A not-terribly-brief note:

To anyone who reads Pitchfork, you may or may not already know about the mini-controversy stirred up by their senior and now-emeritus reviewer Brett DiCrescenzo, who, in last week's review of the new Beastie Boys album To The 5 Boroughs (presented as his last review for Pitchfork), talked a lot of shit about the group's publicity arm, Nasty Little Man, and its head Steve Martin (a wholly separate entity from the more famous Wild & Crazy Guy). Anyway, it appears Pitchfork has pulled the review entirely and issued a retraction, which as of right now you can read if you go to their front page. (You can still find the original review here and here and probably several other places.) Anyway, as to whether this whole indie-rock brouhaha may just be a publicity stunt on Pitchfork's part, I don't really care; I mention it because it's an interesting insight into music journalism and will provide music geeks with good anecdotery.

What I really wanted to discuss was something that DiCrescenzo�who is generally vilified for his "concept" reviews, but for whom I have a certain appreciation perhaps because I've always preferred, for better or worse, the convoluted, smirky way of doing things, ergo my preference for Joyce over Hemingway�says near the end of the review, which many readers may not have had the patience to reach: "Divorcing the lives and backstory from the recorded product of a musical artist equates to making movies without characters. ... Explaining why I love a record in the confines of its production, lyrics and instrumental "tightness" without detailing the first time I heard the band's song drifting from bowling alley in Poland or whatever confounds me." That pretty succinctly sums up what I'm trying to do with these 50 albums (and why I'm hijacking my typical and perhaps more entertaining blog fodder like humorless humor-lists rejected by McSweeney's and pictures of my friends' amusing drunken antics): this is the music that's made me who I am. I couldn't in a million years divorce the music from my experience with it, and no matter how self-indulgent or effusive I get with these pieces, I prefer that to cold impersonal analysis. To try and write an "objective" review of an album or a song without taking into account one's personal relationship to it strikes me as a fool's errand�an endeavor whose inherent futility, for me, is tantamount to having a family dinner without discussing politics or religion. I simply can't do it. And I wouldn't have it any other way: all music is inextricably bound up in my personal relationship to it.

I'd posit that maybe the people who criticize DiCrescenzo's reviews or those of other critics who long ago realized it's impossible to be fully objective and so have fully stopped trying, owning up instead to full disclosure of their biases and foibles and ignorances�I think the people who critique these critiquers are themselves missing the point and perhaps losing sight of the proverbial forest.

So:

Orbital, Snivilisation

Winter break, junior year of college.

I�m not sure why, but that winter, the days seemed a little darker, the nights a little longer, the air a little colder. Grinnell can be a slow and lonely place at any given time of year, but especially during winter, especially during the cognitive dissonance that is a break from college, being home for three weeks, unemployed, twenty-one years old, obligated to do nothing, really, which is what I did. So I could relate to the young man described during a vocal sample in the later minutes of Snivilisation�s penultimate epic, �Are We Here?�: �The prodigal son is alive, well, and sleeping in the front bedroom. ... We never see him. He treats his home like a hotel!� For all I knew, my parents were downstairs saying that while I passed in and out of consciousness, listened to Snivilisations, and still managed to plow through all of Douglas Coupland�s ouevre.

Released in 1994 when the genre was still nascent, Snivilisations proved that electronica could have heart. Maybe it�s Alison Goldfrapp�s lilting vocals. Maybe it�s the way sampled voices touch upon themes of environmental awareness, religion, philsophy, political corruption, even body image throughout most of these bliss-outs. Maybe it�s the Phillip-Glass-on-benzedrine intro to �Kein Trink Wasser�. Maybe it�s the hilarious way the opening drum fill from �Two Princes� is used throughout �Sad But True�. Maybe it�s the charmingly awful and mercifully brief �hard rock� interlude �Quality Seconds�. Maybe it�s the ominous, buzzing bassline underneath the operatic album closer �Attached�.

Anyone who�s been overwhelmed by the overcrowding of electronica during the past ten years would do well to clear the decks and seek out this album. It will sound sweet, simple, beautifully new again, whether you�re lying in the sun at the height of summer, or sleeping all day in the deep of winter.

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