Psychic Ills Respond To Pitchfork And Joe Colly!

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The only times I find myself reading Pitchfork are when they publish review of an album I like. Without fail, these reviews are almost always negative. For a while, it seemed like the entirety of my musical taste was hovering at around a 5.9 on the Pitchfork scale of quality music.

On Friday February 6th, Pitchfork ran a review of the new Psychic Ills album Mirror Eye. The review was penned by staff writer Joe Colly. His rating (or is it Pitchfork’s? I don’t really know how that works) was a rating of 1.4 — an absurdly low rating that is usually reserved for…I don’t know…Pitchfork likes to give things ratings of 1 or lower when they want to make a statement. I have no idea what their intended statement about Psychic Ills is supposed to be. Pitchfork as an entity is retarded. That is to say, if you amalgamated every brain furiously struggling to write something snarky or relevant at Pitchfork, you would be left with a giant, retarded brain.

Now, I’m biased, because I’ve been listening to Psychic Ills since the release of their first studio LP Dins. I loved that album. I still love that album. I saw the band live for the first time in the summer of 2006. They put on a great show, mind-expanding and wild, yet controlled so that the sounds never diverted from their intended course. It was not shambolic, it was masterful.

That said, the low rating given to Mirror Eye was so utterly baseless, and the explanation was so inane, I became angered almost to the point of writing my own response to Pitchfork for this little blog of mine. The idea put forth by author Joe Colly — that improvisational recordings are often disastrous — carries little weight, especially to those of us who are hip to the sundry artists who have shaped brilliant careers working entirely in improvisational situations. Colly, rather than open himself up to the possibility that music outside of the pop realm exists, simply chose to plug the new Animal Collective album (Again? For fuck’s sake, guys, it’s not even good!) and dismiss Psychic Ills as “frustrating” and — if I may paraphrase the final sentence of the review — downright lazy.

Yesterday, a brilliant thing happened. Psychic Ills went ahead and posted their own response to the Pitchfork review. Phew! Now I don’t have to! The band took their MySpace blog to share a hilarious review of Joe Colly, the author who reviewed Mirror Eye. The author of this review feels no shame sharing both Colly’s blog address and his Facebook page while taking some hilarious shots at the online “indie” magazine de-jour. It definitely brought a smile to my face. If you too find yourself annoyed by the dolts at Pitchfork, you should be quite pleased by the band’s response.

So, the war is officially on. Let’s see who throws the next punch, shall we? Will the news department attempt to inject their devoid-of-snark snark into an item about the band’s “review,” or will they simply choose not to call any attention to the matter? If anything, I hope this experience brings more attention to the egregious reviews published on Pitchfork’s website, or at the very least, exposes Pitchfork as a subpar music criticism website lacking in understanding of that which exists outside the mainstream. Is that too much to ask!? IS IT!?

PS – Mirror Eye is really good! Not as good as Dins, but better than the early EPs included on the Early Violence compilation. Only after you’ve see the band live can you begin to understand how talented and special they are.