Pitchfork review 'Ys' (Joanna Newsom)

[admin]

What do you get when you mix Joanna Newsom, Smog, Van Dyke Parks, Steve Albini (what?) and Jim O'Rourke?

-Ys

Pitchfork offered this in the way of review:
www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/39644/Joanna_Newsom_Ys

I think the review would carry a little more weight if it wasn't just going "fawn fawn fawn i really want to bang joanna newsom"

Just a suggestion.

Also, watch out for this little nugget of journalistic creative license (read: shocking inability to separate the truth from its polar opposite)

Van Dyke Parks' orchestration is polite, never intruding on her performance.

lmbo.

[david]

This is the best one I've seen on there, completetely indulgent but there you go:

"The Jesus and Mary Chain (henceforth “JAMC”) was the musical project of Jim and William Reid, who were (a) Scottish, (b) brothers, and (c) the foremost technological and scientific innovators of the modern rock era. Before they came along, many people still assumed that in order to make aggressive, energetic noises, the members of rock bands had to actually move around, do guitar windmills, and look engaged. The JAMC did not like this situation, because those poses tended to be either uncool or boring, and often made one look like a complete twat.

But after a brief scientific study of their equipment, it came to the JAMC’s attention that electric guitars, when paired with high amplifier volume and harmonic distortion, could create feedback, thereby producing aggressive noises mostly on their own, and freeing their actual players to stand around looking half dead, depressed, and generally too contemptuous and disgusted to really bother playing-- all of which seemed, in 1985 and in the particular case of the JAMC, totally super-awesome.

Obviously the drummer for such a group couldn’t sit behind a big kit looking like he knew what he was doing, so the JAMC stood Bobby Gillespie (yes, that one) up behind only two drums-- a floor tom and a snare-- and had him bash away like he was pissed off at them but either too bored or too drunk to finish them off. A similar approach was taken to bass guitar and vocals.

If the band had applied these tactics to knotty, difficult music, you would never have heard of them, and Dominique Leone would be reviewing these reissues. Luckily-- intuitively-- the JAMC wrote pop songs, basic three-chord rock’n’roll and all-hook melodies, vaguely in the style of early Beach Boys, girl groups, or the laid-back end of the Rolling Stones. Only...as played by lazy, spiteful, nearly hopeless people who didn’t care one way or the other and therefore covered the whole thing in screeching. (See also: the Velvet Underground.)

And thus we get Psychocandy (1985), the JAMC’s enduring contribution to the annals of rock history."

[tom]

Man, I fucking hate Pitchfork.

[admin]

tom said:

Man, I fucking hate Pitchfork.

what?

how?

[tom]

Poncey, pseudo-intellectual, self-indulgent shit. That JAMC review makes me fume.

[a]

tom said:

Poncey, pseudo-intellectual, self-indulgent shit.

Isn't that what we're all here for? I am.

[admin]

a said:

tom said:

Poncey, pseudo-intellectual, self-indulgent shit.

Isn't that what we're all here for? I am.

hell yes.