The 21 Most Pitchfork Sentences from Pitchfork’s 100 Best Albums of the Decade List

Via Chicago Now.

I absolutely love the indie music criticism site Pitchfork, and, specifically, its peculiarly Pitchforkian prose. Anyone who has read a review on the site will instantly recognize the hallmarks of the Pitchfork review: The casual references to bands you’ve never heard of, with the implication that you should know their entire catalogue as a matter of course; the allusions to genres that sound as though they were invented by Fred Armisen for a “Portlandia” sketch; the enthusiastic descriptions of music that seem like they would be unpleasant to listen to for more than fifteen seconds.

As I was scrolling through Pitchfork’s recently released, much discussed list of its 100 Best Albums of the Decade So Far, I decided to keep a running list of my own: Of my favorite, most unmistakable snippets of Pitchfork prose. Pitchfork writers have chosen their favorite albums of the past five years; now I have chosen my favorite sentences they used to describe their favorite albums of the past five years.

Here are the 21 most Pitchfork sentences from its 100 Best Albums of the Decade list.

1. In peeling away the singularly outré vocals from a dozen of Clams Casino’s finest weird rap nuggets, Instrumental Mixtape fully exposes the playground of textural oddities swirling underfoot — human voices splayed like chewing gum, birdcalls, and acres of white noise.
2. His willfully overzealous style, which Simon Reynolds called “digital maximalism,” conjures thoughts of The Legend of Zelda: MDMA Edition, or a computer that throws up double rainbows every minute of every day, or maybe a club full of robots popping and locking in an underwater club years after humans have been mercifully extinguished.
3. …[T]hough Jaar uses samples and occasionally defers to the backbone of a 4/4 beat, that doesn’t make him techno, nor do his jazz inflections and French-film dialogue make him smarmy.
4. Based around recordings of a day playing pipe organ in an Icelandic church, Ravedeath sounds less like music than the remnants of it — a haunted, hollowed-out record that reflects Hecker’s fascination with what he calls “digital garbage.”
5. It starts with a prayer and ends with “a new religion being born,” taking excursions into both druidic revelry and ghostly military choirs, but the electronically starry “Marilyn” and heartbreak-pinpricked “All Your Gold” are direct hits to rival any Ralph Macchio ode.
6. The Steve Albini-produced Attack on Memory was comparatively a no-future monster, with Jade Tree-style emo aggression that left We Who Downloaded Diary Off KaZaa nearly blindsighted.
7. It may be too early to call these icy, anguished, very catchy songs timeless, but the Toronto duo’s melancholic romanticism and existential dance-tripping is the perfect soundtrack for today’s tear-drenched, ultimately empowered @sosadtoday generation.
8. Whether you were a fan of Four Tet’s idyllictronica or his more adventurous breakbeats, there was reason to wonder if Kieran Hebden might ever come back from his mid-’00s jazz explorations.
9. Traces of his previous sounds (harp plucks, glitchy data, free jazz spurts, experimental INA-GRM gurgles) twined around house beats like streamers around a maypole, while Four Tet revealed a new lyricism in his productions.
10. Shaking the Habitual is the sound of Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer taking the dark, tightly controlled sound of 2006's Silent Shout and opening it up for a shaggy, 97-minute trek into tribal EDM, extended drone, and sweaty dance-psych.
11. His drums turned into bludgeons and the empty spaces filled with blackness and dread; it was dance music closer to Sunn O))) and Merzbow than the type you’d hear at a superclub.
12. As with Haim’s Days Are Gone (with whom it shares a producer), the soupy, smeared, and overdriven new wave pastiche pop-rock of Night Time, My Time imagines pasts that never existed. The Jesus and Mary Chain joining Transvision Vamp? Curve kidnapping Cathy Dennis?
13. With 17 vignettes featuring glittering synth-pop, minimalist Italo, and flourishes of kraut and glam rock, Chromatics’ 2012 LP illustrates a disconnected ensemble drama.
14. By most objective standards, Kurt Vile’s music has grown increasingly “boring” — he hired a real producer and developed an interest in extended guitar solos, drum machines, and phaser pedals. His songs can last up to 10 minutes, and he talks about his kids a lot.
15. From the time that it began finding its way to a wider listenership thanks to YouTube videos and eager compiler/facilitators like Planet Mu’s Mike Paradinas, Chicago footwork was regarded as a music of motion — of bewildering polyrhythms, triple-time cadences, slow-fast moiré patterns of cross-hatched blur.
16. Hill’s genre-fucked production slams and grinds and skips and short-circuits (sometimes all at once), an assurance that if you play it at a particular volume, you’ll be rendered sterile.
17. There are so many ways to chant “U-S-A,” each one revealing a perspective on what makes America. I’ve heard it used to celebrate World Cup goals, jingoistic pro wrestlers, the death of Osama bin Laden — and, in 2010, a handful of Titus Andronicus shows when the band was riding high on the success of The Monitor.
18. Punk rock isn’t expected to celebrate anything other than the outdated Kurt Cobain archetype, co-opted by fashionistas and tastemakers as a perverse enforcer of elitist, 1% ideals.
19. Deafheaven’s potent mix of beauty and brutality made Sunbather a true crossover album; it gets under your skin, regardless of your familiarity with corpse paint and burning crosses.
20. “Intro” allowed Mute to recognize the inner pop-goth goddess in recent signee Zola Jesus, and after two decades of alt-rock struggle in Savage Republic, Medicine and Electric Company, the self-explanatory “Splendor” allows Brad Laner a regal procession into the Hall of Fame. Throughout, White Sea’s Morgan Kibby establishes herself a songwriting auteur rather than a muse or voice-for-hire, a teen internet poet named Claudia Lewis becomes an electro-funk namesake, and the album producer’s 5-year old daughter rambles about magical frogs and becomes the most interesting storyteller on Earth.
21. Amid comparisons to fellow “Small Pop” case-studies like Sky Ferreira and Solange, it can be hard to remember that this is a girl who, just five years ago, tried sailing down the Mississippi River on a DIY houseboat with live chickens and 20 pounds of potatoes.

You can read Pitchfork’s entire list of the100 best albums of the decade here.