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Welcome to the Pitchforkast. Here, your friendly Pitchforkast team (YFPT) will attempt to predict the Pitchfork rating for albums that have not yet appeared on that Web site. Note: Ratings estimates are arrived at through expert guesswork.
TODAY: Liars, Sisterworld—-leaked January 2010; out March 8
Holy dude do those Pitchforkers love their Liars. Ratingswise, Brooklyn’s finest rack up an Average Pitchfork Rating (APR) of 7.97—a solid pretty good that would be darn near very good if it wasn’t for that pesky pretty okay (6.3) the band got for its They Were Wrong so We Drowned. They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, Drum’s Not Dead, and Liars? Not a single one of those suckers came in under 8.1.
‘Course, as we all know, love for a recording does not guarantee one’s ability to write about it. Over the years, Pitchfork has collectively struggled to get a clear picture of just what it is that draws the publication to that band. Here, Jess Harvell’s metaphor-heavy treatment of the band’s last full-length release can stand in: “In essence, Liars is scorched-blacktop biker music played through the art-rock filter of a band that’s spent the last few years steeped in the bleak sounds of German new wave and early industrial.”
We know about (indeed we have some personal experience with) writing about music. And we’re pretty sure that the overprose kicks in when a critic doesn’t really have much to say. The members of Liars seem to delight in compounding that problem by throwing their reviewers the sort of curveballs that’ll make you try and describe something by using “scorched-blacktop biker music played through the art-rock filter of a band that’s spent the last few years steeped in the bleak sounds of German new wave and early industrial.”
Though YFPT thinks that this new Liars album, called Sisterworld, may be a bit more focused than the trio’s past attempts, we’re pretty sure that it’ll provoke some crazy, long-winded metaphor—even as it continues the band’s trend of pretty OK to very good ratings. So, YFPT has determined that Liars latest will earn an…
8.4. And that its reviewer will go on and on and on about it.