27 August 2009 — Pitchfork Don't Like Temper Trap
Mess and Noise claim that Temper Trap (who Plastic Palace Alice supported a while ago) have "hit a snag with a lukewarm review on US indie barometer Pitchfork", in their attempt to make it big in the States. Whether or not it proves to be a snag at all is, of course, up in the air – as one commenter noted, it's not like the Pitchfork readership is necessarily Temper Trap's target audience.
Mess and Noise loves it when Pitchfork features Australian artists, and generally consider such an event worthy of news all by itself. When Royal Headache had a tune played on Forkcast, they not only reported on it, but implied that an upcoming headline slot was given to them as a result – something that a friend of the band's informed me was simply not true (something a commenter tries to point out also). Interestingly, at much the same time as Royal Headache got put on Forkcast, so did Denim Owl: a duo consisting of Janita Foley and Aleks Bryant from Aleks and the Ramps. Denim Owl keep a somewhat lower profile than Royal Headache do at the moment, which may explain the fact that Mess and Noise declined to comment on it. It would seem that yes, they have had at least one offer of a gig as a result of being played on Forkcast but, if you go to their myspace page, you will see that the single that was played, "Knitted Soup" is still sitting on 997 listens, as of the time of writing. No doubt most people who listen to Forkcast just stream the track through the Lala service, but it is interesting that it doesn't seem to have resulted in a huge influx of visitors to Denim Owl's website. Isn't this "Pitchfork effect" supposed to be huge?
Of course, Mess and Noise really just use Pitchfork as a foil, and a way of generating easy news. If Pitchfork mention an Australian band, it's news! And they deliberately take lines from the review out of context: when Marc Hogan writes that "Australia is still pretty far away from most of the rest of us", it sounds like the statement of a typical parochial American. But here's the quote in full:
The Temper Trap didn't come out of nowhere. But even in an age of instant global communication, Australia is still pretty far away from most of the rest of us. So when this Melbourne rock foursome with stadium-sized ambitions first landed in my inbox last October, it was a modest revelation.
See what they did there? They took a line that was describing their ostensibly immediate arrival onto the music scene and made it somehow relate to the 4.6 score Hogan gave their album. Who's being parochial now?