Welcome, one and all, to the first award of Fermata Over Whole Rest’s 2011 FOWRies. How would you feel if we got the bad news and cynicism out of the way now? Alright, awesome, I think we should do that. This is not the best album of 2011. It’s also not the worst album of 2011. Our idea for choosing this to “win” this category was based on a concept that was either farmed by other music websites or the artists themselves, but either way, the idea is frustrating and accosting to our health in the FOWR offices.
I mean, in a perfect world, we would have an album that didn’t sound like a shameless, soulless, third-rate Pavement. The general consensus around here, anyway, is that Pavement isn’t that great, so for us to call you third-rate Pavement is a rather unfortunate occurrence. However, Yuck sounding like a single band (or two, there’s a lot of Sonic Youth in there as well) is not what I find to be the real issue. The Pitchfork review for Girls’ album Father, Son, Holy Ghost, written by Mark Richardson, begins with this quote: “We may eventually remember 2011 as the Year of Retro.” If this review was not written half-way through the year and didn’t force me to research Pitchfork’s odd narrative angle as of late, this would not have phased me as much as it did. But I found the quote disturbing in regards to music of my time, with bands trying to capture what artists of the semi-near-past did and incidentally, are acclaimed for it. At the root of it all, Yuck embodies what I dislike about certain 90s indie-rock bands as well as the current day fetishism for those indie-rock bands.
PS: The rest of these awards will come with sample songs from the albums. We just didn’t want to do that with Yuck, because none of us have the heart to ask you to listen to Yuck.
Fermata over Whole Rest 