Pitchfork Demands That New Father Stop Being Responsible

Everyone has that one Pitchfork review that drives them nuts. This is ours. It’s a review of an LP by Channels, the new project of Washington, D.C. rocker and producer J. Robbins–the stern-faced, dystopia-prophesizing dude who gave the world the great bands Jawbox and Burning Airlines. He also happens to be a new father; his wife is Channels bassist Janet Morgan. For a writer with a soul, this fact would invite only well-wishes, but for Pitchfork’s Jason Crock it’s a means to a critical end.

At the end of Crock’s review, he writes of Robbins, “If only he’d book a few less mediocre emo bands [at his studio] and put the baby down on the boards; we could always use more of Robbins’ A-game.”

See what Pitchfork did here? They just expanded the limits of the possible. They just blew our minds. We look forward to future Pitchfork reviews that take into account how the Project Runway fascination of Ira Kaplan, the weekly Mandarin class of Sufjan Stevens, the dog-walking sojourns of Neko Case and the twenty-hour-a-week Halo habit of Aesop Rock affect the musical quality of their next records. (Examples 100-percent made-up, although we’re kind of karmically certain that Ira Kaplan watches Runway. He simply must.)

Okay, now, seriously–we’ve listened to the Channels record a dozen times. It’s great. We think it stands alongside the best stuff in the Robbins canon. And when we spun the disc for the first time and heard J. Robbins spitting phrases like “threat-level-yellow sunshine” and “I wanna feel the art in heartless, get the urge/For ever-brighter effigies to burn,” we felt only great joy and a profound sense of peace–knowing, as we now knew, that even dystopian prophets can rock gracefully into the threat-level-yellow sunshine of fatherhood and middle age.

Review: Channels, Waiting For the Next End of the World [Pitchfork] Channels – Chivaree [MP3, link expired] Burning Airlines – 3 Sisters [MP3, link expired]