P4k Fest Highlights: Day 3

Day 3 kicked off for me with Women, who turned in a wonderfully noisy and enjoyable set. The Walkmen continued the streak of great bands, and were much better than the last time I saw them. Hamilton's mic was at the perfect volume where it wasn't too loud, but was loud enough at the right times. Grizzly Bear was apparently what everyone came to see, because the crowd waiting for them was the largest that I saw other than Flaming Lips. Anyway, they were fantastic, with the exception of a couple sound hiccups. The Flaming Lips closed the fest with balloons, giant plastic balls, and even bigger sonic vaginas. It was quite a show, but not really for me. All in all I had a blast, and strongly suggest it for y'all next year, depending on the lineup.

-Chandler

P4k Fest Highlights: Day 2

Because I had to stay at the C stage the whole day to get good pics for Beirut, I missed a lot of bands I wanted to see. I also got there a little late, and missed what I heard to be the best act so far. Apparently Plants and Animals was amazing, and all I heard throughout the day was how good their set was. Oh well. I managed to catch some solid acts, Beirut probably being my favorite of the day. They were also joined by Final Fantasy towards the end, whose set I kind of heard from across the park (did he open with a "My Body Is A Cage" cover?) Yeasayer surprised me again and turned in an energy-filled set that I was more than pleased with. And the National was, you know, the National: they were solid. Click da pic for a bigga view.


-Chandler

P4k Fest Highlights: Day 1

The best act day 1 was Yo La Tengo followed closely by Built to Spill. Jesus Lizard was a little too hard for me, and Tortoise was a little too suck for me (sorry Tortoise fans). But YLT played a whole bunch of classics, including the relatively new epic "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind." I really liked the whole "write the playlist" feature, and it worked well with BTS also. Overall, it was a solid day, but it would eventually be outdone by day 2. Anyway, here's a couple pics from a decent digital camera. As always, click any of them to see a bigger version and to be brought to the f/k flickr account, where there are more from this show and others for your viewing pleasure.


-Chandler

Pitchfork Festival Coverage Comin' Atcha

Well I'm off to Chicago to bring you guys (hopefully) good coverage of what I think is the festival with the best lineup this summer has to offer. Some fantastic acts are playing P4k Fest, so count on what should be day to day coverage on stuff like this:

Ok, ok. Fleet Foxes actually won't be there, but I'll take any excuse to watch that video. Anyway, all these videos are from La Blogotheque, which we all strongly suggest you visit.

-Chandler

Why I'm Really Starting to Hate Pitchfork

The title of this post should illustrate what I'm writing about. It's not necessarily in my nature to hate on other blogs or sites, (except this one) but sometimes I start to get to annoyed with the musical influence that Pitchfork holds in the music community. Anyone reading this undoubtedly knows who and what Pitchfork is and what they do, so there's no need to really go into detail. Let me get one thing straight, I love the blogosphere. The blogosphere is made up of everyday, normal individuals, most of whom have jobs or go to school, and have not an ounce of pretentiousness about them. They are simply trying to further peoples' knowledge of the music community, and I think that's great. Enter the biggest, baddest music website of them all, and things start to change. First off, the materiality of a numerical review is saddening, and objectifies music in a way that is impossible and completely incorrect. Musical taste and preference cannot be objectified, much like art itself cannot. Obviously music is art, so I'm not exactly sure how they can manage that. Imagine a website that gave paintings a rank from 1 to 10, and seriously impacted the lives of the artists who painted them. The fact is, however, that there are many websites who rank music, and I'm not writing about them. So what separates Pitchfork from them? I'd say two main things single Pitchfork out from the pack and subject them to an amount of criticism. First, the scope of their influence is large, much larger than any other musical website. Second, their ratings involve a level of pigheadedness and pretentiousness absent in other music websites. They consider their ratings to be "fact," in a way that's difficult to explain without reading them. There's a level of separation from the number, the idea that it's not the opinion of the reviewer, but it's a fact as much as it's the year 2009. They are notorious for pandering to a certain audience, they tell people what they want to hear in a way that's hard to explain. I don't think it was their intention, I think they simple grew out of "blog natural selection" to be the one website that seemed to best represent the views of the indie community. I believe, however, as their scope has grown, their feel on the pulse of the indie community has weakened far past the point it once was. The fact is, I find very little correlation with the albums I enjoy and the rating Pitchfork gives it, as it is for every single person I talk about music with. My point is that I don't think it's just me who finds the ranking system perplexing. Also, a lot of music tends to intrinsically possess the quality of not being easily understood. Even artists can have certain albums that possess the "fungal creep," and other albums that don't. To give a quick example, I'm a pretty large Tori Amos fan (although in the world of Tori Amos fans, I'm actually considered quite small). Her second album, Under the Pink, was filled with pop hooks while still being essential Tori Amos material. As such, it's a really fantastic, fluid album. Her next album, Boys for Pele, was filled intensely played harpsichord and insanely crazy and difficult to comprehend lyrics. On first run though of that album I was perplexed and left stunned. I wasn't sure what I thought of it. Being forced to review it at the point and put it on a scale of 1 to 10 would've been completely unfair. And believe it or not, I wasn't particularly fond of Fleet Foxes on my first listen to them. Obviously I love them now, but my point is that first impressions are hardly worth ranking an album on. It just disappoints me to know that a Pitchfork rating is still very important to an artist, not because the artist gives a shit what a group of hipsters thinks about them, but because it will undoubtedly affect sales positively or negatively depending on the review. I guess at the end of the day, I'm asking people to keep their objectivity about music, and to not look at a record review and let it affect your opinion; go out and listen to something off the album. Believe me, our own blog is far from perfect, and our opinions are just those, opinions. There will certainly be music we don't like, such is the curse of this craft: no one person could ever hold the opinions of everybody. Our goal is just to introduce you to something you may never have heard before, and do our best to try and get people supporting artists we feel deserve it. That's all any music website should ever be about, and when one oversteps its fundamental bounds, I feel drawn to speak out against it. Sorry for being terribly boring, but I had to get it out.

-Donovan

Pitchfork...What's the Deal?

So a week ago, Pitchfork reviewed The Very Best, an effort by Radioclit and Esau Mwamwaya, and gave it an 8.6. You can find that review here. Let's get one thing straight: this is one of those times when Pitchfork gets over zealous and gives something they think is way too unknown a great score so they can keep up their hipster vibe, because this is not an 8.6 performance. The entire album can be downloaded for free here, but unless you want to clutter your hard drive with turd tomotoes, you should avoid it like the bubonic plague. On the record you can find remixes of M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" and "Boyz", both worse than the originals and given that African vibe feeling, as well as a couple other songs that sound incredibly similar to each other. It's mind-boggling that they have the audacity to give this such a high score, and give amazing albums lower scores (anyone remember the review for Z?). After listening to this thing all the way through, or at least trying, I have to wonder what would possess them to even waste their time with it. Anyway, I felt I needed to post this just to give a giant wag-of-the-finger to Pitchfork. 'Cause they'll probably read this, right? Try to enjoy a remix of the "True Romance" theme (?) and a remix of Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, brought to you in stunning African Vision!


The Very Best- Chikondi, which I assume is African for "Our Album is Shit Salad!"

The Very Best- Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa


-Chandler