Reviews? We don't need no stinkin' reviews! (We've got Pitchfork)

Hello world.  I'm James.  It's nice to meet you.

Before I begin diving into reviews, I wanted to give you a background as to why I chose to start reviewing indie music.  Like it says in my "about me," I'm an ad student at the University of Minnesota.  The real reason I'm giving you this tidbit about myself is to let you know that I'm not a music expert.  Why should you care about my opinion then?

I'll answer that with another question:  Why do you care about anyone's opinion?  Why is it that 1,887,475 people (at the time of this post) follow Pitchfork on Twitter?  Why is it that Pitchfork's opinion can make or break Arcade Fire's career?  Ryan Schreiber was just a regular guy with opinions like you and me.

I'm not trying to knock on Pitchfork.  I use it all the time and it's a great site.  That being said, I have a couple of problems with it being hailed as the place to get music reviews (and, to note, these are problems that most similar sites have as well).

The biggest one is inconsistency.  How can Cold War Kids be described as a "non-descript brand of blues" and charged with riding the coattails of The Black Keys when a band like Bear Hands is praised for sounding like MGMT?  The logic baffles me.  I can't blame them for their inconsistency, though.  They have Pitchfork-only-knows how many reviewers writing for them.  Trying to create consistency when you have tons of different people putting their insights on one site as a single voice is impossible.

I think that this inconsistency is not only the result of numerous writers, but also their review process.  Using numbers to review music is, in my personal opinion, problematic.  Quantifying music is impossible because music is inherently subjective.  Believe it or not, some people hate the Beatles.  Does that make their opinion any less valid than mine?  No (please don't leave angry comments saying they have a voice too, John Lennon fans).  What's deserving of a 7.9 as opposed to an 8.4?  I don't think there's really an answer.

And that's why I won't give any.  There's a reason that I'm not going to score the albums I talk about.  I think it's stupid.  I'm going to weigh in and give my opinion on albums and invite you to do the same.  I'm going to tell you what I think of an album and that's it.  That's what the Indie 5000 is going to be about.