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July 05, 2006

Sound Team v. Pitchfork

I've commented before on anecdotal evidence that a Pitchfork review can make or kill a budding musical career. However, though many bands have been slammed by Pitchfork writers (who use a 10-scale binary digit ranking instead of the Rolling Stone-influenced 5-star system), I personally haven't seen a band react to a bad review like Austin's Sound Team or its fans have. After receiving a 3.7 from Pitchfork writer Marc Hogan, the band has produced a video of an effigy/proxy being poked, mutilated, hurled off a cliff and burned.

In a way, you have to give them credit for hitting back with a metaphor on the Pitchfork effect. On the other hand, there's a part of me that cringes a bit when seeing the video. It's like begging for change or something. Still, it's about time that someone called "bullshit" on the Pitchfork effect (and it's getting people to write about it, so it's good publicity).

In addition, Christopher Zane took it upon himself to defend Sound Team by writing a letter to Marc Hogan and posted Hogan's reply.

Like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Tapes 'n Tapes and Voxtrot, Sound Team owes a great deal of its buzz to blog pimping. But backlash strikes so quickly nowadays, and some people would love to be the first ones to puncture the blog hype balloon, because how could any band live up to the constant encomiums of the mp3 blog community, who constantly need to find new music to embrace, and pounce on each feted discovery until the life is sometimes squeezed out of it before the album's release date.

Does that mean Sound Team got a raw deal from Pitchfork, perhaps in reaction to blog hype? Noise for toaster comments "if (Pitchfork) can't handle the rise of influence from independent music bloggers, even with the same ultimate goal in mind - that is, to share good undiscovered music - and continue relentlessly to step up and imitate the qualities of blog posts (mp3 downloads, youtube streaming, live concert pictures blog-style), we have a bunch of immature foot-stomping adults on our hands". Or is it true that their "adenoidal overemoting and Wall-of-the-Edge guitars can't hide a shortage of, like, actual decent songs"? In this case, the answer most likely exists somewhere between the blog and Pitchfork hyperboles.

Posted by timothompson at July 5, 2006 12:30 PM