it's not anything new to hate on pitchfork's often ridiculous review style, but this one really is the cream of the crop. you hear a lot about how you can't tell what they're talking about, but i'm often hard-pressed to come up with a concrete example. if you find yourself in similar situations, i suggest printing this one out and carrying it around in your pocket. my favorite aspect of it is how the author refers to himself as if he were two people, one of whom likes (i think) the record while the other decries its failure to live up to some kind of battle call issued by a cutely acronymed and fictitious organization. kind of makes me want to vomit.
Centro-matic :: Love You Just the Same :: Score: 7.7
Gentlemen-- and you few precious femullets-- welcome to what will sadly be the final meeting of the SUCKERMCs: Socialists United to Control or Kill Everyone Resistant to the Marxist Conspiracy. As you know, our efforts to inspire, provoke, or mandate revolution via the audio manipulists lumped under the label "Americana" have failed. I'm just as flummoxed about it as you all are; I mean, isn't "folk" a reference to "the people," like with Hitler's Ford-assisted, Jew-designed wagens? Surely some of these performers, we'd guesstimated, would hanker to wield a radical version of the ideological cannon that something called "country music" regularly exploits in the interests of defense contractors and capital. We thought we had Wilco where we wanted them when they hooked up with SUCKERMC Billy Bragg to record honorary SUCKERMC Woody Guthrie's work, and even their later "assassin down the avenue" line sounded like our mode of subversion, but alas, they've careened off into lovesongism and dilettantish wordplay.
Centro-Matic has not responded to our commissioning a rebuttal to John Cougar's "Ain't That America" entitled "That Ain't America". One would think that a group whose press materials tout their "working class hero" status would long for some realism. Our enemies in SWASS (Subtle Workforce of American Sentimentality and Superstition), obviously got through to this quartet, because their approach and lyrics have fallen sway to emoting and obliquery. I was willing to give the album a chance based on the democratic/humanistic principles espoused in its title, and because of the stompy and marchy, prole-rousing percussion work, but this band has become prey to mainstream America's sappy What-Would-Seabiscuit-Do ethos. Songs emerge about midshipmen, cables, and corrals, but their industrial plights are (sigh) all fictional. Singing about false struggles smacks of a poseurdom on par with the rappers who fabricate criminal fantasias set in unsurvivably savage burgs.
And the music press are continuing to misprioritize album-shopping over uprising. Peer at what a "William Bowers" blurted at Pitchforkmedia.com on the second anniversary of the September 11th attacks, perpetuating the website's info-dumping, band-reffing aesthetic: "Ever-prolific Texan, frontman of South San Gabriel, and solo artist Will Johnson leads Centro-Matic to their best set yet. Johnson's lyrics shed their iffily free-associative Pollardism and come into their irascible own. These resonant fables of half-loved underdogs, essentially preposterous scenarios reported with apocalyptic seriousness, call to mind the last two Flaming Lips discs, and let's just say that the manifest similarity between the bleatings of Will Johnson and Wayne Coyne are serendipitous, not calculated. A few of the Wilconic tones are derivative (but that's not a complaint), and the band hugely rawks here in an unprecedented approximation of their live show, often summoning the moldy hearts of Mould and Hart (though someone down the hall from me mistook their professionalism and competence for Night Rangerdom). Hell, a harnessed Cobain twang even surfaces, semi-reclaiming his legacy from the radio-dreck borne from third-generation grunge's typhoid womb."
Bowers continues, seemingly oblivious to how he's unqualified to describe his ferret's saliva: "The best Lips-like tune is the violin exploder 'Stephan Has Corralled the Freaks', while 'Spiraling Sideways' could have been a Britpop hit, as its hook theatrically outgarages a host of statelocked pretenders. The album's most upbeat moments ('Biology Tricks' is an insanely catchy example) hold their own with Carl Newman's Zumpano zest, and the most downbeat intervals suggest a Mark Kozelek persevering after being punched in the stomach by a foreman. Ears accustomed to mid-fi dance-noise might find this record a pinch Buffalo Tom-ish or middle-of-the-road, but listeners counterculture enough to value patience and intelligence will find the hungover eye-wiping bewilderment of Love You Just the Same rich and rewarding, free from the hot air emitted by self-consciously 'big' bands. Please help Centro-Matic deservedly outsell Ryan Adams."
Ugh. How could such a promising band succumb to comparisons with those orchestral-dub anime-casualties The Flaming Lips? When will the leisure class discover that political ugliness is as magnetic as Will Johnson's purported beauty? How will we turn this mother out? Exactly who is zooming who? My friends: screw Americana. Let's try to spread our propaganda through dance music. When next we meet, we are MAGNUM:PI, the Marxist Alliance to Galvanize New Urban Music: Project Idioteque.
-William Bowers, September 11th, 2003
