This rare, and prestigious distinction has only been awarded a scant 11 times in the music magazine’s 24-year history. Last month, Fiona Apple joined an exclusive club when her album ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ received a real-time perfect score on the most vital and polarizing music publication of its era. “I guess that’s the best way to make music, and not let it get you down when certain albums aren’t perceived well. (It got a 7.8!) At this point in Pitchfork’s history, a 10.0 was not yet a hallowed historical mile marker that involved a lot of internal debate. Which is why Fetch the Bolt Cutters might qualify as a dazzling evolutionary leap for both Apple and the website once again lavishly praising her. The Beatles - Rubber Soul. Charli XCX: how i’m feeling now 47. Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, officially released in April 2002 after an infamous deluge of music-industry bullshit, was another instance of a critically adored band dropping an instantly mythic record. Icelandic singer, songwriter, Björk, has received the "perfect 10" nod twice. As the only Pink Floyd album to receive a 10/10 score from Pitchfork, Music Critic James West considers the ways in which it deserves its perfect rating James West I'm a 2nd-year maths student, with interests ranging from music to science with a bit of everything in between. Pitchfork, however, deems themselves the “most trusted voice in music.”. Full Review →. Here's a Detailed Summary of What's Going Down Between Fiona Apple and Lil Nas X, SojaBoy's Music on '90 Day Fiancé' Is Just the Tip of the Auto-Tune Iceberg, 12 Artists Who Had To Change Their Sound to Become Famous. Just because, if you don’t, it kind of loses some of its meaning if everything is around the same score.”. That gave me the push to carve out my own space.”. “And then, that had more of an impression, because that fucked everything up for us in the States. ("Perfect Places" by Lorde) ("LMK" by Kelela) Kelela started out as the face and voice of a loosely organized squad of underground bass producers, but on Take Me Apart, her magnetic presence takes center stage. In 2003, LeMay wrote a scathing 0.0 denouncement of Liz Phair’s self-titled pivot toward mainstream pop, itself a famous review that he later dismissed, in a thoughtful 2019 Twitter thread, as “condescending and cringey.” (Pitchfork’s meanest and most career-devastating reviews constitute their own separate, terrifying pantheon.) “And I knew precious little about rock music history for somebody who was writing for Pitchfork at the time. People may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. The last time they awarded an album a perfect score was Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in November of 2010. At the time, among critics, Phair and Trail of Dead and all other artists of their prominence were relentlessly plotted and replotted on that fraught spectrum: indie vs. major, rock vs. pop, “good” ambition vs. “bad” ambition. It has a simple four stainless-steel tine setup that makes it perfect for cultivating soil, moving mulch, turning compost, and digging up … “I saw them play a show at the Knitting Factory where they trashed everything and yelled at us,” is how Matt LeMay, a New York City teenager in the early 2000s, now describes a formative experience with the Austin garage-rock band ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. When we do our Best Albums of the 2020s, do we feel like this will age well? But the Source Tags & Codes review was one among a dramatic series of turning points in the site’s influence. Fires a 4-round burst (5 if the gun stock is Dahl) when zoomed in. It’s the first real-time 10.0 for a female artist, and the first such review written by a woman. Otis Redding - Otis Blue. This is my second favourite album and one that I measure many others by. “I do think that its significance is lost if we overuse it, obviously. “So yeah, there was just this kid in Minnesota, and he did an interview with the Wrens, and he had a 10.0 review of Walt Mink,” he recalls to me now. The 10 best albums of 2017. 2009 was okay, not super. Glenn Gould - Bach: The Goldberg Variations. Create your own list of music and share it with the world. There was Spin, and I loved it—any of us would’ve killed to write for them, of course. In Europe. made by Sean Dawn. “I liked that it felt kind of scientific without any actual science to it,” is how Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber explains the 10.0 scale to me now. Offers may be subject to change without notice. But that 10.0 scale—which at the high end carries all the historical weight of five stars in Rolling Stone or five mics in The Source—remains one of the site’s signature flourishes, with its maddening and theoretically precise approach to decimal places, such that an ocean of feeling separates an 8.1 from an 8.9. Here's the Fetch the Bolt Cutters track list: The result is vigorous praise for the Kanye West of that exact moment that does not attempt to predict, or for that matter sanction, anything Kanye West might do in the very next moment. And to me, that still felt so cool and exciting and dangerous to whatever extent.”, For the record, neither DiCrescenzo nor Sirota regrets their respective 10.0 reviews 20 years or so later, nor has Pelly reconsidered her feelings for Fetch the Bolt Cutters after a few weeks to reflect. (“I can’t remember if it was email—maybe it was Instant Messenger, Jesus Christ,” Sirota says with a laugh, recalling his conversations with Schreiber at the time. score: 29 of 112 (26%) required scores: 1, 2, 11, 32, 57. list stats leaders vote. (Shout-out to late April’s Talking Heads Day.) Pitchfork Contributor Brent DiCrescenzo wrote, “When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that six men...created this, it's clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive...Breathing people made this record! In the world of music today, many critics have found it difficult to find anything new, original, or extraordinary to rave about in such a way that makes readers take notice, listeners feel something different, and the general concept of music feel forever changed. Like much of Pitchfork’s earliest writings from Schreiber and others—including 10.0 reviews for the likes of the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin and Amon Tobin’s Bricolage—those reviews have since been scrubbed from the official site, though they live on via the Wayback Machine, and reflect the site’s initial identity as more of a labor-of-love personal blog than a voice-of-god institution. But there’s nonetheless an acute awareness of the pantheon, and what it means for Fiona Apple to enter it. 2,320 views. “But by the time it’s 2010, there’s just a lot more people reading the site. And I’m glad to be participating in culture at a time when people understand that Fiona Apple is a genius.” And her fellow geniuses, presumably, are glad to finally have some company. Fear of a Black Planet. And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over.”. 100. Thanks a lot, Pitchfork.’”, He might’ve been far less comically nonchalant a few years later when the site greeted the band’s next album, Worlds Apart, with a dismissive and disappointed review whose exact score, 4.0, Reece can still recite, unprompted, from memory. For the first time in 10 years, Pitchfork gave Fiona’s album a coveted 10/10 rating. “Walt Mink and 12 Rods were probably the two best bands in Minneapolis, and to see these normal kids in my town putting out records I loved, playing packed rooms, and getting played on college radio—it was kind of the coolest thing in the world to me,” Schreiber says. As for album reviews, those are given a rating from 0 to 10, specific to one decimal point (ex. The Beatles - … The site regularly tackles major reissues, and through its Sunday Reviews feature returns each week to a classic album, and thus has now doled out a 10.0 to more than 50 records altogether, most of them in retrospect. 102: 102. But the record, in all its chaotic focus and feral tenderness, still got one unexpected reaction: It inspired the first real-time Pitchfork 10.0 review in almost a decade. We care about his ego, and if that’s not present, then it’s not interesting. “If you look at a 10.0 as a personal evaluation of quality in the moment, then yes, I gave it the score that I felt it deserved at the time,” LeMay says now. And as it got bigger and bigger and bigger, it became the establishment.” And soon even that objectively silly 10.0 scale would be freighted with significance, and something very much like consequence. First with her album Post in 1995, and then again in 1997 with Homogenic. “I still feel pretty overwhelmed by it, in the best way.”) As for Schreiber, “The only thing I might change is that there aren’t more of them,” he says now. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this guy totally fits my profile, fits my vibe.’”, By 2000, DiCrescenzo, by then one of Pitchfork’s most prominent writers, had relocated from Atlanta to join Schreiber in Chicago, and found himself painstakingly downloading, via “Limewire or Napster or whatever,” each individual track off Radiohead’s Kid A. Reduced damage. Content ©2020 The Ringer All Rights Reserved, Pitch Perfect: The History and Influence of the Pitchfork 10.0, an infamous deluge of music-industry bullshit. Humbug, Arctic Monkeys (8.0/7.2) 9. For the first time in 10 years, Pitchfork gave Fiona’s album a coveted 10/10 rating. Pitchfork's 50 Best Albums of 2020 50. ", In 2007, the site introduced a new system called "Forkcast." Nina Simone - Nina Simone in Concert. 1. The list is short in comparison with how many records they’ve actually reviewed! Nas Illmatic (1994) My rating: 10 Of course it's a 10. In her opinion, two previous Apple records, 1999’s When the Pawn… and 2012’s The Idler Wheel..., are 10.0s, as well. In 2010, Kanye West released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which Pitchfork praised for its originality and lyrical content. by bigbigbigheartbe Plays Quiz not verified by Sporcle . 10. Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters. “As Pitchfork got bigger, just like with anything, once you get bigger, it’s a little scarier to take those big swings, because you feel like you have more to lose, right?” Dombal says. Glenn Gould - The Goldberg Variations. Read the full list: http://p4k.in/xu9oW88 100. “I was really struck by the idea that there was this whole subculture in music that was kind of for misfits, and those guys made it feel real because it was happening right around the corner from me. Explore the Pitchfork Best Albums of the '90s list by discogslists on Discogs. As always, her editors at Pitchfork made the call on the Fetch the Bolt Cutters score, which she found out about only a few hours before the review ran. In 2009, the site did away with this method and instead opted to simply review tracks, while giving some a label of "Best New Track.". Public Enemy. The score is rare and has only been given to twelve albums since the site was launched in 1995. In her opinion, two previous Apple records, 1999’s When the Pawn… and 2012’s The Idler Wheel..., are 10.0s, as well. Which sounds exhausting, but it’s worth it, especially when the end result is a puncturing of the dudeliness of the 10.0 club as it has historically stood. “We considered the rating for a lot of albums over the years, and I think we’d have been on the right side of history with most of them.”, But LeMay, now an author and tech-world consultant, has a more complicated relationship with Trail of Dead and his 10.0 review for the band’s brash and cacophonous 2002 major-label debut, Source Tags & Codes, which “will take you in, rip you to shreds, piece you together, lick your wounds clean, and send you back into the world with a concurrent sense of loss and hope,” he wrote at the time. Best New Music: Fiona Apple's Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a perfect album. (Patel and I are friends and former colleagues at various other publications.) “We had the existential Pitchfork conversation,” Patel explains, “where it was like, ‘Let’s take a look at everything that’s gotten a 10. Will we care about this a year down the line? “I have stumbled, quite absentmindedly, upon one of the best albums I’ve ever heard,” is how Schreiber’s El Producto review begins. 5. Trail of Dead had parlayed the notoriety of their instrument-trashing live show and the underground success of their 1999 Merge Records album Madonna into a deal with Interscope, still a fraught leap for a young rock band in the early 2000s. (“My love of it has only grown,” she says. “A lot of the conversation around those albums became more about the score than about the music. His G.O.O.D. The Beatles - Revolver. But a real-time 10.0 still qualifies as a seismic event for the rock-critic universe as a whole. (“I think that you would very easily, naturally puncture the dudeliness of it,” Patel says, “if you were being open-minded.”) It is critically useful, and if you’re so inclined maybe even fun, to muse as to how Fetch the Bolt Cutters will hold up a year or even a decade from now. Exclaim! “He’s using social media to have fun. I think that we should be using the higher end of the scale more frequently than we have, and the lower end of the scale more frequently than we have.”, The baton pass from West to Apple is fraught with symbolism all on its own, and the classic idea of perfection, as anyone who has recently slogged through the interminable Chris Rock bit on the deep cut “Blame Game” can attest, does not readily apply to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, either. 2) and 199 other records that in many cases almost, but did not quite, merit a 10.0, including Lana Del Rey’s 2019 phenomenon Norman Fucking Rockwell!, which got a 9.4 review written by Pelly herself. Indeed, what was revolutionary about that Kid A review was not so much the scoring system, which DiCrescenzo cheerfully found absurd, too: “The nuance between a 7.4 and 7.5 is obviously—it’s just a joke, it’s stupid.” Nor was it the praise for Radiohead specifically: Starting with 1997’s OK Computer—another early, archived Pitchfork 10.0 from Schreiber—worshipping the band was by then an international pastime. That rating can mean a lot of things to different people, so if the conditions aren’t exactly right, you might be starting the dialogue from a place of incredulity or saddling the record with expectations it may not be able to live up to. On October 24, 2003, Pitchformula.com, made a survey of the 5,575 reviews available on Pitchfork at that time, showing that the average album rating was 6.7, 2,339 reviews had been awarded a rating of 7.4 or higher, and 873 reviews had been awarded a rating of less than 5.0. But “I wrote it thinking, ‘This is a 10,’” she says now, “and tried to make the case for that as I was writing it.”, Because that rating scale, flagrantly subjective and objectively silly as it might be, still matters. You could count Girls Girls Girls and Yo Yo Buddy Yup Yup Word to Ya Muthuh as part of this entry of the list, but let's be honest, Exile in Guyville is the album Pitchfork wanted to honour, not the other stuff. The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico. What other albums does Pitchfork deem perfection? But that only binds that record tighter, in indomitable spirit, to Fetch the Bolt Cutters. But I think that if anything, it’s a challenge for us to find music that is perfect. Mary Lattimore: Silver Ladders 49. Other albums that have received perfect scores are Neutral Milk Hotel’s, In An Aeroplane Over The Sea, D’Angelo’s VooDoo, and The Blue Album by Weezer. Fridays promo strategy of doling out one free track a week (shout-out to the “Power” remix) stands now as quite possibly the last tolerable album rollout in history, from anybody, but for West especially. and Walt Mink’s El Producto, both from 1996, both noisy and ambitious local rock bands made good. I found it often had a negative effect on how these records were perceived by readers, and I thought in the case of Source Tags & Codes, maybe it wasn’t given a chance to come into its own because people were so put off by that statement.”, There was no concern, in 2010, with overburdening Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with expectation. But it’s enough for the moment to know that Fiona Apple, for many, is the perfect artist for this misbegotten spring of 2020, and that she deserves her enshrinement whatever your opinions of the shine, and that all further raucous debates about the past are best left, for now, to the future. How did the distinction come to mean so much? Top 10 Albums of 2009. New releases to look forward to in the coming months, from SZA, Drake, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and others. Specifically, in Billboard’s view, he “managed to capture the historical awe of that moment with some of the most flamboyantly earnest, absurdly effusive, and borderline nonsensical bits of prose to ever be published in a legitimate music publication.”. No music has ever sounded quite like it. Kerrang! No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us.”, “It wasn’t something that we had to sell or endorse or give a big platform to,” says Sirota, now a history professor at NC State. All Rights Reserved. (Full disclosure: In 2002, I got a speeding ticket on an Ohio freeway whilst rocking out too hard to Source Tags & Codes. Girly-sound to Guyville was given the 10 as one release, despite being a compilation of 3 separate releases. A Tribe Called Quest. Today, though, a new album will join the ranks of “Abbey Road” and “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”: Pitchfork has just awarded a rare 10/10 review to “Now That’s What I Call Music! “What we crave from her is the brazen tell-offs and the very intimate, confessional-style songwriting, and what we crave from Kanye is, like, nonsense. I understand some of the Perfect 10 scores are for album reissues that include bonus tracks and demos. “There were ratings from day one, but they started out as percentages, like instead of 6.7, the score would be 67 percent,” he writes in an email. 3. Recently, American singer-songwriter Fiona Apple released her fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, much to the delight of music publication, Pitchfork. 2. Again, my rating is first, followed by Pitchfork’s. The last album to earn a quote-unquote perfect 10.0 upon initial release was Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, reviewed by longtime features editor Ryan Dombal in 2010, and praised as “a blast of surreal pop excess that few artists are capable of creating, or even willing to attempt.” The nearly 10-year drought that followed gives you some sense of the momentousness of this occasion, and how bizarre and vexing and fascinating this pantheon—which now bonds Apple to the likes of Radiohead, Wilco, ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Will Oldham, and a few luminaries from the late-’90s Minneapolis rock scene—has become. “Over the past few months, Kanye has intermittently tried to flush away his rep as a boorish egoist in interviews and on Twitter, which is, fortunately, impossible,” he wrote, soon adding, “In his public life, he exhibits vulnerability and invincibility in equal measure, but he’s just as apt at villainy—especially here.”. “We were definitely trying to entertain people, we wanted to be funny, and we wanted to be a little irreverent,” DiCrescenzo says. The wonderful people over at Pitchfork just released their 10 best albums of 2010 today. And the Pitchfork 10.0 that greeted it, written by Brent S. Sirota, likewise rose to the momentousness of the occasion. Lil Baby: My … Distractify is a registered trademark. Music Quiz / Pitchfork Perfect 10 Albums by Cover Random Music or Album Quiz Can you name these 15 albums that received a perfect 10.0 on Pitchfork.com by their cover art? Some of the very few albums that Pitchfork has scored a perfect 10 since beginning in 1995 include Radiohead's OK Computer and Kid A, and Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. For the record, the site liked this year’s The Godless Void quite a bit. Fiona Apple is the first artist in 10 years for 'Pitchfork' to give a perfect 10. Highest Rated Albums of All Time. 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