RipFork

Artist: Animal Collective

Album: Fall be Kind EP

Reviewer: Mark Richardson

Pitchfork, 2009

Writing Disorders: Jargon Palsy, Idea Fever

Longest Sentence: 62 words

Most Sterile Phrase: “the words and music suggest a sticking point, something that needs to be punctured before the song (and ideas) can really flow”

Before I even started reading this review, I did a quick word count. 1,000 words. Then I checked to see how many tracks appear on this EP. 5 tracks. Then I had a question burning in my head: how does someone who has the job title of managing editor manage to write 1,000 words about 5 songs? Well, let’s find out.

A lot of it has to do with you fawning on the band at every possible opportunity, Mark. Ahem…

“then Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) comes in with his thick, honeyed voice”

“They sound joyful, and they’re not smirking. (I’m not sure they’re capable of that particular expression, to be honest.)”

Jeez Mark, why don’t you marry them? But whatever, Animal Collective does seem like a pretty cool band judging from the one song I’ve heard. My real beef’s with your writing style, not theirs.

First there’s the jargon. Did I mention jargon? There’s a lot of it. Do you have a jargon key on your keyboard? Did you ace jargon 101 in college? Does Robert Christgau ask you for advice on sentence structure? Read some of this, Mark:

“It refracts Aquarian optimism through a modern sense of uncertainty, undercutting the loop’s jovial lilt”

“Fall Be Kind exists in the orbit of the full-length that preceded it but it isn’t defined by it”

“Given its fragmented genesis, it’s surprising how listenable and of-a-piece Fall Be Kind is.”

Ugh, I don’t even know what to say about this postmodern crap anymore, so I’ll just move on. While some of your writing is impenetrable, other bits are just plain dumb. Like this, for example:

“It’s not easy to take a cut-up voice and make it the centerpiece of a tune”

Do you know anything about sampling, Mark? Try listening to black people music sometime. In the meantime, here’s another of your gems:

“It doesn’t develop or do much, but it’s not supposed to”

How do you know it’s not supposed to, Mark? Maybe Animal Collective desperately wanted the song to develop or do much, but failed miserably. I think it takes a certain brand of person to extend the benefit of the doubt to one band over another based purely on his own conjecture. It also takes a certain kind of person to write this:

“When a band tries something that shouldn’t work and brings it off, it’s a sign of confidence.”

Mark, this is simultaneously one of the dumbest and most revealing things I’ve ever read in music criticism. How exactly does a band “bring it off?” It’s not like they built a bridge that either supports the weight of traffic or doesn’t. It’s a piece of music – in other words, a purely subjective experience. Here’s what I think you meant:

“When a band tries something that shouldn’t work, but enough music critics decide that it did work, it’s a sign of a band being lucky enough to avoid the indignity of suffering 39-year-old emo kid wrath.”

In spite of the awful writing, Mark, this review was actually rewarding. Even though it took me like 25 minutes to sift through from start to finish, it revealed to me the kind of stuff that Pitchfork critics desire in music. Here are a few:

“a series of scenes glimpsed out the window of a van”

“a peppy flute melody”

“a section that asks you to bust out the medieval garb and hop around on one leg for a minute”

“a kind of stomp that seems designed to inspire folk dancing”

“as natural as something that grew out of the earth”

“thwacks of hand drums that slowly rise in the mix”

The truly funny part about all of this hilarious shit is that at face value, it all looks like fresh meat for the snark grinder. But it ISN’T! Instead, it paints a pretty little picture of the kind of man behind Pitchfork. And when that picture is painted, I can’t help but wonder why the hell people like you are the ones dictating the futures of bands when you sound like a cross between a South Park hippie and that guy from the Free Credit Report commercials.

Mark, I’m not sure how you got your job as managing editor, but I don’t see you doing much of anything except snatching good releases for yourself so you can write gigantic tracts of foolishness. This was truly awful.