fun with babel fish

Oh, Pitchfork.

They're lucky I link to 'em at all. The reason I do is they do manage to have reviews for the most notable of the new music releases, they have the largest staff of writers, and they cut a wide swath.

It sure isn't because of the reviews.

Every second review they publish contains gleaming examples of the reasons we should all hate them. Big talkers. See right through everything. Their review of the new Venetian Snares record was some kind of juggernaut of Aristotelian reasoning. (I don't like glitch! You can't make me like glitch!)

The Mars Volta review of today's date, however, is just frankly too big of a sandwich. It is emblematic of nearly everything, all at once, that is wrong, wrong, wrong with the site. Lest you click on it and get the wrong idea, it isn't the 2.0 grade that has attracted my ire. Well, it is. Such a small grade does act a bit like a homing beacon for any pent-up hatred and aggression. What I mean to say, though, before you go clicking, is that I'm not some big Mars Volta fan. I liked At the Drive-In, and I liked De-Loused in the Comatorium, the two times I bothered to listen to it. I don't however, give any shits whatsoever if their new album gets ripped, deservedly or otherwise.

I do, however, grow quickly tired at the posture of the average Pitchfork review, and this one is particularly affected. Click away.

Watch him begin with a statement that lets you know how much more he knows about music than other people who like music know about music:

Indie and prog-rock have a lot more in common than most of their listeners might like to admit.

Wow. Hidden indie-prog juncture about to be exposed! Somebody knows how to draw a double bubble map! You mean there are areas where one kind of music and another kind of music are similar? Shh, disbelievers, and let him explain his dangerous new thesis:

Both are dominated by apostate wallflowers who act a lot cooler and more self-assured than they really are, and their artists, despite creating an aura of aloofness, are notoriously defensive.

Musicians really aren't cool? They're only pretending? Holy shit, good thing I found that out before I became one. Is it too late to become a Pitchfork writer instead, or do you have to go to college for that?

If you wanna take the psychoanalytic bent, both have masculinity issues: Prog compensates with double kick drums and the phallic gratification of rabid shrrredding, while indie prefers to spin its shortcomings into anti-heroism.

Man alive. Just look at that. If you want to listen to music made by guys who have big dorks, I suppose there's a lot of easy-listening jazz that would fit your bill. I'm told John Tesh's is staggering. And just so we're not missing anything, the insinuation is that the dudes from Mars Volta are hung like squirrels. Whether it's because they're indie rockers or prog rockers hasn't been made clear yet, but we're sure to find out, because it's (standard Pitchfork gripe #1) so goddamned important to classify something before you can have an actual reaction to it.

This is not to detract from the legacy of either music-- both have rich and diverse histories-- but the reps of each have been tarnished by generations of feckless dudes whose spotlight-hogging has rendered the genres unusually susceptible to generalizations.

Oh well, in that case, generalize away. What he's done here is first to create the rules of the little game he is now going to play: Indie and prog are populated by "feckless dudes" who have ruined it for everyone else, and in such a convenient way that someone like Ubl can come along and make generalizations about the genres. Notice how this argument is a) totally unsubstantiated with examples and just comes out of nowhere, b) completely obliviated by the following reductio ad absurdum: "If indie and prog are entirely unpopulated by feckless dudes, then those genres of music are not susceptible to generalizations". Bullshit. You can make generalizations about everything from chalk to chicken fingers and if Ubl doesn't recognize that the onus is on him to substantiate his own generalizations, then he's the one who would seem to be lacking in the feck department.

In fact, the terms themselves are generalizations, almost always used negatively: These days, bands are most commonly dubbed "prog" or "indie" when their music isn't provocative enough to earn a more individually tailored description.

Does he mean descriptions like "discopunk"? Or some other brand of mouthwash? Almost any term would be a generalization when it dripped onto his smarmy little keyboard. Sklave zu den Zeiten, you can't review something without talking about it. You can't! Even though they try to do it all the time. Will they try again? Read on:

On De-Loused in the Comatorium, the Mars Volta weren't straddling any fencelines. Rather than carrying over characteristics from the rough-edged indie-esque stylings of their former band, At the Drive-In, or plunging headfirst into the never-ending math equations of psilocybic canterbury prog, they artfully missed both marks: too sincere for indie but not quite prolix enough for prog; too melody-driven for prog but not repetitive enough for indie.

Just time enough for an under-the-table Modest Mouse testicle-smooch (standard Pitchfork gripe #2) and we're on to some real honest to goodness generalizing, instead of just talking about it. Indie isn't sincere? Prog's not melody-driven? Okay! Now we're mangling some real hash, hash-manglers!

Listeners' initial bemusement enabled the band to transcend genre reducibility, which won De-Loused quick (if hesitant) points from critics and fans. But two years later, there are few other recent records for which putatively in-the-know listeners are so cautious of voicing approval. If you liked De-Loused (or thought so, at least) but often found yourself biting your tongue in the company of others, you were probably in the majority.

"Putatively" in-the-know listeners, since, you know, thou shall have no other godz before Ubl and all that. If I am a stylish contrarian, and I am always the smartest person in any room, what the fuck does that make you, you charmingly uninformed rabble of sheep? KNEEL and repeat after me: "you were probably in the majority". The majority of what, Ubl, you dangling mod? Is the majority those who liked De-Loused, or those who bit their tongues in the company of others? He appears to be indicating that De-Loused may be a good album, but is couching that opinion in the contingency that you, the reader, like it too. That he appears to be sucking up to you and your crowd while somehow holding himself reservedly above such an unseemly emotion as liking the album himself is such a stark flare-up of the Pitchfork disease that it would be prudent for Chicago's mayor to call in the National Guard.

Here's a gathering of short quotes that describe the album that simply do not fit Ubl's "2.0" designation, no matter how they're qualified: "Predictably monolithic and impossibly huge, Frances never stops chugging"; "Cygnus...Vismund Cygnus"... builds to a powerful, string-driven climax at around the eight-minute mark but never bothers to come back down, staying aloft in a spiral of guitar arpeggios and overeager drumming before eventually devolving into a chorus of synth textures"; "Frances the Mute doesn't require a long attention span: It's as mesmeric as it is mercurial"; "...Frances largely retains the audacity of De-Loused's lyrics. "Cassandra Gemini" approaches storytelling with the same breed of macabre circumlocution that pocked the band's debut..." no matter how hard he may be trying to call this album down, he makes it sound really cool in spite of himself.

What is his problem? I've looked it up and down and this is the best justification I can find for such a low rating:

...no matter what your feelings for De-Loused, at least the band had a mind to curtail their most capricious jams before they lost all context. Here, they seem hellbent on making an album that's as contiguous as possible, and the result is a homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity.

Ooh, contiguity. That's, like, the way the album just blends into one solid listening experience, and perhaps is something you can sort of get involved with or lost in or any of those unfashionable listening practises. Tanzmusik! Tanzmusik! Discopunk uber alles!

Hunnhhh...

I like the album. More than De-Loused, I think, though I'd actually have to listen to that one again to be sure. It strobes that Ummagumma part of my cerebral cortex when it's not tossing some really nasty riffs at me. "L'via l'viaquez" is a monster, and if they'd cut the first 4:49 of it as its own song, Pitchfork would be tripping over it every time they walked up their parents' stairs into daylight. What the hell is wrong with contiguity?

The perverse truth is that I never would have bothered listening to it if the review hadn't gotten all up in my business the way it did. Which is why, in the ongoing evaluation of the list of sites I link to, Pitchfork stays. They are pretty much indispensable.

Still, I hate the snotty cool-hunting fuckers. You can tell them I said so.