Pitchfork Reviews: Rescored
They say that “writing is rewriting” because the careful process of revision is the very thing that makes a story, a novel, or a piece of criticism actually work. Revisions, of course, are usually completed just before a piece is sent to the printing press or published on the internet when there is finally no more futzing and no takes-backsies. And then there it is, forever, a good and righteous piece of criticism.
But then, sometimes, our feelings change. Our precious fickle little feelings! The truth is we are always litigating how we feel about a piece of music, revising opinions based on context, culture, who we’ve become, who we once were. We can’t change what we said, but we are almost always changing how we feel about it in ways both small and large.
What follows are 19 ideas about rescoring a handful of Pitchfork album reviews. These adjustments are born out of conversations we have all the time here on staff, much like the conversations you, our dear opinionated reader, have as well. They are hypothetical, which is to say, not canon, but rather a fun little diversion, a conversation-starter brought to you by the individual grievances of the Pitchfork staff. From slight adjustments to major reconsiderations to grave errors in judgment, enjoy a bit of our revisionist history.
For more of Pitchfork’s 25th anniversary coverage, head here.
Rilo Kiley: Take Offs and Landings (2001)
Rilo Kiley’s Take Offs and Landings is now seen as an undeniable classic, but our review—which was written as a screenplay—was more concerned with the band’s recent feature on Dawson’s Creek than the actual songwriting. Sure, the Los Angeles foursome were still finding their footing on their 2001 debut, but Take Offs handily uses indie pop to convey candid and often devastating observations about longing, insecurities, and the uncertainty of young adulthood. “I’m a modern girl but I fold in half so easily,” Jenny Lewis sings on “Pictures of Success,” but Take Offs shines when Lewis and her bandmates allow themselves to expand into their ambitions. –Quinn Moreland
PJ Harvey: Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (2000)
For a music critic in 2000, PJ Harvey’s fifth album might actually have seemed “bland” and “middling.” After two scabrous noise-rock masterpieces and a near-universally acclaimed third album of baroque goth-blues majesty, the trip-hop character studies of 1998’s Is This Desire? had met a more muted reception. Now, Harvey was posing in Times Square and crunching out glossy arena-rock. When mainstream music journalism was still abundant, part of Pitchfork’s role, as an upstart online zine, was serving as a corrective to thoughtless advance praise. The rampant maleness of music criticism at the time didn’t help: Even positive, eminently thoughtful reviews of the album could be off-puttingly brusque on matters of sex.
Of course, the context in which “glossy arena-rock” meant something bad is long gone, and while Harvey’s songwriting was more direct than usual on this album, it was also some of her best. Few songs evoke the romance of pre-9/11 New York more powerfully than the whirling late-night tale “You Said Something.” Thom Yorke lends his ghostly vocals to three tracks, including a lead turn on “This Mess We’re In,” a The Bends-style churner for the Kid A era. And while there wouldn’t have been anything wrong if Harvey had gone slicker and more straightforward, she has never settled down since, cementing her art-rock legacy on successive albums that’ve returned to primal intensity, explored the piano and a higher vocal register, embraced autoharp and war imagery, even deconstructed the protest record. Killing your idols can be a noble pursuit, but this exuberant city-love album deserves all the praise it can get. –Marc Hogan
Wilco: Sky Blue Sky (2007)
Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky is an essential album not only because its then-verboten influences—jam bands, wellness, family—have proven to be enduring touchstones in today’s best indie music. It’s also because, after proving themselves as one of rock’s most daring groups, Wilco found a way to evolve while lightening up, embracing community and sustainability while rejecting the myth that great art must be born from torture, tragedy, and visionary collaborations with Jim O’Rourke. It is no coincidence this album shares a title with Wilco’s utopian destination festival in Mexico: After all this time, going “dad rock” doesn’t seem like an insult. In fact, it’s a little aspirational. —Sam Sodomsky
Chief Keef: Back From the Dead (2012)
You learn a shit ton about Chief Keef on his breakout 2012 mixtape Back From the Dead: He is so addicted to True Religion that he implausibly considers himself a fiend for a pair of jeans; he smokes insane amounts of dope every single day, so much so that his excessive coughing understandably causes people to think he has asthma; he doesn’t do love instead he would rather hang out with the bros. OK, maybe Back From the Dead doesn’t have the depth and vulnerability that would come along as Keef got a little older. But it remains the standard for drill at its rawest and most inventive. The Young Chop beats sound like he stripped ATL trap to its barebones and built something new on top of that foundation and Keef’s warbling flows make the unveiling of every frivolous detail a massive revelation. –Alphonse Pierre
Jeffrey Lewis: It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through (2003)
In an era of folk expansionism and Arcade Fire bombast, Jeffrey Lewis fell under the moniker of “anti-folk,” reciting motor-mouth fables over quaintly slapdash strums. Nerds were coming into vogue, but to unsympathetic listeners, Lewis was the wrong kind: precocious, lo-fi, and earnest in a way that could seem cloying. But 2003’s It’s the Ones Who’ve Cracked That the Light Shines Through was too sweet and luminous to deserve vitriol. I still hear its rambling wisdom echoing in my thoughts, perhaps triggered by a similarly plainspoken Frankie Cosmos or Courtney Barnett lyric; I never stopped viewing music-industry exploitation, for instance, through the prism of his unfeasibly charming “Don’t Let the Record Label Take You Out to Lunch.” “Every sip of soup is gonna get recouped,” Lewis sang. “Though the fishes look delicious, someone’s got to do the dishes.” Eighteen years later, we owe it to Jeff to wipe clean a pan or two, too. –Jazz Monroe
Chairlift: Moth (2016)
Over a 12-year run, the Colorado synthpop duo Chairlift gave us many overlooked gems that flaunted Caroline Polachek’s high-wire vocal agility and guitarist Patrick Wimberly’s precise fretwork. But on 2016’s Moth, a bittersweet love letter to New York City and the group’s final album, the pair nailed down their innovative, instantly satisfying indie pop. The album wasn’t exactly ignored, but it deserved more—how do you not move to “Ch-Ching,” a push-and-pull electro-pop song originally meant for Beyoncé? Or shed a tear to “Crying in Public,” the album’s crestfallen inflection point? I return to “Show U Off” the most, a hip-shaking, funky ode to making a relationship public that sounds like a practice run for Polachek's complex pop songwriting on her solo debut, Pang. Moth’s range holds up, full of the off-kilter sincerity and skillful hooks that made Chairlift so appealing. –Eric Torres
Prince: Musicology (2004)
I was not surprised at all that Pitchfork’s 2004 review of Musicology was pretty lukewarm. It’s cool to like Prince now, and this was arguably not the case in 2004. Which is a shame, because this late-career album is a major masterpiece on a minor scale. Prince examines his own work and the history of Black music (both “Musicology” and the jazz fusion-gospel of “If Eye Was the Man in Ur Life”), gets contemplative (“Reflection”), and sings the blues (“On the Couch”). He’s not necessarily aiming at the same targets he hit in the 1980s, but this portrait in miniature contains everything he’s been contending with his whole career. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Foxygen: We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic (2013)
Foxygen were so assured of their own exuberance that they named their second album We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic. Their “peace & magic” never quite materialized, but they did press on with a strain of devotive rock that tied together hippie-dippy joie de vivre, a daisy chain of 1960s and ’70s worship, and other tricks from cherished Boomer blowhards. The band lay it on as thick as the era’s polyester double-knits, contemplating “What if someone liked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones?” without taking it much further. But their West Coast gleam gets just as sticky and restrictive, with their charm diminishing as the band continue to insist upon their own incurious allusions and swooning clichés about psychedelia. –Allison Hussey
Grimes: Miss Anthropocene (2020)
It was impossible to crush the excitement Art Angels left in its wake. Grimes’ psycho-pop masterpiece was vibrant, intricate, and fucking bananas in the best way. Could it be that some residual elation seeped into the next release cycle? Art Angels was the sound of Grimes shapeshifting in a swift, colorful explosion. On the subsequent Miss Anthropocene, she sounds like a carbon copy of herself—faded and less defined. There are individual songs here that move the needle: the spectacular, detailed “My Name Is Dark,” for instance, but the album itself suffers the same problem as poorly written screenplays: things just happen, with no service to the overall story. The songs here, cloying and timid at worst, seem to lack cohesion—the connective tissue so vital to great albums. —Madison Bloom
Big Boi: Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty (2010)
In 2010, Big Boi had a lot of goodwill on his side. Maybe too much. Ever since OutKast first set the standard for Southern rap in the ’90s, he was often wrongly seen as André 3000’s sidekick—the straight-talking everyman to Dre’s extraterrestrial funk fiend. With his long-awaited official solo debut coming out, it was time to correct the record. Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty is still a good time—“Shine Blockas” and “Shutterbugg” can bounce with the best—but there are other questionable moments that may have been charitably overlooked. The ghastly modern rock crossover attempt featuring a band called Vonnegut. The old man-isms decrying a lack of real hip-hop. The T.I. sex raps. Looking back, the record sounds more like an end of an era rather than the start of something exciting and new. –Ryan Dombal
Lana Del Rey: Born to Die (2012)
It’s hard to describe how overheated the discussion around Lana Del Rey was in 2012, when critics eyed her femme fatale persona with cynicism and you couldn’t scroll a Tumblr dashboard without passing a flower crown. But late one night that summer, I set out for a long drive, slid a burned CD in the player, and realized the open road feels like Born to Die, all smooth glossy surface and the riskiest danger around, the kind where you’re the victim. The future looks pitch black and you glide right in. Lana is reaching for something: the fulcrum point where the fear and pain of sexualization start to work as leverage. There is a lot of room to miscalculate; some weaker tracks show up toward the end, and the singing is sometimes less than polished—the best early-era Lana material is the follow-up Paradise EP—but Born to Die turned out to be a sign of things to come, like genre-agnostic pop ballads with hip-hop beats, and the arch, depressive languor that’s more mainstream than ever. Sit back and imagine what the Lana of 2012 would get clowned for now: Singing the opening lines of Lolita? Ordering a “Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice”? –Anna Gaca
Daft Punk: Discovery (2001)
This is the review often quoted at me by any person who’s ever cornered me at a party for a diatribe about the futility of music criticism. I don’t disagree; if scores are meant to indicate a work’s longevity or impact, the original review is invalidated by the historic record. Daft Punk’s second album, Discovery, is the centerpiece of their career, an album that transcended the robots’ club roots and rippled through the decades that followed. Amending this scoring error is all too easy. –Noah Yoo
Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (2013)
There was that seemingly interminable campaign of singles and sneak peeks; the 15-second ad on Saturday Night Live; the inescapable “Get Lucky,” an earworm so wormy that it’s probably burrowing effortlessly into your brain right now. Then, too, there was the whole issue of Daft Punk’s much-ballyhooed return to vintage disco played on “real” instruments, which, set against the neon backdrop of the early-’10s EDM boom, felt like a big deal. Throw in Italo-disco godfather Giorgio Moroder solemnly recounting the story of his life, and who could dare to doubt the monumental gravitas of the duo’s fourth studio album? Mark Richardson’s review acknowledged the hype while attempting to look beyond it: “My guess is that people will be listening to Random Access Memories a decade hence, just like we’re still listening to Discovery now.” Eight years later, I’m not so sure about that. It’s not that people aren’t listening to it; the album has racked up nearly 1.5 billion plays on Spotify alone. RAM has some jams, but it doesn’t feel pivotal in the same way that Discovery did. It didn’t push pop music forward; it merely opened the door for countless Moroder cameos and convinced Pharrell that what the world really needed was a 24-hour “Happy” video. –Philip Sherburne
Interpol: Turn on the Bright Lights (2002)
I was nearly 14 when this record was released, and even then I remember thinking “Sleep tight, grim rite/We have 200 couches where you can sleep tonight” from “PDA,” was one of the dumbest lines I’d ever heard. “Subway she is a porno”? What is this guy on about? And why does he sound like Ian Curtis? Obviously no one listens to garage-rock revival bands for the lyrics, but there was something about how poetic and dour they thought they were that drove me nuts, then and now. Listening recently, I could appreciate the cinematic twinkle and punishing heft of songs like “Untitled” and “The New,” moments where Interpol feel more like experimental indie rock inspired by post-punk and shoegaze than just another ripoff band. But for me, those moments are few and far between on an album we’ve awarded a 9.5 twice, both upon release and a decade later. –Jillian Mapes
Liz Phair: Liz Phair (2003)
There really is nothing that can be said here that wasn’t already covered in Matt LeMay’s 2019 Twitter thread apologizing for this “condescending and cringey” review. So I’ll just quote him: “In 2019, it is almost inconceivable that there would be *any* controversy around an established indie musician working on a radio-friendly pop album with radio-friendly pop songwriters. To a smug 19-year-old Pitchfork writer (cough) in 2003, it was just as inconceivable that an established indie artist would try to—or want to—make a radio-friendly pop album in the first place. The idea that ‘indie rock’ and ‘radio pop’ are both cultural constructs? Languages to play with? Masks for an artist to try on? Yeah. I certainly did not get that. Liz Phair DID get that—way before many of us did.” –Amy Phillips
The Strokes: Room on Fire (2003)
The Strokes’ second album was received as a minor letdown because it supposedly sounded too much like the band's debut, Is This It. (Said Pitchfork at the time: "NYC’s finest have all but given birth to an identical twin.") But under the same glaze of Gordon Raphael tape hiss, Room on Fire was a different, better album with major improvements over its predecessor: Lead guitarist Nick Valensi played on his entire fretboard, instead of just hiding out near the root notes like he did on Is This It, artfully embroidering (and sometimes outdoing) the primary melodies. And where drummer Fabrizio Moretti once did such a convincing impersonation of a Roland TR-707 that many listeners assumed he was one, here he added fills to his repertoire and pushed tempos for dramatic effect. Plus, best of all, Julian Casablancas remembered to write choruses this time. If Is This It—which scored a 9.1—got bonus points for delivering on the Strokes' early hype, Room on Fire deserved just as many, plus an extra 0.1, for confidently marking progress and at least partially thwarting rock history's most inevitable backlash. –Lane Brown
Regina Spektor: Begin to Hope (2006)
I got into Regina Spektor’s third album, Begin to Hope, just as my pre-teen angst levels peaked and everything felt inexplicably bad. The album was the perfect salve for me, a listener who wanted to escape the mundane dreariness of middle school while still hoping to hear my extreme emotions reflected back at me through the prism of absurdist folklore. Spektor writes stories that radiate anguish and valor in equal measure; treacherous Biblical characters reimagined as heartbroken lovers, a quirky city dweller who romanticizes only eating tangerines right before she solemnly recounts her lover’s overdose. Spektor’s storytelling is jarring and disorienting, completely engrossing and troubling all at once, a mix of Fiona Apple’s cynicism and Joanna Newsom’s ecstatic fantasy. She’s a classically trained pianist too, and every note she plays is full of restrained mourning. This album is a masterwork of drama and intrigue, camp mixed with vulnerability. –Vrinda Jagota
Charli XCX: Vroom Vroom EP (2016)
To a certain, very melodramatic, very online type of Twitter user, there was nothing more homophobic than our humble publication giving a 4.5 to Charli XCX’s Vroom Vroom EP. At the time, many critics seemed to be paranoid about PC Music’s motives. Nervous that they’d be bamboozled, they obsessed over whether a pop experiment was either satire or sincere. (“Is [Charli XCX] sending up pop’s shallow triumphalism? Or reinforcing it?”) The Vroom Vroom EP didn’t offer a clear answer, pairing frivolous lyrics that sounded more or less like “Lamborghini, bikini, eenie-meanie zucchini” with squelching production—courtesy of SOPHIE—more jarring than previously shown on Charli’s work. Nowadays, it doesn’t seem that extreme. And when you don’t think too hard about it, it's pretty fun. –Cat Zhang
Knxwledge: Hud Dreems (2015)
Knxwledge’s love for all things vintage gospel, R&B, and hip-hop coalesce into a distinct haze that’s cast a large shadow over the independent beat scene. He’d been releasing projects since the late 2000s, but his 2015 Stones Throw debut Hud Dreems, released shortly after landing a beat on Kendrick Lamar’s jazz-rap opus To Pimp a Butterfly that year, was an enormous leap in ambition.
The album’s 26 songs are condensed into a staggered free-flowing suite of distorted samples, vocals, and film clips that warped nostalgia into something alien, familiar but wholly unrecognizable. These murky soundscapes are now the norm within independent hip-hop, holding nearly as much sway as the drumless loops revitalized by rapper-producer Roc Marciano. Beyond the inevitable shine Hud Dreems received post-Kendrick placement, it remains Knxwledge’s most holistic project six years later. His fascination with Black music’s past provided a template for its future. –Dylan Green
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