I think the music reviews of Merriweather Post Pavvy will probably be ‘the last great music reviews’ of all time. In our current information economy, it takes less time to sample an album than it does to read a review with big words describing sound + references to bands that we don’t know + references to tidbits of information about the band that we don’t know. Are Music Reviews meant to be read before or after a reader hears the album? I feel like people use them to a) find out what is good, usually based only on a number (9.6/10) and b) to reaffirm that an album is good after they have already decided that they liked an album. If I were running a review site, I would try to keep everything positive so that I wouldn’t alienate one, kind of like Amazon reviews. In order to build a meaningful online brand, you must pick a type of music that you consider to be irrelevant + inauthentic, and continue to give these bands poor scores.
In other words, music reviews demand the right balance of exclusiveness and inclusiveness (that you are in the loop and part of the in-crowd), a way to express oneself through one's consumption, and a way of justifying your purchase or download through social networks and praise. You also need music that you consider lame (e.g. Coldplay, Kings of Leon, The Killers, etc.) so that you have a baseline of bad reviews to further justify the bands you want to champion (see also, the mock-ironic hilarity of Yacht Rock).
Nevertheless, here's AnCo in all their alterna-dad brilliance:
