stunt rock review on pitchfork

read the review here... if you can stomach reading pitchfork, that is.

while it's great that artists i know and have worked with are getting attention (srock released a tape on bad taste and collaborated on mono a mono), it's a typical pitchfork review. which means that it gets basic facts wrong and says absolutely nothing of substance.

the whole paragraph about how the songs don't have titles is particularly ridiculous. anyone who knows anything about stunt rock knows that the song titles are half the fun, and yes, those "quotes" are indeed the song titles.

this is really a review of the cd packaging and liner notes. it doesn't have much to say about the actual musical content of the album; certainly no real insight into the content is given here. and what's with the lowly 6.5 rating? it's hardly a negative review, but no explanation is given for the mediocre score.

on top of all that, reports on the addict board are that the original review stated that this was "his debut album under the Stunt Rock moniker", a particularly silly error considering that the album's title is This Is Stunt Rock Volume Three! if you read it now, it says "latest album", so this blatant error has since been corrected, but i have no reason to doubt the addict board members on this fact. it sounds like par for the course for pitchfork.

possibly even worse is this review of jason forrest's latest cd. the whole review is written in the context of "the parabolic course of the mashup/bootleg craze"... but it doesn't just describe jason forrest/donna summer as an outcropping of the mashup scene: apparently "the willfully underground breakcore scene" is a progression of the mashup scene, too. and if you're wondering who the "forefather" of the breakcore movement is, you might be surprised to learn that it's kid 606.

the jason forrest album does merit an 8.2, which is a pretty decent score. but dear god, the entire framework of the review is so incredibly off-the-mark that i could barely bring myself to keep reading after the first sentence. jf/ds a part of the mashup scene? breakcore a progression of the mashup scene? clearly the reviewer, rob mitchum, has absolutely no conception of electronic music before 2001 or so, as breakcore predates "the mashup/bootleg craze" by at least 5-6 years and plunderphonic collage has been around since... what, the '40s?

i guess i knew what i was in for going there at all, but damn do i hate pitchfork. ¶