Pitchfork released their list of the top 50 albums of the year last week. I've come across some really good bands by checking out the site a couple of times a week, but I don't do much more than skim the reviews. Every review reads like the mid-term paper of some earnest college underclassman trying to impress the professor. References to underground bands from the '90s don't help me much when I've never even heard of the band being mentioned, much less have any familiarity with that band's sound.
The best way to find out if the band is any good is to listen to it myself. If an experiment is the best way to learn, opening myself to new experiences, even something as small as listening to a new band on my drive in to work, is the best way to broaden my sense of what's interesting, new, and beautiful. Given that I have issues with how these new bands are discussed by the professionals at Pitchfork, I figured that maybe I should stop criticizing and start writing a few reviews myself. To that end, I am going to listen to and write reviews for Pitchfork's top 50. I'm not giving myself a timeline, but I'm going to work my way through the entire list. It will be good practice for developing grit.
My plan is to write each review without relying on references to other bands to give an idea of how a particular band sounds. I'm going to try and focus on the images and emotions each album evokes while I'm listening to it. You won't need to have spent the last few years listening to every bootleg that's been posted online to get an idea of an act's sound. The album and the review will be as self-contained as I can make it. My writing on this blog or the documents I prepare at work do not require much in the way of description. Description will be the entire point of these album reviews.
I'm not going to post all of my reviews in this blog. I'm going to put them up over at Amazon, but I will put add a link to this post every time I put up a review.
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