MUSIC MUSING: A Tiny Discrepancy

It’s pretty great that Pitchfork allows their writers to maintain individual voice and creatively express themselves in their record reviews. It is also true that the Chicago-based “small business pop music” publication’s editorial staff wields considerable power in both the numerical scores for their reviews as well as the thrust of the Pitchfork aesthetic narrative.

With that in mind, I present to you excerpts from two reviews on Pitchfork this week:

The Henry Clay People – Somewhere on the Golden Coast – 5.2 (link)

“[Joey Siara's] travelogues and character sketches lack a certain attention to detail and too rarely cohere into much beyond quips and overstatements… there’s no shortage of these gradiose catch-alls that don’t stand up to much inspection… Siara seems to have trouble getting much going at the verse level, and many of Golden Coast‘s songs play themselves out without sticking.”

Best Coast – Crazy for You - 8.4 (link)

“…as a lyricist, Cosentino lacks a certain depth and overall intelligence. It’s true that she’s not exactly the Randy Newman of the beach-pop game– there’s a few too many “crazy/lazy” rhyme schemes, and feel free to snicker at the “I wish my cat could talk” line from “Goodbye”. But it’s easy to miss that, just as these songs are relatively basic in construction, she’s never aimed for any sort of lyrical grandiosity– just feelings, presented as straightforwardly as possible.”

Infer from this what you will.

RELEVANCE!

(rock n’ roll will never die.)