You are aware this is Joanna Newsom and not My Bloody Valentine?

You guys, Sgt. Pepper’s is so overrated. I mean, 4-track recording is SO CLICHE at this point! I can’t help it that time was unfair to that record, but that’s the way life goes.

All I’ve heard are the 2-3 songs they’ve released online, and I’m very underwhelmed. The Monitor had grit and challenge; everything I’m hearing from this is best described as “eh.”

Sigur Ros has been absolutely winning at music videos this year. They’ve finally realized their music makes the perfect score to beautifully-photographed indie short films, and man have they run with that.

A great continuation of where they left off with “Wild Go.” This band makes truly beautiful music.

Sounds like Damon Albarn is dominating the production, which is a little annoying.

Yeah, because all music reviewers read every other review on a piece of work before writing their own so everyone can judge things on the same level, because somehow dozens of critics all saying the same thing is good for business and good for art. Oh, and we all worship at the altar of Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, because maybe copying what they think will make us cool. By basing everything on what they think, that’ll make us them, right?

People act like critics are in some secret society that meets in a basement and collectively decides to shit on an album because they feel like it and it will piss people off. Have you considered that a critical perspective is simply different from a fan’s perspective, or in this case different from your perspective? Critics often listen for different things than fans, and not because they don’t like music but because they’re writing about art, and writing about art and simply enjoying art are two different things. I liked a few songs on this album, but the ones I enjoyed were the ones that weren’t making a statement or aspiring to be different, they were the ones that simply sounded pretty, and while I’ll comment on that, and most critics, given enough word count, will as well, I’ll have to keep it in a general context around the rest of the album. I’m not paid to write about songs, I’m paid to write about albums, and overall, I thought this album was not good. Don’t accuse me of joining some kind of “groupthink” session with some guys from other websites just to make you feel stupid, because no one I know who writes about music has ever done that. I, and many other music critics I know, have a strict policy against reading other reviews, and as an editor, if another writer seems to be responding to other critics’ reviews (as they’ve done here), I always tell them to either cool off or write about something else, because it’s not worth slinging mud at other people’s opinions when what you should be doing is formulating your own.