25 Years Later, Does The Pitchfork Score Matter?

Also Arca & Sia, glaive/ericdoa, Richard Youngs, Big Freedia, Gabriels

Hello welcome to the Unskippables where everyone gets a kidney and all our track review ratings are perfect forever!

On Tuesday, Pitchfork published their Marvel “What If?” for reviews, rethinking the scores of 19 records over their 25 year history. The article was seemingly designed to make people mad, and according to The Ratio, it worked!

The piece caught me in my feelings - Pitchfork is the only site I’ve checked every day that wasn’t social media or my email since 2004. I begged dozens of writers to cover my bands’ music over the years, and I’ve seen friends heartbroken by bad (or nonexistent) reviews of their music.

However, the power of their homepage to see what’s Happening In Music has increasingly become important than an album’s review, and *especially* an album’s score - which has waned in power since peaking in influence in the late aughts/early 2010s.

That made the strong reaction to Tuesday’s hypothetical re-scoring so wild - what was the last Pitchfork review number you remember really well? What was the last album that was off by 1-2.5 points that got you truly riled up? James Blake got a 6.6 *today* that I can’t imagine will make a dent on his album rollout.

And yet, pearls were clutched! The article felt like a Rorschach test - people saw what they wanted to see about the state of Pitchfork in the list of adjusted scores, whether it was who took on atoning for past sins, ignoring related sins, or calling a troll a troll. In the end, it was interesting seeing commentary on reviews have more of an impact than any of their recent reviews, or scores, this year. Virality is (Greta Van) Fleeting, I guess?

Anyways - on to the new music! As always, you can follow along on our playlist on Spotify and Apple Music, which will update every week along with the newsletter.

THE UNSKIPPABLES #10

Arca feat. Sia - Born Yesterday

This song sounds like the vocal moves forwards while the instrumental is playing in reverse, thanks to a vacuum-suctioned synth giving Sia’s melody butterflies in its stomach. The two meet gloriously in the middle at 1:53 when a kick drum drops in to bring the two together with pulsing, effortless joy.

glaive, ericdoa - heather

Glaive was my first taste of hyperpop that made me understand the genre wasn’t for me - mall trap, big pop punk, borderline silly diary-esque lyrics - dnd felt like Kidz Bop for sad teens. He’s then grown to be one of the more interesting, and productive, figures in the microgenre, dropping his second record of 2021 this week with fellow young person ericdoa. The cheeky 8 bit synths, lite-flex chorus lyrics, “Hard To Explain” verse drums and back and forth halftime whiplash give the track a shouty, house party energy worth putting on repeat.

Tank and the Bangas feat. Big Freedia - Big

It’s less than two minutes long, barely even time for a second verse, but Tank and the Banga’s New Orleans bounce - blessed by the touch of Big Freedia - welcomes you with a technicolor embrace and doesn’t let go for a second. There aren’t many songs as bubbling or ferocious dropping out in 2021, let alone ones that get the job done in one minute and forty-one seconds.

Richard Youngs - Tokyo Photograph

“Tokyo Photograph” has 121 minor chord changes for Richard Youngs’ 121st release, hinting at resolution but never closing in on it. Youngs trades off wordless vocals against a lone trombone, with occasional buzzsaw synths and hisses, for a dirge that’s mostly song-adjacent but entirely captivating for its 15:51 runtime.

Dustin Krcatovich put it nicely in the Quietus:

Attention, however, reveals a structurally challenging work that, while lovely, is also deeply alien, like grey men successfully imitating the tonalities of western music without any notions about the logic that drives most of it.

Gabriels - Blame

Somewhere between the gospel bounce of their breakout single “Love And Hate In A Different Time” and the Succession theme, “Blame” continues to see Gabriels rise to the occasion of their growing international reknown. There are hints of Portishead and classic Holler/Dozier/Holland in the songs’ dripping melancholy - “Can’t be a captive if it’s where I want to be.”

THE THROWBACK

Patti Jo - Make Me Believe In You (Tom Moulton Mix)

An incredible stomping soul/disco track from 1973, written by Curtis Mayfield and performed by the elusive Patti Jo. The rework, which strips out the song’s lush strings for a raw, extended intro, is a power edit that builds on the sheer force of raw repetition.

I can’t say much about it that wasn’t said better by Oliver Wang in 2016:

Mouton’s remix is a masterpiece of extending a song’s best elements without radically altering it. The biggest change he makes, right off the bat, is taking the original’s 12 bar intro and extending it six-fold. That instrumental build, which takes up the first 2/5ths of the entire song, folds in different elements from other parts of the song and it’s a masterful slow-burn build where the listener – and really, dancer – already has undergone a journey of sorts before Patti Jo’s vocals even enter the picture.

See you next week - and if you haven’t already, please subscribe!