Green Day - Saviors (January 19th, 2024) • Page 72

Pitchfork going down is bad for music. Everyone was a baby about Arielle's Blink review (which I agreed with) and to see everyone being kind of a baby about her Green Day review (which I disagree with) is a bummer.

You're not meant to just thumbs up or thumbs down a review, you're meant to engage with it! It doesn't make your enjoyment of the record less or more!

 

Don't find either of those reviews worth engaging with to be honest. Actaully, I haven't read anything on Pitchfork in years that I find worth engaging with. It's not a style of "review" I like or find any real value in reading. They rarely tell me anything about how the author engages with music, or the music they are covering, which is really what I'm looking for if I want to read someone else's thoughts on music.

Both read like paid reviews that someone is writing simply because they're paid to do it, not because they want or have something to say about a band/album/genre. That generic feeling is what I get from most popular music criticism these days. And why almost all of it turns me off.

 

Hyden is someone I find genuinely transcendent when I care about the thing he's writing about and impossibly stupid when I don't.

 

The only reviews I generally read for music are ones that may pop up on here. I generally don’t care what someone says about it before I listen to it. And then once I listen to it, I already have my own opinion and don’t really feel the need to read reviews.

Movies I’ll check out reviews before. But I normally don’t bother with music. Not sure why I do it that way. But I do. I guess I normally don’t check out tv reviews until after I see it. Obviously, some quotes or blurbs pop up and I do see those for various media.

 

I'm the same way with books, so I get it, in a way.

 

Need to note here: Taking issue with a review does not automatically equal "being a baby" about it. I've got a lot of gripes with that review that go beyond "just thumbs up or thumbs downing" it, and I think those gripes are legitimate. The fact that she accused Green Day of stealing from the Train song "Calling All Angels" because a song uses the phrase "Calling all saviors" is extremely stupid and is the kind of thing an editor should not have let fly.

 

That counts as engaging with it, sorry to paint with a broad brush!

 

It’s funny because I live and die by film and television reviews (RT/IMDB) but music reviews have never once swayed me ever.

 

For me, the core utility of music reviews is deepening my appreciation for albums or songs I already love by giving me a different perspective on them. I also love reading them for things I WANT to love but am a little baffled by; did that a lot during MWE months in the past, when I came to an album I found intriguing but didn’t quite love. I find less use for negative reviews, especially when it’s a negative review of something I think really works, and even more so when that negative review is written by someone who clearly doesn’t have as much respect for/knowledge of the artist in question as I already do.

I do think negative reviews have their place, but I find them most compelling when the writer is really grappling with something, such as “I genuinely loved this artist once; what is it about what they’re doing now that isn’t working for me?” If it’s someone with minimal investment in a band shitting on said band (Hyden during that Indiecast episode, for instance) that just seems like a waste of time for all involved parties.

 

Reviews are usually a quasi bummer because you realize, often, they don’t like this band as much as you and are totally cool with breezing past this record you are stoked enough on to read its reviews.

 

Yeah, like I said, when Hyden doesn't care he's borderline unlistenable.

 

I think part of the issue for me is also that, as a working journalist, I understand that some things you write are just a paycheck. Having seen behind that curtain, especially in the freelance world, I feel like I can always tell when a review is written just for the (minimal) cash, and those are so thin and passionless and boring to me.

Hyden, being an employed and well-established critic, has less excuse than most to write and/or podcast like this!

 

Yeah, this happens pretty often, especially if it’s a less marquee act.

 

writing and publishing reviews of new records sucks btw, you do your absolute best to chart an album’s depths and report back on what you’re pretty sure is there and unless it is a buzzy release it prob won’t be read by very many people, and if people do read it they will prob just post on the internet about how stupid you are, and even when the pay is good, the pay sucks. but i did it for years anyway bc i believed in the music and wanted more people to hear it

these aren’t reviews of contemporaneous releases but pfork’s sunday reviews were (are?) often home to astonishing writing that provided new ways for me to think about albums and artists i love and introduced me to artists i now love just as much. i wrote a lot of those because i felt like i was rewarding an impulse i’ve had since i was a kid, which was that every time i get really into a record i searched for writing about it. i still do. sometimes the writing is good, sometimes the writing is bad. (music criticism is also very difficult to write well, many of you know this firsthand.) but i’m not looking forward to a day where there’s no writing at all

 

god knows i hate pans that are just zingers. but that’s still a pretty small percentage of pfork’s library (at this point)

 

The Sunday reviews really are special; @unbornwhiskey wrote an amazing one about Clarity.

 

I don't really like reviews of anything to be honest, never have, just have zero interest in someone I don't know's thoughts on art

 

No shade throwing haha, just absolutely not for me

 

Jason’s OMT review was great.

 

I wanted to check out the new album and told my smart device to play Saviors album by Green Day and it played this instead lmao

 

Also it seems to me that Pitchfork only likes trashing the music and throwing in esoteric references that mean nothing to anybody except the author to please their own ego to show how "cultured" they are.

 

the song grouping annoys the hell out of me on Spotify, have never understood it

 

That's a relic of when the album originally went up for sale on iTunes, in the pre-gapless playback days. They combined a bunch of songs to preserve transitions between them. I don't know why streaming platforms/the band have never corrected this issue, but it's one of the great things about having local files!

 

and the original CDs!