Though I’m not personally familiar with the work of Pitchfork, etc. writer Grayson Haver Currin, Toby Driver of Kayo Dot, etc. fame sure is. Driver has apparently had enough of Currin, whom he feels has waged a lengthy grudge against him. Driver penned the below missive via Facebook after receiving a slightly above average review for Stern‘s new release “Bone Turqoise“, which he performed on.
“A review for an album I played on, “Bone Turquoise,” by Stern, was published today on Pitchfork.com. Normally, I don’t pay much attention to what critics have to say, but the sad truth is that Pitchfork has quite a bit of power (far too much, in fact) when it comes to making-or-breaking bands, so artists and labels necessarily vie for positive attention from them, sometimes, as rumor has it, paying them for such.
I believe that, typically, it’s good form for artists to disengage from the opinions of the press, but especially from the negative, lest their artistic vision be diluted by an outsider’s opinion, or they lose some of the dignity that being a lifelong, profoundly dedicated artist doing “The Good Work” offers. Critics rather parasitically serve only to distill the massive amount of art out there into a focused slice of culture, according to *their* taste. In other words, it’s useful to read a specific critic’s newest column if you know they share your taste and you can rely on their recommendation, although it’s a less dignified and more narcissistic vocation than that of an artist.
That’s why it is so unfortunate that the de facto critical voice of the music scene most aware of my work has wound up being Grayson Haver Currin. Quite simply, Grayson and I do not share tastes. I think the things he rates highly are painfully boring and idiomatic. And he’s just not into my aesthetic, my personal voice. He is obviously not the right audience for my work, and it’s very frustrating that the PR that works on my behalf continues to pitch our records to him when this fact is pretty apparent. Pitchfork does have other writers.
I wish it were as simple as that, but Grayson has bewilderingly taken it upon himself for years to actually turn our aesthetic dissonance into a personal one, and in the spirit of disengagement, I’ve avoided saying anything about it publicly for about seven years now, but I think the time is ripe. I have to mention, I’ve never met this person, although with the way he acts, you’d think I’d slept with his girlfriend.
This all started back in 2008, when Kayo Dot‘s “Blue Lambency Downward“, a woodwind-driven prog album, was released, and foolishly marketed by our PR to metal writers including Grayson. On the heels of Grayson’s legendarily cruel review of Pelican‘s “City of Echoes,” not a review at all, in fact, as much as a personal attack on their drummer http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10310-city-of-echoes/ (side note: for someone with as much self-righteous indignation as Grayson in regard to his trolling of pro-life protesters http://uproxx.com/webculture/2014/07/this-pro-choice-couple-trolls-anti-abortionists-with-some-clever-signs/ …who is really the bad person here?) he wrote a poor review for “Blue Lambency Downward,” and that should have been the end of it– it’d have been written off as a bad review and nothing more.
But Grayson would not let up: when Kayo Dot and Steve Brodsky opened for Pelican in Raleigh, NC in 2009, Grayson, who has a column in local rag IndyWeek, implicitly told his readers to avoid the show by spewing more bile: “Pelican still hasn’t fired its drummer, Larry Herweg, who remains the hindrance for the instrumental quartet: He seems to mostly stay on point these days, but his brutish complacence adulterates the accomplishments of dashing guitarists Laurent Schroeder-Lebec and Trevor Shelley de Brauw. Kayo Dot used to make massive art-metal statements with strings and drones and drums and masses of guitars; on this year’s “Blue Lambency Downward,” Toby Driver directed his miasmatic tendencies to somewhere between Jeff Buckley, The Mars Volta and Grizzly Bear, except less than any of those three. Stephen Brodsky, whose reputation rests on the laurels of Cave-In, opens. 7 p.m. —Grayson Currin”
A few months later, Kayo Dot released “Coyote,” which received no Pitchfork attention, although Grayson was kind enough to tweet: grayson haver currin @currincy 21 Jan 2010
That period when Kayo Dot wasn’t a shitty band? Yeah, that was cool. These last few years? Sorry, dudes, Art Bears have already existed.A few years went by, and Pitchfork continued to ignore my output. I began to believe it had something to do with Grayson, but was wary of looming paranoia. Eventually, another one of my bands, Vaura, was fortunate enough to release a record, “The Missing,” on Profound Lore, a metal label that consistently puts out great music but also reliably gets positive attention from Pitchfork. Due to the fact “The Missing” was on Profound Lore, Pitchfork had to review it, and favorably so. Being the de facto voice of the scene, Grayson was assigned to the review, yet he couldn’t resist the opportunity to snarkily call me a “survivor” of maudlin of the Well, a band I was in as a teenager. http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18545-vaura-the-missing/
Further shunning of Kayo Dot‘s albums by Pitchfork followed, which brings us to today’s review of “Bone Turquoise.” Grayson describes the album favorably, yet, like the obsessed person that he is, simply cannot resist just one more potshot: “Stern‘s tunes provide ballast and borders for Toby Driver and part of his Kayo Dot crew, something *that* band’s albums have needed badly in recent years.”
At least it’s comforting to know that I haven’t been imagining things– the fact that Grayson will so reliably take the chance to denigrate me. I just wonder what it is I ever did to him, beyond just not sharing his aesthetic. Can this post please be, at the very least, a call to all the PR powers out there to STOP sending interesting music to this guy, and only throw the basic-ass shit his way, as is his druthers? And to Grayson, I say, thanks for the review, now will you please grow the fuck up?”
