File under overrated

I'm not sure why critics have a huge hard-on for the buzzband 'How to Dress Well'... the songs are mediocre at best and the album itself sounds like fucking garbage. I'm sure I'm missing the point of the 'lo-fi aesthetic', but sounds this unpleasant to listen to shouldn't be paid for.

The Pitchfork review states "It feels brave, like it's going places a lot of artists in this sphere are afraid to go."... among other things that make me want to throw up in my mouth. Music recordings have become so devalued that the ephemera passing through our shitty computer speakers gets raised to the level of art. I'm a little annoyed.

Of course this could all be for moot as I'm listening to mp3s... but to that point, my friend Matt picked up the recent Ariel Pink album on CD after enjoying the mp3s for months. He was hoping for the disc to be worth the value, 14.99 or whatever the price was, which would include higher quality sound. Boy was he ever disappointed. Something about having it on CD made the music sound worse, because the expectation was that the digital hard copy would sound better than the particulate floating around the interwebs.

So that's where we are in 2010, entry level artists can't afford quality production so they're stuck with manipulating Garage Band or some other cracked software in order to get their mp3s onto the hard drives of relevant websites while so called 'legacy artists' who made their money under the old paradigm, like Trent Reznor, are able to release new material on stunning Blu-Ray 5.1 surround sound.

I know which one I prefer to spend my money on.