post them here.

Audioslave
Out of Exile
[Interscope; 2005]
Rating: 6.8

Fresh out of exile, Chris Cornell is trying to re-adjust to the real world. Cornell has one problem, though: He only communicates using Audioslave lyrics:

Chris Cornell at the eye doctor:

Eye Doctor: So what's wrong, Mr. Cornell?

Chris Cornell: I've stared straight into the sun.

Eye Doctor: You can't see anything?

Chris Cornell: I've seen 50,000 names all engraved on a stone.

Eye Doctor: So you see some things, but not other things.

Chris Cornell: Send my soul away.

Chris Cornell at a bodega where somebody's buying lotto tickets:

Old Guy: God I hope I win...

Chris Cornell: I will be your luck.

Chris Cornell returning to his home in L.A.:

Chris Cornell: I was happy in this fortress.

Chris Cornell working as a Japanese tour guide, scaring people:

Chris Cornell: I walk the streets of Japan till I get lost with a graveyard tan carrying a cross.

Chris Cornell at the DMV saying stupid things that prevent him from getting his driver's license:

Chris Cornell: I like driving backwards in the fog.

Chris Cornell screaming:

Chris Cornell: Yeahhh!

Chris Cornell interviewing at med schools:

Chris Cornell: I don't want to learn what I'll need to forget.

Chris Cornell explaining what he likes to study:

Chris Cornell: I like studying faces in a parking lot.

Chris Cornell, M.D., talking to a patient in the emergency room who really just needs stitches, nothing big:

Chris Cornell: I don't know why you're dying.

Chris Cornell getting fired from Guitar World:

Chris Cornell: I like throwing my voice and breaking guitars.

Chris Cornell giving tips on how to play hide-and-seek:

Chris Cornell: Hide in the hours before sunrise.

Christ Cornell wondering whether this will all go away:

Chris Cornell: I've got a feeling this will all go away.

Places Chris Cornell will drink you:

Chris Cornell: I will drink you in my honey.

Chris Cornell's favorite mathematical functions:

Chris Cornell: Multiply and divide.

Drown him fast?

Chris Cornell: Drown me slowly.

damn, I thought they stopped with those gimmick reviews.

The Kid A review is pretty absurd.

the first few grafs are hilarious:

I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Radiohead were hunched over their instruments. Thom Yorke slowly beat on a grand piano, singing, eyes closed, into his microphone like he was trying to kiss around a big nose. Colin Greenwood tapped patiently on a double bass, waiting for his cue. White pearls of arena light swam over their faces. A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage. The metal skeleton of the stage ate one end of Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, on the steps of the Santa Croce Cathedral. Michelangelo's bones and cobblestone laid beneath. I stared entranced, soaking in Radiohead's new material, chiseling each sound into the best functioning parts of my brain which would be the only sound system for the material for months.
The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard's cap. The staccato piano chords ascended repeatedly. "Black eyed angels swam at me," Yorke sang like his dying words. "There was nothing to fear, nothing to hide." The trained critical part of me marked the similarity to Coltrane's "Ole." The human part of me wept in awe.

The Italians surrounding me held their breath in communion (save for the drunken few shouting "Criep!"). Suddenly, a rise of whistles and orgasmic cries swept unfittingly through the crowd. The song, "Egyptian Song," was certainly momentous, but wasn't the response more apt for, well, "Creep?" I looked up. I thought it was fireworks. A teardrop of fire shot from space and disappeared behind the church where the syrupy River Arno crawled. Radiohead had the heavens on their side.

For further testament, Chip Chanko and I both suffered auto-debilitating accidents in the same week, in different parts of the country, while blasting "Airbag" in our respective Japanese imports. For months, I feared playing the song about car crashes in my car, just as I'd feared passing 18- wheelers after nearly being crushed by one in 1990. With good reason, I suspect Radiohead to possess incomprehensible powers. The evidence is only compounded with Kid A-- the rubber match in the band's legacy-- an album which completely obliterates how albums, and Radiohead themselves, will be considered.

That Kid A review is HORRIBLE. It's embarassing.

Their review of Tool's Lateralus is a classic

Ryan Schreiber is the quintessintial hipster. Totally looks cool to all the unassuming, bandwagon indie-rock crowd, but is really a big insecure nerd with an obese wife.


The Pitchfork Uprising
Ryan Schreiber hatched a music website in his suburban Twin Cities bedroom, and now it's captivatingrock fans worldwide and bringing change to the recording industry.
Chris Riemenschneider, Star Tribune

Little Steven comes up from the underground
CHICAGO -- Tucked behind smoked-glass doors in a brick 1920s building, inside what looks like some film-noir detective's office, Ryan Schreiber is hot on the trail of a new music revolution.

The mysterious sign on the door says "World Headquarters." Inside, the Sonic Youth poster and pile of Sean Lennon CDs confirm it's the home of Schreiber's PitchforkMedia.com -- headquarters to a growing world of music fans scouring the Internet for the hippest new thing.

Created when Schreiber still lived with his parents in a Twin Cities suburb a decade ago, Pitchfork is now one of rock's most influential websites. Its ascent reflects the rise of non-corporate online music communities and shows the clout they are gaining in the slumping recording industry.

Schreiber, 30, is being likened to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, taking the pulse and shaping the tastes of many of today's young rock fans just as Wenner's magazine did with another generation of fans three decades ago.

Pitchfork now gets 1.3 million unique visitors per month and 160,000 viewers daily -- five times more than a few years ago. The site, which features a grab bag of snobby reviews and snarky gossip bits, even drew 40,000 fans to its second annual festival in July.

"I honestly don't know where they're all coming from," said Schreiber, a Hopkins High School graduate. "To me, it's a sign of the re-democratization of music."

In the Twin Cities, clubs and radio programmers are watching the site closely. So are national record labels and retailers. "Pitchfork has emerged as one of the more important indie music tastemakers in any medium," said New York Times media columnist David Carr.

Minneapolis band Tapes 'N Tapes, for example, went from playing St. Paul's ragtag Turf Club last winter to "The Late Show With David Letterman" this summer after it earned a rave from Pitchfork.

From clerk to kingmaker

Schreiber hardly planned a revolution when he created Pitchfork in 1995. The site merely provided a creative outlet after high school, when he worked at Down in the Valley record store in Golden Valley and then in telemarketing.

Four years later, Schreiber gambled that Pitchfork could be a full-time pursuit. "I sold a bunch of old records on eBay, drove to Chicago, found a crappy apartment and moved the following week," he recalled. "Pitchfork was going to be my job. If I expected to make rent, I'd have to find some way to make a go of it."

Now, some bands that benefit from Pitchfork raves, including the Arcade Fire and Modest Mouse, sell more than 100,000 copies of their records.

Pitchfork has grown, too. It has six full-time staffers (none older than 34) in its Chicago headquarters and about 40 freelance writers. Its rates for advertising, which provides most of its revenue, are below what major magazines charge for their websites.

Pitchfork sometimes skews to the underground to a fault -- check its list of the best '90s albums for proof. But Schreiber said he sees the site as an antidote to the "bloated" corporate music industry, whose album sales have decreased by almost 25 percent since 1999.

"The mainstream is shrinking," he said. "People have more freedom than ever to watch or listen exclusively to what interests them personally, yet major labels are still shocked when their artists can't sell 5 million records."

Tapes 'N Tapes was not even a well-known name in its hometown when Pitchfork gave its album an 8.3-point rating out of 10 in February (the Olympic-style ratings demonstrate how seriously the staff takes its reviews).

"It literally happened overnight," said Tapes 'N Tapes frontman Josh Grier.

By the time Grier's band signed an international record deal and made its national TV debut in July, it had sold 12,000 copies of its self-released CD, mostly off the Internet.

"That Pitchfork review was definitely the single most important thing in getting us where we are now," Grier said.

The next Seattle?

Alongside websites such as MySpace, eMusic and YouTube, Pitchfork represents a growing shift from geographic music scenes to Internet music hubs.

The nearest thing today to the celebrated Seattle rock scene of the early '90s, or the Twin Cities scene of the '80s, might be the Pitchfork scene.

"The next Seattle will probably exist in virtual space," said Michael Azerrad, music editor at eMusic.com and a veteran rock critic.

An online partner of Pitchfork, eMusic is a monthly subscriber site (i.e., 40 song downloads for $10) that works exclusively with independent record labels. With about 180,000 subscribers, it is now the second-rated download site after industry giant iTunes.

"That really says something about how many independent music lovers there are," Azerrad said. "People are tired of corporations shoving bad music down their throats, and the Web is providing more and more remedies to that."

At Pitchfork and eMusic, fans can read reviews just like in magazines or newspapers, but they can also sample songs, watch videos and download albums.

Music sites are no longer seen as second-rate by advertisers, either.

"We've had better luck with Pitchfork than we've had with the websites for Rolling Stone or Spin," said Spencer Windes, Web marketing coordinator for American Apparel, a clothing company that is one of Pitchfork's major advertisers.

Schreiber believes there's more to Pitchfork's success than convenience. With five album reviews daily, his writers are encouraged to write passionately and aggressively. The site, after all, took its name from Al Pacino's pitchfork tattoo in "Scarface," a symbol for assassins. ("It made a lot more sense when I was 19," Schreiber quipped).

"Most publications seem more concerned with who they're going to offend and alienate," he said, "than with actually providing an informed take on a record."

But Pitchfork has taken a few journalistic knocks: One of its star writers, Nick Sylvester, was caught fabricating a piece for New York's Village Voice. Before that, the Voice's "dean of rock criticism," Robert Christgau, put down Pitchfork's sometimes rash review style as "opinion-wielding for its own sake."

Some critics also question whether Pitchfork crossed the line from booster to profiteer by producing Chicago's Intonation Festival, which this year featured Tapes 'N Tapes, Yo La Tengo and the Streets.

"I think it was the most daylight all those hipsters had seen in a year," joked Chicago resident Greg Scherer, 36, who attended both the Pitchfork event and July's gigantic Lollapalooza festival in Chicago. While Lollapalooza "was corporate and mega-sized," Pitchfork's event had "more of a cool community vibe," he said.

The impact in Minneapolis

The Twin Cities music scene is feeling Pitchfork's impact. At Down in the Valley record store, for example, the staff doesn't remember former clerk Schreiber, but it definitely knows about his site.

"They're keeping people excited about new music," said Scott Farrell, head buyer.

"I don't think a day goes by when I don't read it," said Mark Wheat, disc jockey for the Current (89.3 FM). He likens Pitchfork's influence to the hyperactive British music press, which broke many of the decade's hippest bands (the Strokes, White Stripes, Kings of Leon).

Even with his site's worldwide reach, Schreiber hasn't lost his appreciation for bands from the city that turned him into an indie music fan.

"Minneapolis has always been a haven for independent and alternative music, so I definitely caught the bug there," he said.

He alluded to another cult-loved band with Twin Cities roots, the Hold Steady, whose album coming out next month is pretty well guaranteed a Pitchfork rave.

"Great bands like that are what this is all about," Schreiber said.

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658



http://www.startribune.com/457/story/665643-p2.html

wow, that's a lot less than i thought.

i think youre too cool to work there cb. i get music from them, but from what ive heard and seen they are pricks.

fucking lol

that actually made me laugh quite hard. i dont pay attention to pitchfork much and this justifies that completely.

Slanted and Enchanted
Lateralus
Relaxation of The Asshole
Travistan

Really, all their 0.0 reviews are worth reading.

that review is what first got me interested in pavement.

I don't feel that way about Kid A at all but that is a wonderful description (Except for the imax part)

The Pitchfork Uprising






CHICAGO -- Tucked behind smoked-glass doors in a brick 1920s building, inside what looks like some film-noir detective's office, Ryan Schreiber is hot on the trail of a new music revolution.

The mysterious sign on the door says "World Headquarters." Inside, the Sonic Youth poster and pile of Sean Lennon CDs confirm it's the home of Schreiber's PitchforkMedia.com -- headquarters to a growing world of music fans scouring the Internet for the hippest new thing.

Created when Schreiber still lived with his parents in a Twin Cities suburb a decade ago, Pitchfork is now one of rock's most influential websites. Its ascent reflects the rise of non-corporate online music communities and shows the clout they are gaining in the slumping recording industry.

Schreiber, 30, is being likened to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, taking the pulse and shaping the tastes of many of today's young rock fans just as Wenner's magazine did with another generation of fans three decades ago.

Pitchfork now gets 1.3 million unique visitors per month and 160,000 viewers daily -- five times more than a few years ago. The site, which features a grab bag of snobby reviews and snarky gossip bits, even drew 40,000 fans to its second annual festival in July.

"I honestly don't know where they're all coming from," said Schreiber, a Hopkins High School graduate. "To me, it's a sign of the re-democratization of music."

In the Twin Cities, clubs and radio programmers are watching the site closely. So are national record labels and retailers. "Pitchfork has emerged as one of the more important indie music tastemakers in any medium," said New York Times media columnist David Carr.

Minneapolis band Tapes 'N Tapes, for example, went from playing St. Paul's ragtag Turf Club last winter to "The Late Show With David Letterman" this summer after it earned a rave from Pitchfork.

From clerk to kingmaker

Schreiber hardly planned a revolution when he created Pitchfork in 1995. The site merely provided a creative outlet after high school, when he worked at Down in the Valley record store in Golden Valley and then in telemarketing.

Four years later, Schreiber gambled that Pitchfork could be a full-time pursuit. "I sold a bunch of old records on eBay, drove to Chicago, found a crappy apartment and moved the following week," he recalled. "Pitchfork was going to be my job. If I expected to make rent, I'd have to find some way to make a go of it."

Now, some bands that benefit from Pitchfork raves, including the Arcade Fire and Modest Mouse, sell more than 100,000 copies of their records.

Pitchfork has grown, too. It has six full-time staffers (none older than 34) in its Chicago headquarters and about 40 freelance writers. Its rates for advertising, which provides most of its revenue, are below what major magazines charge for their websites.

Pitchfork sometimes skews to the underground to a fault -- check its list of the best '90s albums for proof. But Schreiber said he sees the site as an antidote to the "bloated" corporate music industry, whose album sales have decreased by almost 25 percent since 1999.

"The mainstream is shrinking," he said. "People have more freedom than ever to watch or listen exclusively to what interests them personally, yet major labels are still shocked when their artists can't sell 5 million records."

Tapes 'N Tapes was not even a well-known name in its hometown when Pitchfork gave its album an 8.3-point rating out of 10 in February (the Olympic-style ratings demonstrate how seriously the staff takes its reviews).

"It literally happened overnight," said Tapes 'N Tapes frontman Josh Grier.

By the time Grier's band signed an international record deal and made its national TV debut in July, it had sold 12,000 copies of its self-released CD, mostly off the Internet.

"That Pitchfork review was definitely the single most important thing in getting us where we are now," Grier said.

The next Seattle?

Alongside websites such as MySpace, eMusic and YouTube, Pitchfork represents a growing shift from geographic music scenes to Internet music hubs.

The nearest thing today to the celebrated Seattle rock scene of the early '90s, or the Twin Cities scene of the '80s, might be the Pitchfork scene. "The next Seattle will probably exist in virtual space," said Michael Azerrad, music editor at eMusic.com and a veteran rock critic.

An online partner of Pitchfork, eMusic is a monthly subscriber site (i.e., 40 song downloads for $10) that works exclusively with independent record labels. With about 180,000 subscribers, it is now the second-rated download site after industry giant iTunes.

"That really says something about how many independent music lovers there are," Azerrad said. "People are tired of corporations shoving bad music down their throats, and the Web is providing more and more remedies to that."

At Pitchfork and eMusic, fans can read reviews just like in magazines or newspapers, but they can also sample songs, watch videos and download albums.

Music sites are no longer seen as second-rate by advertisers, either.

"We've had better luck with Pitchfork than we've had with the websites for Rolling Stone or Spin," said Spencer Windes, Web marketing coordinator for American Apparel, a clothing company that is one of Pitchfork's major advertisers.

Schreiber believes there's more to Pitchfork's success than convenience. With five album reviews daily, his writers are encouraged to write passionately and aggressively. The site, after all, took its name from Al Pacino's pitchfork tattoo in "Scarface," a symbol for assassins. ("It made a lot more sense when I was 19," Schreiber quipped).

"Most publications seem more concerned with who they're going to offend and alienate," he said, "than with actually providing an informed take on a record."

But Pitchfork has taken a few journalistic knocks: One of its star writers, Nick Sylvester, was caught fabricating a piece for New York's Village Voice. Before that, the Voice's "dean of rock criticism," Robert Christgau, put down Pitchfork's sometimes rash review style as "opinion-wielding for its own sake."

Some critics also question whether Pitchfork crossed the line from booster to profiteer by producing Chicago's Intonation Festival, which this year featured Tapes 'N Tapes, Yo La Tengo and the Streets.

"I think it was the most daylight all those hipsters had seen in a year," joked Chicago resident Greg Scherer, 36, who attended both the Pitchfork event and July's gigantic Lollapalooza festival in Chicago. While Lollapalooza "was corporate and mega-sized," Pitchfork's event had "more of a cool community vibe," he said.

The impact in Minneapolis

The Twin Cities music scene is feeling Pitchfork's impact. At Down in the Valley record store, for example, the staff doesn't remember former clerk Schreiber, but it definitely knows about his site.

"They're keeping people excited about new music," said Scott Farrell, head buyer.

"I don't think a day goes by when I don't read it," said Mark Wheat, disc jockey for the Current (89.3 FM). He likens Pitchfork's influence to the hyperactive British music press, which broke many of the decade's hippest bands (the Strokes, White Stripes, Kings of Leon).

Even with his site's worldwide reach, Schreiber hasn't lost his appreciation for bands from the city that turned him into an indie music fan.

"Minneapolis has always been a haven for independent and alternative music, so I definitely caught the bug there," he said.

He alluded to another cult-loved band with Twin Cities roots, the Hold Steady, whose album coming out next month is pretty well guaranteed a Pitchfork rave.

"Great bands like that are what this is all about," Schreiber said

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/r ... _Daft_Club


lock the thread.

that was great

I completely agree with the sentiment of their ST&C review, if not the language itself.

Not a record review, but I like these 2 from the "Top 25 Worst Album Covers of 2006"

Pearl Jam: Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam's longtime green party advocacy has led fans to believe the avocado is a nod to the Avocado Declaration. Initiated by Ralph Nader's 2004 vice-presidential running mate Peter Camejo, the declaration is named for the fruit that's "green on the outside, green on the inside." Okay, fine. But this cover is a bad gradient, a Larabie future font, a miscast drop shadow, and a clipart image that we've actually seen used elsewhere (twice!). If this was 1973-- and the music doesn't go out of its way to suggest it isn't-- Hipgnosis would be really disappointed.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Stadium Arcadium
Judging from this tracklist, Stadium Arcadium would have the worst games imaginable. I'll admit, "Warlocks", "Hump de Bump", and "Torture Me" sound really promising, but that's three out of 28. The rest-- "Slow Cheetah", "Wet Sand", "Hard to Concentrate"-- are pretty obviously third-party Korean SNES ports.

This is funny.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/r ... 7031-frank

Amy Winehouse
Frank
4.9

The self-destructive tortured-artist routine was bullshit when Kurt Cobain did it, it was bullshit when Elliott Smith did it, and it's bullshit now. As anyone who's seen the video of Amy Winehouse desperately finger-fumbling her way through "Back to Black" at the MTV Europe Video Music Awards knows, her look-how-messed-I-am public persona is now screwing up her art something fierce. So instead of a new record, Americans are now getting a modified version of Frank, her first album, originally released four years ago and subsequently dissed by the artist herself. Its two weakest links, "Know You Now" and a pointless cover of standard "Moody's Mood for Love", have been yanked out of the original running order and appended as hidden penalty tracks.

Winehouse has a hell of a voice, even when she imitates her favorite jazz vocalists-- especially Billie Holiday-- much too closely. (Just in case anybody misses the idea that she's supposed to be a jazz singer who's somehow stumbled into a neo-soul record, Frank begins with a little fragment of Winehouse scat-singing, and the chorus of "October Song" doesn't just namedrop Sarah Vaughan but lifts its melody from "Lullaby of Birdland".) None of her songs here are as indelible as "Rehab" or as cutting as "You Know I'm No Good"-- and the best are co-written with Nas and Fugees collaborator Salaam Remi-- but you can hear the development of the high-powered songwriter she turned into on Back to Black in the snarky character sketch "F*** Me Pumps" and in the way the sharp-nailed ballad "You Sent Me Flying" breaks into a Soul II Soul beat halfway through. And although she hasn't quite nailed the 1972 vibe of her later record (despite some corny vintage-vinyl sound effects), a couple of her stylistic experiments pay off, especially the high-drama soul loop that underpins "In My Bed".

But Winehouse's slow public wreck isn't just an unfortunate thing that's happening to someone who happens to be a star, it's part of her act, and has been from the get-go-- which means it makes her audience complicit in it. Her favorite lyrical topic, even on her debut, is loving not wisely but too well; on "Amy Amy Amy", she's gently wagging a finger at herself about her fondness for bad-news boys. And her deliberate affectation of Holiday's unmistakable vocal tics can't help but suggest the narrative we're supposed to buy into: "Great singer, tragically destroyed by her unhappy private life and bad habits, who turned her pain into universal art." (What are we as her audience supposed to do? Stage an intervention? Well, we can at least think very carefully about what our participation in that narrative means. And who are we to say we wish she'd stop going on about how she doesn't need any help and get some goddamn help already? Not vultures, that's who.) Winehouse is good enough that she was worth paying attention to for her music alone before her drama started ruining it, but in the light of her subsequent career, Frank comes off as the first chapter in the Romantic myth of the poet who feels too deeply and ends up killing herself for her audience's entertainment. And that is some bullshit.