So now, on the occasion of the launch of our new Reviews Explorer tool, here is a history of Pitchfork’s reviews section told through 38 pivotal pieces.
THE FIRST REVIEW
The Amps, Pacer (1996)
The music site Ryan Schreiber started went through a couple of different names and began as a monthly publication—new content came sporadically for the first of couple years—but when daily updates began, reviews were crucial. With features and columns you needed pitches and original photos, and the pieces could be long and require more editing than one person working part-time could manage. Reviews were short and needed only album art.
“I always planned for Pitchfork to be centered on reviews,” Schreiber told us over the phone in April 2021. "I was already an obsessive consumer of record reviews. I just loved the debates, the conversation about music, even if it was a one-way conversation. I knew I wasn’t a good writer, and I had no pretenses about that, but my perspective was, I have strong convictions about music, I care about it immensely, and I’m just going to write like I talk.” That reviews would have scores was a given. “I liked it when there was a score with the review, because it would kind of serve as an entry point,” he says. “But I also thought that if the site was going to be a daily, then it was going to need a wider ranging scoring system.”
The first review to go live, written by Schreiber, was for Pacer, the lone album by the Amps, a side project for Kim Deal while the Breeders were on hiatus. It was a hotly tipped record at the time because her primary group’s last LP, Last Splash, had been such a phenomenon. Pacer received an 8.2, though initially that rating would have appeared as 82%—for a while, scores were presented as percentages rather than the numeral-and-tenth scale we all know and love. (We listened recently, and it’s still in the 8s, easily.) The piece is 132 words long. From this point forward, the Pitchfork review was officially a thing.
THE FIRST 10
12 Rods, Gay? (1996)
The first two 10.0 ratings in Pitchfork history happened in close succession, and they were both by Minneapolis bands. Gay? by style-hopping outfit 12 Rods, written by Jason Josephes (for a time, Ryan and Jason wrote almost all the content on the site), came first, followed by Walt Mink’s El Producto. Both records came out in January 1996. Josephes brought 12 Rods to Schreiber. “He lived in Minneapolis, and I was still in the suburbs,” Schreiber says. “He was older, going to shows every night and writing reviews for a local paper called The Squealer. Jason had seen 12 Rods live and was blown away, and he bought the CD of Gay? at their merch table and made me a copy. We both went crazy for it.” But there was very little thought or discussion about giving an album a perfect score or planting a flag by championing a local band. “It never came up. We didn’t have any readers, one, and two, the internet was just so new, the dividing line between local and global wasn’t really present." But Schreiber still listens to that first 10.0. “To me, it holds up,” he says. “The score obviously throws expectations way out of whack, and the title is unfortunate. But as a six-song EP from an emerging band, it’s pretty exceptional.”
A SURPRISE 0.0
(2000)
Sonic Youth’s 2000 album NYC Ghosts & Flowers wasn’t the first 0.0 in Pitchfork history, nor was it the most notorious—that’s probably a tie between Liz Phair’s 2003 self-titled LP and Travis Morrison’s 2004 solo debut, Travistan. But it came when the site’s readership was growing and it was notable in part because it went against the critical grain. Rolling Stone gave NYC Ghosts 3.5 stars, SPIN gave it an 8 out of 10, and at the Village Voice, Robert Christgau gave it an A. Pitchfork’s Brent DiCrescenzo didn’t just think it was overrated—he thought it was downright horrible. And he attacked the record like only a disappointed superfan can. “It takes a giant to fall and make this big of a splash,” he wrote. “Home movies may be sloppy, but titanic disasters like Hudson Hawk and Bonfire of the Vanities go down in history when even the dam of skill, better judgment, and experience fails to stymie the flood of bile.”
Lindsay Zoladz’s review of Visions is shockingly prescient: “As a child I feared the day the world would be taken over by robots; these days I am seized by a much more potent fear that I am becoming one,” it begins. Nine years later, Claire Boucher is jokingly-not-jokingly planning to implant chips into her cerebral cortex, and has a child with a man actively working to make that science fiction a reality. “Have you ever caught yourself trying to open a new tab in your brain?” Zoladz asked in her review, and who among us doesn’t know the feeling.
