, might as well be that one.

This is like saying "For a taste of the archetypical Apple design ethos, look at this 2001 iMac." Sort of, but no. They've matured a lot from their snotty early days - I don't think their reviews since, oh, 2005 would be out of place in any highbrow magazine.

Their reviews of The Beatles' catalogue are great reading, for example.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13436-magical-mystery-to... http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13432-the-beatles/ http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13431-abbey-road/

Ahhh get outta here. People love to cite that thing, it's 15 years old at this point. Come on.

Here's a visually dated, but still accurate parody: http://www.somethingawful.com/fakesa/richdork/

The intensely overwrought style of Pitchfork is really one of the things I love most about it - that you sometimes have to fight even to figure out what genre an album is.

For the types of music I care about, I find their reviews are really very often in accordance with my own tastes, and their best-albums-of-the-year compendia are always worth a browse.

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