Words by Andrew Lampela
Andrew Lampela was an employee and eventual co-owner of the 40-year old institution, Haffa’s Records in Athens, Ohio, just outside of the dark woods from which Skeletonwitch emerged. Over his years there he has played in a number of bands ranging from rock to noise to metal and has taken his lifelong knowledge of music into contributing to a number of publications.
There is an entire universe of forgotten information in the world, certainly not exclusive to the digital realm. Recalling how many hours I pored over Metal Maniacs, memorizing tapes and obscure D-list Thrash band names to hunt for, it’s truly staggering I made it through High School. I most certainly didn’t pore over math textbooks with such fervor. I wish I still had those. I lived vicariously through the words of people much cooler than I.
So it’s no shock that absolutely nobody other than yours truly remembers what was at the bottom of the second column on page fifty six of the 2010 Ghettoblaster magazine with Superchunk gracing the cover. Nobody should. However, that review of Midwestern by Angel Eyes (an album I still stand behind!) was my first experience seeing ideas that were my own in a format I didn’t put together. Actual words from my fingertips right there on the page!
It seems pretty frivolous now, but as a kid raised on all those music magazines, it was pretty goddamn exciting for adult Andrew to be in a print copy. Felt like the big leagues, not gonna lie. Soon, I was interviewing artists I admired and get this, they took my questions seriously! I don’t know that I made much of an impression, but discussing Dylan’s Pat Garrett soundtrack at length with Warren Ellis and all the great talks I’ve had with Ben Chasny and talking to Greg Anderson about how cool it is to put out your friends records, when your friends are Caspar Brötzmann and Gentry Densley, are feelings I’ll remember til the end of my days.
Sadly, print media is a dying species (big fuck yeah to Decibel for being stubborn!), and that’s life. Internet sites have made information more accessible, with curation a much bigger option (for better or worse). It’s ruining my eyes staring at a two by five screen all day, but digital consumption is what is happening, and there’s no backing away from that cliff. Now that the general public has known the sweet taste of ‘owning everything in the world on my phone without paying shit’, there’ll be a near universal riot if that Ice Spice Fart song isn’t isn’t immediately available to non-discerning ears worldwide.
And boy howdy, there are none bigger than Pitchfork. Say what you will about the site-and holy fuck there are opinions-they have held sway for decades now. I stopped visiting for pleasure long ago, but when I still had the record store, you bet I checked in multiple times a week. A good review changed the landscape, launching careers from some random “The ___” band to an album that was impossible to keep in stock virtually overnight. The site flew too close to the ‘smarmy with a thesaurus’ sun there for a stretch, almost becoming a parody of itself, but the last several years have produced some extremely well done long form content by a roster of very talented writers.
So watching Conde Nast fold Pitchfork into their GQ brand while simultaneously firing that roster of very talented writers sucks. Love or hate the site, what happened to Pitchfork is a harrowing vision of the hellish landscape of journalism to come, I’m afraid. Without even touching on the ‘firing mostly Union members’ or ‘folding a broadly inclusive site into one of the most stale and out of touch men’s magazines out there’ aspects, this trend of clearing house (see Bandcamp and Jazz Times and Deadspin and countless weeklies across the country and… and… and…) should terrify anyone with more than a passing interest in, well… anything?
A tsunami of thoughts about music criticism were thrown around in the wake of both the Bandcamp and Pitchfork firings, mostly in the good-riddance camp, and I get that. With the proliferation of sites in need of constant content, the idea of evaluating an artist’s output has devolved into either praising something to the heavens within hours of actually hearing it, or absolutely trashing something under the same criteria. No middle ground. I myself have been guilty, but my relationship to music writing has changed drastically over the last handful of years.
Criticism means something else entirely to me these days. I’m far less interested in spending what little free time I have listening to things I’m simply not into just to spend two hundred words finding new ways to say it sucks. Sure, I talk a lot of smack about Greta Van Fleet and Slaughter To Prevail, but if those bands are your thing, congrats on finding something that provides you with a little joy in this smotheringly joyless world. Just because they do objectively suck shouldn’t stop you!
No, what is terrifying to me is the gentrification of knowledge. Pitchfork may have rubbed you the wrong way, but they were a very powerful gateway for several generations to discover music beyond top forty radio and what the hand-on-the-pulse minds at a garbage rag like GQ had to offer, and I’ll cut the site all the slack in the world just to have kids in the barren flyover states have been able to discover bands like TV On The Radio and The Walkmen and The Liars in real time. The current state of things has caused me to utterly despise the phrase, and maybe that’s why people are landing in the good-riddance camp, but corporations are destroying intellectual discourse just like they destroyed bananas.
If you are fine with Conde Nast grinding the edges down, you’ve never had your mind blown by Harmonia 2 after reading an off-handed comparison in a review, or bookmarked Bandcamp’s weekly Ambient roundup with a near-religious dedication, or had your mind changed on any number of albums by someone with thoughtful, steady, deep enough love to spend two thousand words letting you into that love.
What is being gentrified out by these uncaring, greedy fucks with absolutely no interest in their own commodities is the idea of nerds communally interacting with genuine curiosity and passion about things that move them. More to the point, what is being eroded is any time to establish historical context regarding why something is the way it is, and that sucks because there is nothing more thrilling than diving into an article where the author passionately knows their shit.
Look. It’s easy to say something sucks. Greta Van Fleet sucks. There, see? That was easy. Browse reels or TikTok or whatever for more than five minutes, and you can find ample proof that saying something sucks is a pretty popular thing right now. What is being taken from us it the why it sucks. As the journalistic landscape gets broken into smaller, more easily digestible chunks of baseless, hollow opinions, how will the kids ever know that Greta Van Fleet peddles in completely vanilla cosplay based entirely on well-worn Led Zeppelin riffs with neither the talent to take it further nor the self-awareness to subvert the form into anything other than a sterile facsimile of a particular Classic Rock band that is already wildly overplayed? Oh, and that dude has a voice that peels paint. Go listen to Captain Beyond.
Do I have countless folders chock-full of three thousand word defenses against relegating R.E.M. to the ‘as pretentious as U2’ bin? Yes. Do I also have three thousand words defending U2 from being relegated to the ‘as pretentious as U2’ bin? At least up to Achtung Baby, after that relegate them anywhere you want. No defending most of that business. I write about albums I love constantly, and about how certain artists have touched my life. Nobody will ever read them, and that’s okay. Putting feelings into words is the first step in owning those words, in concretely knowing your real self and how your own interests dictate your relationship to the world around you.
Because one thing I have learned from the Lester Bangs and Robert Christgaus and Katherine Ludwigs and Hanif Abdurraqibs is the importance of knowing why you love the music. Sure, there is positively nothing deep about my unbridled enthusiasm for “Iris” other than every time I hear it, I know the Goo Goo Dolls wrote a fuckin’ banger, and that’s alright. Superficial love of monster pop jams is worthy love. But to convince you why I’d rather listen to the Dead Boys over the Ramones takes a lot of heavy lifting. Context, my internal musical landscape in 1989 when I finally tracked that Dead Boys tape down, the permanent Midwestern chip on my shoulder, all things that contribute to me being completely bonkers. It all makes sense over three thousand words, I promise.
And that is what I’m going to miss the most, as AI takes over facts and truth, skewering intelligence on the pike at the gates of content. I’m going to miss the sweet, sweet caress of words and thoughts and feelings that come from long-form journalism. To know that an author gives enough of a shit to contextualize their feelings is usually enough of a push to get me to reconsider my own feelings on a subject. I’ve rediscovered many a true gem I had dismissively swept aside.
Words are powerful, as we are finding out. As conglomerations of rich assholes monetize every aspect of our free time, streamlining information through a handful of rich asshole-owned corporations, never forget that words are powerful. How else can you explain, for instance, the complete and total scrubbing of “free Palestine” or “Stop Genocide” from the nightly news? That’s the smell of rich asshole fear.
Regardless of how you feel about Pitchfork itself, or even music, these firings should reverberate down to your soul. As Union busting and the homogenization of our news sources continues unabated, don’t think they won’t come for Badminton Monthly or your Is It Cake? newsletter if they stray from the company line. We are on the precipice of truth being irrelevant and already falling from the cliff of genocide being hidden in plain sight. What happens when we let them take our four thousand word Steely Dan think-pieces too?
Anyhoo, I’m super behind. I blew enough deadlines I missed Best Of list season. Life comes at you hard, man. All I can say. While there was certainly a huge list of great albums last year to choose from, maybe next time. I will admit to also being behind on my listening. Winter always has alternating between devouring as much new-to-me music as I can from the weirdo Best Of lists, and getting absolutely stuck on a handful of things. I’m not much of a revisionist, as far as remixing old albums I’ve heard hundreds of times, but the Ed Stasium mix of Tim spiraled me through an alternate Replacements history minus the atrocious 80s reverb and I may never listen to anything else ever again. Except for Low. You guys like Low? I kinda did until a few months ago, when “it” all clicked and I made a twenty hour playlist and I still haven’t come up for air.
But what I did listen to sets an obscenely high bar for the rest of the year. Norway’s Vemod peddle in spacious, reverb-drenched Post-Black Metal on The Deepening (Prophecy Productions). And lest that scare you, this is first and foremost a Black Metal record. There are just so many beautiful layers to these songs. Subtle, unobtrusive melodies, perfectly balanced keyboards. Hell, after the brief vocal interlude “Fra drømmenes bok I”, they absolutely nail one of the best Goth-Punk (mostly) instrumentals I’ve heard in awhile with “Inn i lysande natt”. There haven’t been too many Black Metal albums in recent memory that have nailed me this hard. Vemod certainly have me dialed in. This hasn’t left rotation since it came out, can’t recommend it enough.
20 Buck Spin had what I would argue is one of the single best years of any label last year. Scan that release list and marvel at how many different top ten lists you could make out of that shit. Just a mind-blowing year. So far, it looks like they aren’t fucking around in 2024 either. Dissimulator rip through forty-two minutes of space Thrash on Lower Form Resistance, and it couldn’t be any more my shit. Super technical but chock full of neck-snapping swing, this record is as fun as it is brutal. It reminds me of hearing D.B.C. or Forced Entry for the first time, the same Thrash I love, just… different. Breakdowns everywhere! Huge props to drummer Philippe Boucher for a monstrously entertaining performance. Dude rips hard. I will be spinning this one often. But wait, there’s more! I’ve always enjoyed Hulder‘s albums, but nothing jumped out at me quite like Verses In Oath, truly a level-up record if I’ve ever heard one, and I’ve heard this one quite a bit as it’s become a staple in the rotation. Great production lets the Black Metal be feral while the pretty parts really pop, and the flow makes this a perfect forty minutes I highly recommend. I know, two Black Metal albums in the same column! I dare say, both will be talked about at length come the end of the year. But wait, there’s even more! I really expected Slimelord to be a more primal, molasses-slow doom thing. It is not. Instead, Chytridiomycosis Relinquished smothers with dense, slightly queasy psychedelic Death Metal of the highest order. Love the ripping stuff, but the first half of “Gut-Brain Axis” has some of the best guitar solos I’ve heard recently. Three albums that prove 20 Buck Spin is not fucking around. Wait until next month when I tell you about the Civerous!
Cruciamentum dropped Death Metal rager Obsidian Refractions (Profound Lore) late last year, and if I do get around to a top ten list, it will most assuredly be on there. The essence of Death, magnificently brutal. There’s a new Hope Conspiracy! And Confusion/Chaos/Misery (Deathwish) absolutely smokes! Welcome back, dudes! Phobocosm have the smothering Doom Death thing locked down on Foreordained (Dark Descent). I can’t stop listening to this Crossfire demo on Wise Blood. Midwest pummel Hardcore. Plenty of moments that hit the classic Clevo sound itch. “Anthem Of Our Hate” slams hard. Hard. I’m excited for whatever Sean puts out, but this shit is some of my favorite so far. On repeat.