Gearing up for the summer music season? Me too! But sometimes, it’s hard to decide what music sounds good. Oftentimes, I find myself thinking, Golly, people would take me much more seriously if I knew in advance which albums Pitchfork Media was going to review favorably! So for those of you who—like me—crave a little critical reinforcement but just can’t wait for the actual Pitchfork review to come out, I’ve compiled a list of albums coming out this summer and a prediction of what the Pitchfork review will contain. Enjoy!
“How I Got Over”- The Roots
Rating: 8.8
Rationale: Despite their recent foray into the banality that is Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, The Roots maintain their marvelously eccentric sound, proving they are as relevant today as they were twenty years ago.
Descriptors Used: elegiac, harrowing, vitriolic, un-vapid
“The Suburbs”- Arcade Fire
Rating: 6.9
Rationale: Win Butler’s decidedly long-winded probe into the marginalia of suburban life, post-postmodern detachment, and cultural transiency ultimately falls short of expectations.
Descriptors Used: fecund, dolorous, turgid, lugubrious, Dostoevskian
“/\/\ /\ Y /\”- M.I.A.
Rating: 8.5
Rationale: The third—eponymously titled—album from M.I.A. captures the Sri Lankan provocateur at her rabble-rousing best—at once, celebrating the Dionysian qualities of life and decrying the anathema of modern society.
Descriptors Used: Orphic, churlish, neo-feminist-yet-kind-of-anti-feminist-in-an-ironic-way
“King of the Beach”- Wavves
Rating: 4.2
Rationale: Gone are the pithy reminders of profundity in the mundane, replaced by didactic gleanings into the ineluctable modality of the visible.
Descriptors Used: Beach Boys-esque, masturbatory, vacuous, skateboard-gaze, vainglorious, platitudinous
“Tomboy”- Panda Bear
Rating: 9.2
Rationale: Another phantasmagoric panoply of beguiling samples and rapturous melodies obliquely amalgamated into an alchemical miasma of unmitigated bliss.
Descriptors Used: Elysian, nebulous, whirling dervish-esque, chimerical, Noah Lennoxian, high-in-the-sky-gleaming-dirigible-ambitious
