Review Summary: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20421-wilder-mind/
Pitchfork didn't have to be awful. An American music coverage publication, liberally applying the trappings of a freshman sociology major, they made big reviews well-suited to big audiences, and they made them about as well as possible. But awful they were, nonetheless, a site so determined to be credible that they willed themselves into ubiquity. Their latest effort, a review of Mumford and Sons’
Wilder Mind, is a "rock" review in the least interesting sense of that word - a pastiche of the genre’s most common elements, from a vague, career-spanning introductory paragraph, overused and trite music-critic buzzwords, and occasionally meaningless musical descriptions, to poignant but ultimately surface-level musical analysis. It has all the elements of blogosphere-friendly 2015 American music coverage, with very timely nods to Ian Cohen and all the other Pitchfork staffers who write in exactly the same voice as each other, but what it’s lacking in is any kind of originality, or message - and most importantly, it’s lacking in vigor and passion, the only thing that ever set the site apart from the music-journalism horde in the first place. With the production help of what seems like a decently-skilled writer and a monstrous Twitter presence, the site has successfully created perhaps the most adequate commercial rock review of 2015. It’s fine. But fine is nowhere near good, and, when the coverage is this empty, it might actually be worse than bad.
Reviews of mediocre mainstream rock songs are low-hanging fruit, and on this review of
Wilder Mind, Pitchfork picks from the lowest branches. The first words uttered in the review's opening paragraph are "Mumford & Sons didn’t have to be awful,” and like a music journalist offering a generic critique, the review that follows sounds like it could be applied to any MOR release at any time. There’s so little actual heart present in the words, so little semblance of caring, that it’s hard to imagine they were written from any kind of real place. This is writing without any real center, designed only with click-farming and a vague goal of fixing the music industry in mind. Especially when reflected in this review, what Pitchfork sounds like, above all else, is easy money. These are “thinkpieces” and retrospectives that reflect emotion but generate none. They don't have feelings, they have #thefeels. The ‘I’ in these pieces feels heartbreak but not too much; longing, but not too much; joy, but again, not too much. The influence of these writers’ desire to convey their love for music is obvious in the richness of the sentences, but where many music listeners’ enormous passion is countered by not having to dilute that passion by publishing five new reviews every weekday, Pitchfork matches a big, general enthusiasm with big, general statements of intellectual superiority and self-aggrandizement, and it falls flat. Occasionally, writers are storytellers, bringing tangible and unique perspective to their personal narratives and those of their subjects. Pitchfork is telling the tale of the every-album, in that their narrative could be literally about every single album.
Reviews like this one are so lumbering that they are almost vulgar. “This is music without any real center, designed only with montages and "Grey’s Anatomy" climaxes in mind,” Pitchfork writes in its best Robert Christgau-soft-voice, before laddering up to a loud, crunchy apex of words that explodes into a plea for some kind of redemption. The conflict on Pitchfork is pedestrian - the confusion of someone with nothing real to lose. On the review of Mikal Cronin’s
MCIII, the only review of the day that provides a vague respite from the formula, pairing a score of 6.1 with a single opening paragraph which doesn’t long-windedly introduce the artist or open with a vaguely meaningful sentence which might purport to summarize the album as a whole, Pitchfork sings of a relationship where it and its music writing are simultaneously “copied from good source material” and “yielding substantially diminished returns.” There’s no evidence of life in the review itself, which follows every imaginable rule so closely that all traces of life are erased.
Many of the pieces on the website reference specific locations in New York City, from the coverage of various overlapping music scenes near Pitchfork’s editorial headquarters in Brooklyn to the galloping coverage of 285 Kent, which hyped up the small Brooklyn venue, home to two years of memories which no one outside of Pitchfork’s staff or core reader-base care much about. But they make no reference to any meaningful involvement with the music itself outside of their titles, and read sequentially, it seems as if any of these pieces could switch titles with the next one with no discernible effect. They are countless variations on vaguely 1970s-era Rolling Stone-inspired arena schlock, and in this normalcy, they've found a new bottom. Pitchfork’s only hope to stand out was lost in favor of garnering likes and shares in this ruthless new Internet blog economy, and a mediocre review of a mediocre album most certainly can’t save them now.
