Maybe it's Pitchfork's fault. The notoriously lacerating blog that famously posted a wordless review of Jet's 2006 Shine On album accompanied by a nine-second video of a chimp urinating in its own mouth and then topped that with a review of the Black Kids' 2008 debut that featured a picture of two sad pug dogs and the word "sorry" helped set the stage for the micro album review.
Now, thanks to the just-launched, Twitter-ific review site Musebin, the days of the 500-plus-word, navel-gazing, "serious" album review by opinion-bloated rock critics could be going the way of HD DVDs. How can the Robert Christgaus of the world compete with such pithy 140-character takes on albums like Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy that opine: "Chinese Democracy: What a piece of f---ing sh--," as well as "It took Michelangelo 4 years to paint the Sistine Chapel. It takes Axl 15 to sh-- on a CD, and gravity was on his side."
Or the new Animal Collective album Merriweather Post Pavilion: "Sounds like: naked electric people jumping around the wilderness, wildly gesticulating, like if Walt Whitman was driven mad by Socrates." Or, my personal favorite, a take on the Blood Brothers' Crimes that reads: "It's like if funk and punk music had an epileptic baby, and I mean that in the nicest way possible."
Reached via IM, of course, writer Chris Weingarten said he got the idea for his current Twitter-review blog — on which he plans to post 1,000 miniature album reviews over the course of the year — when he noticed a lot of his fellow music writers "slowly ducking out of the business, taking other jobs and going back to school."
"There's been a bit of a shift where people are disputing the relevancy of music writers [Editor's note: Speak for yourself, dude!] and moving more toward bloggers who post a lot about music but don't have much critical energy. So I thought this would be a good way to combine critical thought with the almost obscene frequency that Twitter provides. Twitter forces you to be careful with your words. The phrase 'tl; dr' [translation: too long, didn't read] came along with the Internet."
Sorry, I spaced for a minute there, Chris. You were saying ...