this kills the RYMfag.
>>129457563please tell me what "international awards" scaruffi received for his beatles review
these guys are the epitome of "thing / japanese thing"
>>1294575637.5 is pretty damn good for ruffi
>>129457889This. I purposely go out of my way to avoid Japanese music like a normal person.
>>129457889nah, this band and album win hands down
>>129457935if you need to -purposely- go out of your way to avoid japanese music, you're not a normal person anymore. You're just a contrarian weirdo. I don't think normal people even care about japanese music (especially japanese people)
>>129457935>I purposely go out of my way to avoid Japanese music like a normal personconsidering nippon independent scene is one of the biggest in the world, acts from that country were always a feature in independent music circles; therefore, purposedly avoiding it its not normal in this context. not a weeb though
>>129457563they were /mu/core long before RYM knew about them
>your arbitrary rating is no match for my arbitrary rating (that isn't even my own, it's a gay italian geriatric's)
>>129458344i love 80s shlock but i go out of my way to avoid the japanese stuff because it never has the right vibe
>>129457889this
>>129457889Not in the least.>>129459701Scaruffi is very consistent except for a few select instances. The higher the rating, the more original the work is. That's Scaruffi's bread and butter. The problem is twofold: 1. People think that 5-7 means bad, it doesn't. Scaruffi likes lots of works that are 5s, 6s, and 6.5s, and obviously the 7s.2. That everything below an 8, while you can trust the rating, sometimes he says things that are rather nonsensical. For instance, Benji by Sun Kil Moon. Gives it a 6, sings it praises quite well before going on about how nobody could possibly relate to these songs except Mark Kozelek and the people closest to him. Saying people can't relate to songs about dead family members, aging parents, youthful relationships, or getting older is fucking ridiculously asinine. That's the kind of shit that make people not want to take Scaruffi seriously. Otherwise, again, his rating system can be trusted in terms of "higher number = more original sound."
>>129457563>gives the highest score to their early EPlmao every time
>>129457678He probably received a "Retard of the Year" medal or something
>>129461202I think ranking in mere originality also means that Scaruffi can often praise novelty acts too. If I took a bell pepper and shoved it in my dog's ear it'd be quite the statement, after all I bet you've never seen that done before have you now
>>129463161>I think ranking in mere originality also means that Scaruffi can often praise novelty acts tooMaybe. But he doesn't. Feel free to put that act to audio and send it to him and let us all know how that goes.
>A critic I don't care about disagrees with me. How will I ever live? I must instantly change my opinion to appease him.
>>129463268Well here's his own art. We're at least on the same level
>>129463325I genuinely think shoving shoving a bell pepper in your dog's ear and recording it would be more novel than a picture of his pot reflecting the kitchen, but this whole exchange doesn't diminish the value of his contributions to music, namely a guide that depicts musical originality the higher the number, the words he's written, the comparisons he's made, the interviews he's conducted with musicians, along with other lists like his best bass players page:https://www.scaruffi.com/music/bass.htmla history of rhythm and blueshttps://www.scaruffi.com/history/rb.htmletc. It's so easy to just shitpost online, but if you care about music, Scaruffi's work is invaluable and the world will be lesser when he's gone.
>>129463384And as I said before, he's of course disagreeable. Here's another: he doesn't even rate Akuma no Uta by Boris, and he gives Flood a 6. I haven't heard anything like Flood ever, and Akuma no Uta is just plain bitching rock music that warrants at least a 6.
>>129463384>https://www.scaruffi.com/music/bass.html>Les Claypool above Tony Levin>Roger Waters, notable for being a great songwriter but a mediocre bassist, on the list at all>The two Slint kids on top of Lee Sklar>No mention of Sean Malone or Tony ChoyI must be missing something here, if not I'd really like to know what the hell goes on his head. How would you defend this, really?
>>129463325The banana is an homage to Lou Sneed
>>129459077Everything was /mu/core long before it was RYM core though. RYMcore is downstream of /mu/core in the same way trannyshit is downstream from 4chanshit. Every tranny constantly talks about how Fallout New Vegas is "their game" when that was a /v/ darling for years before then. Anytime you find one into anything other than shit like femtanyal or gecs, dollars to donuts they are a former 4fag with trolls remorse.
long season is rated way too high here
>>129463325unironically one of the best works of art I've ever seen
>>129459077The point is that RYM rates Japanense albums way higher than they deserve. There are like 60 Japanese albums in the top 100 rated albums on the site.
>>129464994there is only 1 in the top 100 which is fishmans at 28. The next one is Boris's Flood
>>129465310>The next one is Boris's Floodwhich is at 144 I forgot to add.
Who cares about what Piero Scaruffi thun about Fishmans? They're good.
>>129465310Facts and logic.
>>129463384>but this whole exchange doesn't diminish the value of his contributions to music, namely a guide that depicts musical originality the higher the number, the words he's written, the comparisons he's madeMaybe you were lucky to come across some words of his that were more insightful then what I read, but what I got from the guy is that he is the music critic equivalent of Miles Mathis and other crank types. Maybe that's too harsh, but whenever I read the guy, I get the impression that whatever is not obvious is left out and whatever is kept in is obvious... when not wrongFor example's sake I picked the page of a guy called Toby Driver, one of the composers from that Tzadik circle of avant-garde weirdos, and read a little of what the Scaruffi had to say about his music. He has rated basically every single relevant work Driver ever put out, and also wrote about a bunch of them, so we can assume he listened to all of them.Let's try the debut Choirs of The Eye. Scaruffi describes it at:>perhaps the most accomplished fusion yet of prog-metal, post-rock, jazz and classical music by any band.Big talk, but I love this album. It appeals to the guy who's growing out of rock and that might have the smarts for jazz but is too retarded for classical, so it was right up my alley when I first found it and I've listened to it endlessly since then. The issue is that he says there's jazz in it. I couldn't hear it, I just think it's modern chamber music. But then I read an interview quote from Toby Driver:>I've seen analytical reviews, but they're usually pretty wrong. They'll call a trumpet a clarinet, and they'll say there's jazz when there's no jazz. But I'd like to have an analytical review, the same way I'd like to go to a psychiatrist to find out what my dysfunctions were.So already he got that wrong, hopefully he meant harmonies are dense enough to warrant a big band comparison, which is not egregious, but still wrong
Corduroy's Mood gets a 7.5 but Long Season only gets a 7? idk how anyone can come to the conclusion that that one is better than the other besides just being contrarian for no reason. like there's some good on Mood but it's just like somewhat boring dub pop music, they obviously took that sound a step further and really started to polish it with Kuchu Camp & then made it a world of its own and just totally elevated it to the next level by the time they got to Uchu Nippon Setagaya. laughable take from a professional music reviewer desu
>>129466066Scaruffi was kind enough to also say some stuff about the tunes from that record.>the 14-minute The Manifold Curiosity deploys flute and violin to create a calm but tense atmosphere and then unleashes an infernal heavy-metal orgyThis is an admitedly eloquent way of describing it, even though it doesn't say much. From this we learn about two instruments in the arrangement (playing over what? Turns out it was guitar, and there's a guy singing too), and that it sounds like metal in the end. But from the wording it seems Scaruffi liked it, and while I agree with him that this a great cut, I can't help but think of pic related.As for what he doesn't comment, it's nothing but the most interesting bits of the track, and they are not even subtle or anything. The vocals in the first sections have all sorts of effects stacked over them to make it sound degraded, but the coolest bit is the middle section in which three separate voices each read a separate segment of prose, and the "real" lyrics to the song are revealed when you note down what words from the three voices overlap. This is the section that runs over increasingly dense music, the three voices are replaced with violin and guitar parts that maintain the thematic cohesiveness of a multitude of voices competing, until it finally breaks into the metal section he mentioned. This segment is inarguably the most unique thing about the tune, so it's odd to leave it out. Of course he is not obliged to write all of this faggot shit I wrote about it, but it's strange to not have at least a nod to it
>>129466199After that he writes about the next track, Wayfarer:>The eleven-minute Wayfarer is a more traditional fantasy that borrows from the suites of early Genesis and the melodies of latter-day Pink Floyd. Keyword here is borrow. If he had written "brings to mind the suites [...]", it would be a statement about himself and this would this naturally give us a window into his head; that is, we'd be able to estimate, to a point, what his internal horizons are, he would give it away his repertoire of known material, which he uses to correlate with new material. Naturally he's not having any of that, so he instead writes "borrow", turning it into a statement about the music. The music, he says, "borrows" (imitates, whether consciounsly or not) the stuff by early Genesis suites and "latter-day" Pink Floyd.Lucky day, for better or worse I spent my teenage years in incurable virginity (I was a progressive rock fan), but it did give me the quirk of, by time I came across the music of Toby Driver, having digested (and gotten bored with) the entire Pink Floyd discography and every single Genesis album, at least the ones before they went pop.Please listen to the segment that begins at around the first minute of this track: https://youtu.be/yvEa69XIdEEThis is such a shallow comparison. Nevermind the fact that no notable Genesis or Pink Floyd song has the singer harmonizing with violins, the two bands are two of the most well-known to come out of prog, and they had the tunes with guitar strumming and a guy singing in them, so of course the acoustic song by prog-adjacent band borrows from these suites!The worst is when you realize that he could have made a comparison that was both more precise and less of a low hanging fruit if he had picked "The Herald" by Comus, which he reviewed, and which has guitar chord blocks on the left channel and arpeggios on the right much like "Wayfarer" does, apart from the violins and the winds, plus the darker mood and similar length.
>>129465310Don't care. RYM rates Japanese albums way higher than they deserve simply because Japan thing
>>129466066>>129466199>>129466604Also fuck proof reading, it's already hard enough to write as an ESL faggot, and it already takes enough time to revisit the tunes to confirm I'm not misremembering, what am I even doing, nobody will read this anyway. I'm sure you can do what I did with your favorite band or whatever. The thing is that after reading shit like that page he wrote, it becomes hard to justify reading him rather nothing. I've limited myself to three comments from a single album, all wrong, and the whole page is like that, I just can't be bothered to write about it all day, but from these three alone you can probably infer that the rest of his track record is awful. Taking the man seriously boils down to a severe case of Gell-Mann Amnesia:>You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.>In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.Disregard the man completely. Don't fall for the meme. He is not more knowledgeable than you, at best he has consumed more music (even this is fucking debatable), but this means nothing to anyone else other than him because he fails to correlate old and newly absorbed material into valuable insight. The only use for Scaruffi, Xgau, Fantano, some RYM fag or whatever other mongoloid critic is to bait retards into giving you (Yous) when you post a hit piece they wrote on some anon's new favorite album.
>>129466637Stfu you're factually wrong. Japs albums barely reach the top10 for each year, it's still dominated by anglo musicians. I swear japan-thing spergs are worse than weeabos
>>129457937>>129457889This is why I don't use RYM. They inflate scores by Japanese artists. This and that shitty jazz album that is always pushed
>>129457563Isn't the highest this dude goes an 8/10? If so the one EP and back half of the discography are certified gold
>>129466637Imagine doubling down on being a retard. Get the fuck off my screen.
>>129467523Eureka sits at a 3.78 which is completely fitting and not inflated.>>129467576https://www.scaruffi.com/music/best100.htmlThe highest he goes is 9.5. Sort by decade to see scores in a list.
