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I think I'm officially done with Pitchfork making my decisions for me.  I cringe when I think how many amazing albums I've missed because of a shitty PFork review.  Surely I would have missed this year's Forms record (6.6), which still remains my #1 album of 2007 and is definitely in my top 10 of all time; I would never have heard the French Kicks (6.0); and I wouldn't have bothered with The Most Serene Republic (5.8), which I downloaded last night and am rapidly becoming infatuated with.  It's got the Arts & Crafts / Canadian indie pop thing going on, but also with the crazy melodies and angular structures of Mew. 

I just finished listening to the Sports Guy's latest podcast, and in every single conversation he has with his buddies they all seem to be totally torn up about the Giants / Cowboys game.  I don't see what's so hard about it - the Cowboys are going to kill the Giants.  Last week's Giants game did nothing to convince me - their first quarter (where they gained a total of -2 yards) is pretty much how I expected the entire game to go, and I'm still not convinced that the Giants won that game, as opposed to Tampa Bay just completely falling apart.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I certainly wouldn't bet any money on the Giants making a game out of it, even if T.O. stays on the bench.

Kath is out tonight; I'm debating whether I want to go out or if I want to go home and collapse.  Haven't been sleeping well this week, which works out great for the dogs since they've been waking up with me at around 4:00am.

More in just a bit.
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    losinginterest
    I think Pitchfork is a great source for news, and I read it every day. I rarely read their reviews, though -- sometimes I play a game where I try and guess the rating before I click on the review, and I'm getting pretty good at it. As critics, they leave a lot to be desired -- that Brent Dicrescenzo (sp?) guy really kinda set the bar for them, writing reviews that people wanted to read for their biting pseudo-erudition, far removed from anything having to do with the important question of "Yeah, but as a reader, can you inform me whether I would like it?"

    I'm currently writing my end-of-year album list (hopefully to post next week, I've been more than a little distracted lately by some things I'll be elaborating on soon enough), and for what it's worth, my #1 album of 2007 didn't even get a 5.0 from them.
    jervo
    I can't wait to see your list; it's become one of my favorite annual LJ events.
    losinginterest
    Heh, mine too. One of these years I'll actually get the damn thing out in December, while most people still give a shit.
    jervo
    Hey - I did mine in December, and in the weeks since I've already acquired enough stuff to make me rethink my lists. I'm a goddamned whore.
    delphicdays
    lately it becomes rare for me to read an intelligent review from pitchfork. i can't stand the language they use and a lot of what certain reviewers say could be considered juvenile. plus, they have tendency to give an album 8.0 on first release, then a re-release UNCHANGED but for remastering/extra B side, etc....a 6.0 or something retarded. i think i may just give up on music reviews in general. unless i can find some good music blogs.
    jervo
    I'll just say this - last night I reread this post and decided to reread the reviews, and I noticed that all three reviews are by the same reviewer. So now I know at the very least to discount everything that Adam Moerder has to say about anything ever again.
    jervo
    Here's when things between me and Pfork started to get sour past the point of no return: they never actually reviewed Paul McCartney's "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard", and I'm guessing it's because they couldn't reconcile their Macca-loathing with the fact that Nigel Godrich produced it and it actually turned out to be Paul's best album in years. That didn't stop them from reviewing a ton of other albums that year that had pretty much no business being reviewed on Pfork.

    There's lots of other reasons that have cropped up since then, especially the notion that they will sometimes give a good album a shitty score because they're Pitchfork and people go to the site to read them give albums shitty reviews, and they have to fill some sort of quota. I can't prove this, of course, but I have second-hand evidence of a reviewer actually going up to a band and apologizing for her published review, which was apparently quite different from what she had submitted, both in terms of content and numeric score.
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