Reviewing reviews, Young Marble Giants edition

Among music geek types, it’s de rigueur to float above the fray of Pitchfork. If you admit to reading the site at all, it seems, you must immediately pile on the qualifications so that everyone understands you’re not just one of the rubes. The anxiety even extends to contributors: when Carl Wilson announced on his own blog that he was now writing for Pfork, he did it with a distinct air of self-justification.

But I’m not sure all the detractors have been reading the site much lately. Lately I often remark that the reviews seem to be the most informed, considered, and in-depth ones that any given record is going to get. And I think the actual writing’s improved markedly over the past few years – less showoffy & pretentious, less to prove, more attentive to the craft of words & sentences.

A case in point would be Douglas Wolk’s review of the latest Young Marble Giants reissue, the classic album Colossal Youth plus two discs of demos, etc. (And the fact that Pfork is luring writers of Wolk’s caliber says a lot.) In just a few deft strokes he captures the essence of their sound and appeal:

They weren't even all that quiet-- they were just in love with negative space, and their lyrics were so much about things unsaid that the space was formally appropriate. Stuart Moxham flicks at his guitar like a card-sharp snapping out an ace, amplifying the impact of his pick on the strings as much as the notes themselves; his brother Philip Moxham bangs at his bass, then lets the sound decay. Alison Statton's not an affectless singer, exactly, but her chief weapon is understatement.

He makes you see familiar songs in new ways:

In theory, "Include Me Out" is a mighty garage-rocker, something the Stones or Count Five could've played with a sneer and a great big beat; the Giants strip it of virtually all its audible violence, reducing its rhythm to a muffled thump.

And when he gets more evocative, speculating on the band’s state of mind, it’s both convincing and wonderfully poetic:

There's another space in the center of these songs, though: a pervasive sense of lost youth, toward which most of their fury is directed.… The five days when Colossal Youth was recorded, though, were the moment when they were sailing painfully and angrily into maturity, staring into a darkness illuminated a flicker at a time by a fire behind them that they knew couldn't last.

And then at the bottom of that great piece, Pfork has to go and link to its own 2003 review of a previous Giants reissue, by Chris Ott. And sure enough, this is the kind of thing that gave the site a bad name in the first place.

Ott begins by clobbering us with context, from Beethoven to van Gogh to Artforum – we’re nearly 300 words in before the Giants are even mentioned. But it’s a weird kind of context, obsessed with the idea that we valorize the mediocre artists of the past because of our anxiety over having missed something. At least, I think that’s it. Except when we valorize the good artists, like the Vaselines. Or maybe the problem is just that we rely too much on received wisdom of critics or stars as to “what’s good,” an everyday phrase that Ott for some reason feels compelled to attribute to the irrelevant Lou Reed song, unless he’s referring to the Christgau rant on Take No Prisoners. In any case, the point is so obvious as to be hardly worth the pixels it took to make it.

The writing is pretty frightening, too: word choices that are not at all apt (“crystallization”) or that are clunky & contradictory in their context (“flagellant, necrophiliac back-patting”); tortured metaphors (“their fingers coiled around a trigger labeled Shame”); and half-thought-out ideas (“such is the fate of self-supported, self-contained movements”). In that last bit, it’s unclear what Ott means – fanbases of individual artists? Genre and regional scenes? Rock and roll itself? What’s an example of a musical movement that’s not self-supported or self-contained, and how does that play out differently?

It only gets worse when he does get to the band. Almost never does he actually describe the music itself, as Wolk does so effortlessly. Ott prefers airy metaphor – “an impossibly hollow, marooned, malaise that brings all the intellectual headiness of Prague, Paris, and your local café to bear” – and broods over the personalities of the artists, at least as they exist in his imagination. More than anything else he seems interested in digging up the bandmembers’ old soundbites from the British music press of the day, using them to bolster the (unconvincing, to me at least) assertion that the Giants’ ambition rendered Colossal Youth overmannered.

And the writing continues to thrash. One song is described as the “bone of contention on that score,” which makes for an impressive two already-lying-around phrases in six words. There’s the fallback to lazy superlatives: “at no time in the history of pop music could turning down have been more deafening.” (Compare that to Wolk’s easygoing but more careful treatment of the same point: “In a year when everyone was trying to make a big noise – but isn’t that every year? – YMG switched tactics.”) Throughout, Ott’s tone is smug, pedantic, insiderish. Note the offhand, from-the-mount dismissals: “his widow ended up murdering it on Live Through This”; “digitized sounds so fatuous they simply have to have been ironic.” Talk about received wisdom.

I don’t mean to unduly pick on Ott; I’m sure he was pretty typical of the Pfork of old, and indeed there were doubtless worse offenders. We can just be glad that these days this kind of thing is getting rarer all the time.

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And just for the record, Colossal Youth is one of my fave records ever. As Wolk says, there’s nothing quite like the Giants.

• Young Marble Giants, “Include Me Out” (buy here)