It's possible this thread was done in the past and I even posted in it. If so, show me the link and we can close this if that's needed.



I was just checking out Pitchfork and it reminded me of another site that's similar but I can't think of the name. Any idea?

I also use www.allmusic.com

www.trouserpress.com is good for the old new wave/alterna stuff.



Any other places?

I really like Metacritic. Not a classic review site per se, but really does a good job of pulling everything together.

AllMusic, PopMatters, Pitchfork, Amazon, in that order.

This is my favorite too. Kind of a rotten tomatoes, but with music. They don't get everything, but they do a pretty good job and include a lot of indie albums.

Other than the ones listed, I'll sometimes use roadrun.com for metal reviews.

All of these except for Pitchfork. They have too much of an agenda. It's like reading the op/ed page of the Village Voice, you know what you're going to get.

I use Pitchfork as a way to find out about new artists. Being the most mainstream of all the "indie" sites, this means they don't report on every single nook and cranny in music. If something sounds interesting (regardless of their review), I'll investigate further elsewhere.

Plus, I've internalized a sort of scoring adjuster system for Pitchfork reviews, using their base review score as a starting point:

+1.0 if band is on a major label
-1.5 if the album is hard to get because it's a bootleg, or a mixtape, or not in print
+2.0 if it's a great artist that Pitchfork would be ashamed to admit to like
-0.5 for any rap album
+1.0 if the review doesn't mention the album

I'm sure there's others...

What is the URL for Pitchfork? When I go to that name I get a cattle site.

The Onion - A.V. Club ( http://www.avclub.com/content/ ) is one I sometimes visit along with many of the others listed. Also, their Least Essential Albums year end round ups are always worth reading.

Amazon is probably the one I use most for reviews. There's a lot of noise to sift through, but you can usually get a good feel for the CD if you've got a good sense of what you like and read between the lines- kind of the same with pitchfork.