Giving Indie Acts A Plug, or Pulling It

"That amazing review," as Merge publicity director Martin Hall calls it, "was really the band's first validation, saying: 'Everyone needs to pay attention to this.' Before that, Arcade Fire had been below the radar. But the floodgates opened. And I was just holding on for dear life."

Stephen Sowley, new product manager for Reckless Records, an independent music retailer in Chicago, says Pitchfork's uncanny ability to shape opinion has forced him to pay attention to the site in the same way a stockbroker might monitor CNBC.

"I look at it all the time, because I need to know what people are going to come in and ask for," Sowley says. "If they give a glowing review to a record, with a high number rating, it goes crazy."

However, Sowley is hardly an unabashed fan of the webzine, which has many critics -- especially in the blogosphere, where one site, Tuning Fork, is devoted to picking on Pitchfork. Among the sources of complaints: Pitchfork's mean-spirited rants, which have been accompanied by more than a few zero-point ratings; the site's cooler-than-thou indie-elitist tone; blowhard reviewers who don't really review the music; and pretentious writing that can be, as Rob Harvilla brilliantly put it in the East Bay Express, "a dense, hugely overwritten, utterly incomprehensible brick of critical fruitcake."

(An example, from a review of a Metallica recording: "A banana spider bit into Ktulu the Mule's heel. The animal reared. The cart spilled its contents, the CDs and myself, into the dust. A safety cut the electrical field protecting 'St. Anger.' As the cart master attempted to rein the bucking animal, I slipped a disc into my overalls.")

Sowley says Pitchfork's writing is "smarmy and not always about the music and it's not polite. I think they kind of embrace every sort of stereotypical, cynical faction of indie hipsterism."

Then again, he adds: "No matter what I think of the writing, Pitchfork does need to be commended. They're serving as a means for people to find out about new music. They're shining light on bands that are taking risks and doing it for themselves, without a ridiculous advertising campaign to back them up."

Pitchfork's pointed digs are no accident. The name, Schreiber says, came from the gangster epic "Scarface," in which Tony Montana's pitchfork tattoo is said to be code for an assassin.

"When I started out, it was about really laying into people who really deserved it," Schreiber says. His earliest targets included the Stone Temple Pilots' "Tiny Music: Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop," which received an 0.8-point rating (the equivalent of an F-plus). Wrote Schreiber: "There's nothing for sale at the 'Vatican Gift Shop' but lousy, repetitive riffs, wimpy lyrics, and a drug-addled [SOB] that should have OD'ed a long time ago."

Ouch.

"Honesty is such an important journalistic attribute," says Schreiber, who had no journalism training when as a 20-year-old former record store clerk he launched the site as a solo operation. "And you have to be completely honest in a review. If it gets sacrificed or tempered at all for the sake of not offending somebody, then what we do sort of loses its value. . . . That's so the opposite of what criticism is supposed to be.

"So I think we maybe have this sort of snobbish reputation. But we're just really honest, opinionated music fans. We might be completely over the top in our praise, or we might be cruel. But to anybody who reads the site, it's clear that we're not pulling any punches."