Older folks reading this blog won’t know what a mighty shadow the website Pitchfork.com cast over alternative / edgy / college / indie rock in the 2000s. Their weird grading system — one to ten, with a decimal point — literally delivered some bands and destroyed others. You had to crack 8.0 or the Millennials wouldn’t give you a sniff. If you broke into the 9s you were golden…Anything less than a 7.0 or worse — might as well hang it up.
It infuriated me. What elevated this eyeroll of suburban record store clerks over the established music critic community? Or every other eyeroll of suburban records store clerks from Boston to Silverlake? Somehow, out of some kind behind the scenes PR legerdemain, theirs became the only opinion that mattered.
And I was never able to figure out who they’d anoint and who they’d destroy.
Troubled Hubble was one they destroyed. Pitchfork reviewer Marc Hogan gave them a kiss of death 6.8 for their major-indie-label debut and the band, after several years of constant rehearsals and touring and three previous releases called it quits.
Hogan called them “a nerdy blast from the too-recent-to-be-trendy past” and that seems to have been his beef with the music. It was not fashionable. Close to being fashionable, which is the worst kind of out-of-fashionability of all.
Quality music is quality music, though, and give a listen to Troubled Hubble and see what you think? Is this music worthy of a D+?
And here they covering one of my favorite ‘80s hits:
And here is their “hit,” the song that got them signed to Lookout Records, a label not quite fashionable enough for the Pitchforkerati:
I saw them live, and they were every bit as tight an ensemble as you hear from the above…These kids from out where the sidewalks ended in the cornfields of northern Illinois deserved better.
An indie musician friend of mine got a pitchfork review of 5.8 on one album and 8.6 on another. The two records sound about the same to me, very similar yet got this huge disparity in pitchfork ratings. The scathing 5.8 review took a personal hated to the lyrical content and the artist, complaining the love sick songs were too co-dependent, which pissed him off, as if these songs are all autobiographical and requiring a labored psychoanalysis by him rather than just being creative works. Complaints of co-dependency in song lyrics could be directed at most any sad heartbreak song by countless artists but the reviewer acted like this was a new problem in lyrics. He had no criticism of the quality of the music, just didn’t like the subject matter. That’s not a valid review. That would be like giving every gangsta rap record a 3.0 because you’re a law & order type guy and don’t like glorifying street life. In which case, you’re not suited to review the material. Things like this make me think Pitchfork is a joke. What next, a film critic giving Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid one star simply because “I don’t like westerns”?
Would PF have been a success pre-Internet as a print only publication?