Review of Pitchfork’s Review of The Sophtware Slump
Here are a few points that I feel I need to declare before I start.
1. I love Grandaddy, and The Software Slump in particular.
2. I generally hate Pitchfork.
I was looking up this album on Wikipedia, hoping that there was something new and interesting about this album that I could learn. There wasn’t. But I did click on the link to the Pitchfork review. What a mistake that was.
It’s been almost 10 years since this album was released. When evaluating a work of art, knowing when it was made helps you determine the context. But, and this is apparently very important, the album was released sometime in early 1999. So much of the review is spent talking about how this might be an early contender for “album of the year.”
I don’t understand why critics fixate on these arbitrary year-to-year distinctions. Especially in a review. And especially in a review that is available on the internet 10 years after it was first written.
People talk an awful lot lately about how online journalism (blogging) is killing print journalism. Every time I read something on Pitchfork, it makes me sad because even smelly old Rolling Stone is better than this garbage. And it’s never the albums they choose to review or their ratings or anything like that — it’s entirely their tone that bothers me. See this old post.
Still, I guess 8.5/10 ain’t half bad. I give this review, however, a 1.475 out of 10.