The Ballad of Ray Suzuki: The Secret Life of Early Pitchfork and the Most Notorious Review Ever “Written”

The mystery was hiding in plain sight. Maybe you missed it, too, over the years, even if you’ve come back to the page dozens of times to revisit one of the most popular and influential posts in Pitchfork’s history: a review of the Australian rock band Jet’s 2006 album, Shine On, which consists solely of an embedded YouTube video of a chimp peeing in his own mouth.

It’s plenty to talk about on its own, after all. The review made instant waves at the time with Pitchfork’s skyrocketing audience, and it’s remained in the halls of site lore, even as the publication has gone from a scrappy music blog to an entire wing in the sparkling quartz tower of Condé Nast. Over the years, the rotating Pitchfork staff has tended to it like a vigilant gardener, periodically replacing the link with a copy when the video goes dead, allowing future generations to find it and be moved by its wisdom. (Phoebe Bridgers, who was 12 when the post originally went up, called it “the best review of all time” in 2016.) But it was only recently that I noticed something that had never caught my eye in all the time I’d spent watching a chimp do unspeakable things. Just who in the hell is Ray Suzuki?

Click on the name listed as the author of the Shine On review and you’ll see one other post with Suzuki’s name attached—a 2003 write-up of N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton and Efil4zaggin. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that he’s also the author of a few blurbs—good call including White Town’s “Your Woman” on the Top Tracks of the 1990s list, Ray—dating as late as 2010. Dig even deeper than that, and you’ll find that Suzuki, ever notable for his range, was also writing news posts on the site in 2001.

“Oh, Ray,” said Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber, when I got him on the phone. “You shouldn’t have written that N.W.A review, probably.”

I wanted to know how a person could fill such a strange, unique role in Pitchfork history and then quietly disappear. And so I began my search for Ray Suzuki plainly enough: by hunting for a writer with that name, who perhaps had demonstrated an inconsistent work ethic and an appreciation for the nuances of indie rock. But the hunt ended up bringing me much further into the depths of Pitchfork’s history than I could have anticipated. It illuminated an underground ethos that fueled the publication’s rise—a passionate, experimental, and sometimes childish approach that feels particularly distant in 2024, as the site has found itself in dire corporate straits. (In January, Condé Nast laid off a significant portion of Pitchfork’s staff and announced that it would be folding its operation into GQ.) It also brought me to the heart of Jet, the band caught in all this.

What I ended up finding is that Suzuki was in some sense the 2000s era of the site personified—which is particularly impressive given his mortal limitations. “Though I have great respect for Ray,” said Chris Kaskie, former president of Pitchfork, “Ray Suzuki was not a real person.”

My first breakthrough in the case landed after I began emailing a variety of 2000s Pitchfork figures—some staff, some contributors—to ask whether they knew how to track down the esteemed Suzuki. One person, who asked to remain anonymous, gave me the tip that rearranged my brain on the matter. “Ray Suzuki was like Pitchfork’s Alan Smithee,” they told me in an email, referencing the pseudonym used by directors in the 20th century who didn’t want their name on a film. This explained Suzuki’s unlikely genre spectrum and the broad time frame of his work—and it also likely explained the N.W.A review, which was originally published under the name of a different, seemingly real contributor. (Using the Wayback Machine, you can see that, in 2012, Suzuki was swapped in.)

But it turns out that being an Alan Smithee wasn’t the alias’s initial purpose. When it first started appearing as a byline in news posts in 2001, it was actually a punishment. At that time, all the contributors were writing for free, and many of them were less than reliable. Brian Roberts, the then–news editor, had asked contributors to make sure to include their bylines with their news submissions, “probably so I didn’t have to track what email addresses were associated with which writer,” he explained in an email, bemused that he’d been tracked down. (“I’m not even a footnote in the history of Pitchfork, I’m more like a toe-note,” he wrote.) The threat, if any of the hodgepodge of college students and hobbyists failed to honor this request, was that a different writer would be given the credit instead. This writer’s name was Ray Suzuki.

For no real reason, Roberts took the moniker from “Ballad of Ray Suzuki,” a 1999 song by Looper, the postmodern electronic project of Stuart David, the original bassist of Belle and Sebastian, and his wife, Karn. (Pitchfork’s review of Looper’s debut LP, Up a Tree, which includes Ray’s theme: 8.1.) David, in turn, had gotten the name from a friend of his, Adrian Stewart, who did DJ sets as Ray Suzuki and was immortalized by providing the spoken word vocals on his namesake track and by riding one of the Vespas in the video. Stewart, for his part, had taken the name from Mark Gordon, of the Irish band Tunic, who used to come up with quirky noms de plume for bandmates and friends.

Ray Suzuki was an alias that was “going spare,” as Gordon explained in an email, and Stewart ended up with it. Gordon said the name was in the tradition of “the Bowie ’70s thing of sticking random words together and seeing if a very mild form of alchemy occurred.” “Suzuki” came from the motorcycle company. Through all this kismet, the name found its way back to Pitchfork, where Ray Suzuki was brought to life, sort of.

There were other Pitchfork aliases in the early days—G.P. Sippy, John Toes, etc.—and Schreiber said some of those came from an “anything goes” mentality. (James P. Wisdom—who gave Pink Floyd’s Animals a perfect 10 in 2000—is an actual guy, I was shocked to learn.) But Suzuki had more staying power than the others. “I always loved the name,” Schreiber said. “It’s got so much pizzazz.”

It also developed a different utility in the news department: making readers believe Pitchfork was more bustling than it actually was. “There were many days when the only news writing on the site was by Ryan and/or myself,” said Will Bryant, a Pitchfork news editor in the early 2000s, via email. “It would be super-lame to give every byline to ourselves, so we added Ray Suzuki for seasoning.”

Schreiber hired Kaskie as his first full-time employee, and soon after brought in Ryan Kennedy, Kaskie’s best friend, as general manager. Kaskie and Kennedy had met while working together as interns at The Onion, where they bonded over music, in between trips lugging sacks of mail to the post office. They also developed their own internal sense of humor.

“We would email each other the stupidest, weirdest stuff back and forth,” Kennedy remembered of their Onion days, “just trying to make each other laugh. We really didn’t think or care about the business—it was like a Don Draper thing. Like, I want to make Kaskie lose his shit at his desk right now. And he wants to do the same.”

Kennedy’s first day at Pitchfork was spent helping the publication move out of Schreiber’s basement, and they carried some of the prankster spirit into the new office, which was in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. With Scott Plagenhoef, the first outside editorial hire, also on board, Pitchfork had transformed into a team of young, highly opinionated music nerds with little formal editorial experience (little professional experience at all, really), who all saw the latent power of the internet that was lurking.

“I was watching The Onion invest heavily in more print markets for their newspaper,” said Kaskie, “like, ‘Wait a minute, you know that the internet’s a thing?’” He explained that The Onion—satire as it may be—was a crash course in how media companies were failing to meet the moment online, “where so much opportunity lived that they weren’t paying attention to.”

As Pitchfork grew in popularity, there was a conscious effort to become more serious, more legit. Pseudonyms were used less frequently, and writers with outside clout began to contribute substantial pieces—including some of the most legendary perfect-score reviews of the new century. But progress on this front wasn’t a straight line, as anyone regularly checking the site could tell. One of the most storied stunt posts in Pitchfork history ran in 2008, when Black Kids’ Partie Traumatic was reviewed with text that just read “sorry :-/” over a picture of two pugs (score: 3.3). The post, credited to Plagenhoef and featuring Kaskie’s dogs, was meant as a mea culpa for having previously hyped the band up.

“Sometimes [the tone] could be brash, sometimes it could be super passionate,” said Kaskie, “but all of it was rooted in the love of music, and that was clear.” He said they weren’t checking their analytics or studying traffic patterns to decide what to do that day: “What was really exciting was just knowing that, when you don’t have rules, you can kind of set your own.”

Figuring out that Ray Suzuki was an Alan Smithee was one thing, but narrowing down who, exactly, had used it for the Jet review was something else altogether. For a while I was getting nowhere by taking guesses at likely writers. There was Nick Sylvester, for example, who wrote the savage Pitchfork review of the first Jet album, 2003’s Get Born (score: 3.7); he never got back to me. There was Rob Mitchum, who wrote another memorable Pitchfork pan from a few months after the Shine On review—of Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky (score: 5.2); wasn’t him, he told me in an email. (“The legacy of one notorious review is more than enough, ha,” Mitchum said.)

I was beginning to fear I was never going to learn who “wrote” the review when Plagenhoef said he might have some answers—but warned that he had to get any interview requests approved by Apple, where he works as global head of music programming. I sent a list of formal questions and waited anxiously, thinking about how Jet’s debut single, “Are You Gonna Be My Girl”—a foot-tapping earworm of a bar-rock song—was catapulted into ubiquity by being featured in an iPod commercial. (The song reached no. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100, and Get Born ultimately sold more than 5 million copies worldwide.) I had visions of PR professionals, black silhouettes at a conference table with white AirPods glistening in their ears, telling Plagenhoef to stay out of this one. But then the email came through.

“Three of us,” Plagenhoef wrote, referring to himself, Kaskie, and Kennedy, “sat at a separate table from the rest of the group and conceived of the review.”

The scene was Lula Cafe, which is directly downstairs from the old Pitchfork office, where the entire staff—at this point featuring additional employees and interns—had gone for a celebratory lunch of some kind. There’s discrepancy about who was explicitly a part of this conversation; Schreiber remembers being involved, but Plagenhoef, Kaskie, and Kennedy remember being sectioned off. Regardless, there was discussion about what to do with this new Jet record, which, everyone at hand seemed to agree, was terrible.

For anyone who has ever wanted a Pitchfork review of Shine On with actual words, this explanation from Plagenhoef is as close as you’re going to get:

We were talking about the central problem as we saw it with the record, how the Return to Rock trend that started with the Strokes, White Stripes, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs—and really rock in general—had curdled into a set of lazy signifiers and poses. When the point or driver of what you’re doing is reclamation it’s inherently limiting and resistant to new ideas. It’s a creative cul-de-sac. Progression—whether it was in hip-hop, pop, guitar music, electronic music—was important to us at the time. Seeing mainstream rock music, which of course most of us had grown up with a fondness for, become so knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed was disappointing.

Such was the verdict of the critical merit of Jet, but after Sylvester’s conceptual review for Get Born, which took the form of a made-up conversation between the band and a venue manager, going back to a straightforward album review for Shine On “felt unnecessary,” wrote Plagenhoef. “It was almost better to not bother reviewing the record and giving space to something else,” he explained. “So the challenge became, Is there some third approach? And that’s when we started throwing out ideas for something metaphorical and dismissive.”

Kennedy and Kaskie—two operational employees who never had formal bylines on the site—clicked back into their collaborative shitposting mindset to help figure something out. A third approach that Kennedy considered was in the style of a recent post he’d enjoyed that was published the previous year on Tiny Mix Tapes, a music blog that has since been unplugged. It was a review for Nine Inch Nails’ With Teeth that was absent of text or a byline—and instead featured just an embedded image of the album being thrown in a digital recycling bin of a computer (score: 1.5 out of 5).

“There’s no reader interpretation,” Kennedy said. “It’s thrown in the garbage. Haha. Done. I’m like, ‘You know, I would love to do something with that. We could do better.’ And in my head, I’m thinking of images and all these things, and nothing’s really hitting. Kaskie’s sitting there, we’re kind of riffing, going back and forth. And then he’s just like, ‘The monkey drinking its piss.’”

The video—succinctly titled “Funny monkey peeing in his own mouth EPIC”—was originally something that Kaskie had sent Kennedy in their Onion days, after Kaskie’s mom, Jane, had sent it to him, in an attempt to “speak their language,” as Kennedy reasoned it. (“If she was to walk into a room you would be like, ‘No way did she send this.’”) The video had made its way into the Pitchfork office over time, a sort of proto-meme among a few people. And as soon as Kaskie suggested it for the review, Plagenhoef—by all accounts a stoic and serious person—was cracking up, and they knew they had something. “Fucking Kaskie hit the cigarette with the tip of the whip right there,” said Kennedy. (It should also be stated directly that despite its name, the clip actually captures a chimp urinating, not a monkey. To some, that’s an important distinction; to others, they’re practically one and the same.)

Just nine seconds in length, the video contains within it what Kennedy, at least, sees as the perfect narrative for how they felt about Jet and Shine On: “The monkey,” he explained, “the way he tilts his head and gets blasted in the face—and then goes back for seconds! That is where I’m won over. He drinks, gets shot in the eye, and then he looks right at the camera, and he goes right back for more! He’s communicating, like, ‘I know what I’m doing, you can’t stop me.’” Kennedy described Sylvester’s Get Born review as describing a band “intoxicated by its own sweat.” “Like the monkey, they go back for more,” Kennedy said, “because they like their own taste.”

When the Shine On review was originally published—with the decision to give the collaborative effort of the staff to Ray Suzuki—it had no score. The video was the score.

This put it in the canon of Pitchfork reviews that experimented with the scoring form, like Bob Pollard’s Relaxation of the Asshole, which was given a simultaneous 10 and 0, or Radiohead’s In Rainbows, which, in the spirit of the band’s pay-what-you-want model for that album, provided an option for readers to provide their own score. Later on, the Pitchfork CMS required that a traditional number be put in for albums, and the nuance of this type of review was lost. Pollard was stripped of his 10 at that point. Radiohead were given a 9.3. Jet were given a 0.0.

But even without the original zero score, the review had an immediate impact when it went up. Some remember the response to it being negative, some remember it being positive—but either way, it got people’s attention, that much everyone remembers. And without so much as a single word of copy, it communicated everything about the Pitchfork agenda.

“Jet was the whole goal,” Kaskie said. “Irreverence, new ideas, playing with the tools the internet had to offer.” Schreiber reminded me, with a laugh, of how new YouTube was at that time—only a year old—and that embedding videos was then “cutting-edge tech.”

“One thing that I really tried to do with Pitchfork in the early days,” Schreiber said, “was think of it as entertainment.” He emphasized that they “took the music extremely seriously,” but also that they wanted to find ways to “catch you off guard and knock you back a step.” In this case maybe two steps.

In the 2000s, Pitchfork learned how to use its powers for good, putting relatively unknown acts like Arcade Fire on the map. But perhaps just as importantly, it also developed quite a punch. Like a young Mike Tyson, Pitchfork arrived on the scene with vicious, violent right hooks that could easily end the careers of musicians stepping into the ring—musicians who, in many cases, never really had a chance in the first place. The cautionary tale in the Pitchfork world is its 2004 review of Travistan, the solo debut of the Dismemberment Plan’s Travis Morrison, which was given a 0.0. In its wake, record stores wouldn’t stock the album, and Morrison’s musical reputation was severely damaged. After this, “the Pitchfork Effect” was recognized in The New York Times and Wired as something to reckon with.

In 2018, the writer Amos Barshad did a story for Slate in which he attempted interviews with various artists, like Morrison, who had received knockout blows of 0.0. With the exception of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, no one agreed to be interviewed, including Jet. Morrison, clearly struggling with the subject, sent an email saying it was a “really frightening and awful experience” to be pummeled by Pitchfork, and described the ongoing horrors of being “branded” by the review.

Most Pitchfork figures I spoke to noted that Jet was a major-label band and suggested that this made them fairer game than, say, Travis Morrison. But when I called Barshad, he emphasized the way status didn’t seem to make a difference in how it felt to the artist. Even with “clear indie-rock legend guy” Moore, he said—whose accolades obviously supersede one bad review of the Sonic Youth album NYC Ghosts & Flowers—Pitchfork’s 0.0 did not come across as a glancing blow. “He remembered the details of it, and was putting it into the context of where the band was at the time,” Barshad said. “So it obviously left a mark even on him.”

After I reached out to Jet to ask for an interview, their manager told me he didn’t think anyone in the group would want to talk. I then emailed Dave Sardy, the producer of Get Born and Shine On, who initially said OK before thinking twice. “Is this a hit job on Jet?” he asked. Despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise, I never heard from him again.

“I used to really like my own harsh reviews if they were well written,” said Stuart David of Looper, calling from Scotland. Our conversation was initially about his group’s unlikely role in this saga via “Ballad of Ray Suzuki,” but while I had him, I asked for his perspective, as a fellow artist, on the Jet review. He could still recall a line from a negative 2005 NME review of Looper’s third LP, The Snare—“the desultory whoosh of a once-promising career as it plummets, irretrievably, down the art-pop pan”—and its writer, Sarah Dempster (score: 1 out of 5). “That’s clever,” he said. The Shine On review, as he saw it, was just “trolling people who couldn’t reply or couldn’t troll back.” “To do it anonymously,” he considered, “seems quite cowardly, I think.”

For many years, Jet didn’t seem to weigh in on the matter. They released one more album, 2009’s Shaka Rock, and broke up in 2012. But after Phoebe Bridgers commented on a 2021 Instagram post by Pitchfork about the review—“I think about this once a day,” she wrote—Chris Cester, Jet’s drummer, replied to her.

“I think I saw you on SNL recently it was really cool …” he replied. “Did you smash your guitar or something? It was a huge statement. Dangerous.” He ended his comment with “It’s tough out there best of luck to you.” Cester was doing what he couldn’t in 2006: trolling back.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that Jet’s opinion on this matter might end up being playful in its own right. One of the band’s best-known songs, the Kinks-ish romp “Rollover D.J.,” is essentially a monkey-piss-level review of DJ culture. “Well, I know that you think you’re a star,” Chris’s brother Nic sings. “A pill-poppin’ jukebox is all that you are.”

When I sent Chris Cester—who, with Nic, is a cowriter of most Jet songs—an Instagram message, I didn’t really expect a response. I did my best to explain that I was coming from a place of respect, even though I recognized it was a delicate subject.

“It’s not delicate,” Chris wrote back, “tbh the first time I saw it I laughed my ass off.”

Chris called me a few days later while he was getting his car washed and said he honestly didn’t know who Bridgers was when he saw her comment. He then looked her up and was unimpressed by her SNL performance, in which she broke a guitar. (The event was arranged with discreet pyrotechnics to go off when Bridgers struck a dummy PA; David Crosby called it “pathetic,” and Bridgers replied by calling him a “little bitch.”) “She’s got her thing,” Chris said, in a thick Aussie accent. “People seem to like it, I guess, if you’ve got a cardigan or something.”

Careful not to be perceived as speaking for the whole band, Chris explained that, after being featured in the iPod commercial, he felt like Jet had an Apple-shaped target on its back. He noted that it was a wonderful boon to have such immediate mainstream exposure—if anything rivaled the Pitchfork Effect in 2004, it was the iPod Effect—but brought up the cost as well. “That was still kind of a faux pas at that point,” he said, joking that, given the encouraging attitude about artists having their music in commercials these days, Jet could be called “trailblazers.” “Like any 22-year-old,” he said, describing himself when Get Born came out, “you’re looking outside for validation. I’m 42 now. Things have changed in that regard.”

Chris said he remembered the band thinking the Shine On review was funny but acknowledged that it might have initially bothered them “for like a week.” That the general feeling was that it was “bullshit,” “pretty snarky,” and “unfair.” Still, he insisted, he shook it off because you have to when you’re in that position: “You learn that pretty early on about being in the spotlight,” Chris said, “if you get really excited about people kissing your ass, you get really upset when people kick you in the balls.”

Shine On ended up becoming the last non-compilation album to receive a 0.0 from Pitchfork, and that’s likely because it was realized that the score was an unnecessarily low blow. “A lot of the records that we had already given the zero to,” Schreiber said, “in hindsight, they might have been awful records, but to say that they have absolutely no merit whatsoever is just probably false.” Kennedy described the zero for Jet as being “a pretty nakedly dirty grade.” “I guess even monkey piss has some value to it,” he said. “There’s, like, some potassium.”

The question of whether Pitchfork’s review was “fair” to Jet was something I had spent a decent amount of time thinking about. From a certain angle, the review feels less like a piece of music criticism and more like a Dada-ist joke on what music criticism even is. Or at the very least like a shitpost that was prophetic in its use of the visual, flippant language people would soon be employing en masse to post about art online. Squint, and it’s a masterpiece … of some kind. But it goes down in the stats sheet as an actual review—and in that sense, it wasn’t really fair to Jet.

In some sense, the review may not even be fair to Pitchfork, either. Amy Phillips, who was at the fabled lunch as a new employee—and would stay at Pitchfork for 18 years, eventually becoming executive editor, until she was caught in this year’s layoffs—described the review as “the lowest form of reacting to something.” “It’s just kind of like putting a middle finger up and moving on,” Phillips said. In terms of memorable Pitchfork pans, she’s partial to the carefully thought-out ones, like current reviews director Jeremy Larson’s more recent takedowns of Greta Van Fleet (score: 1.6) and Måneskin (2.0). Plagenhoef, similarly, feels that the Jet review unduly takes the focus away from all the great actual writing that’s been on the site over the years, and all he and others did to build Pitchfork into the editorial powerhouse that it became.

“We wanted to lead with quality,” Plagenhoef wrote, “to be trusted, to be thoughtful and mindful and a beacon to our users. Stunt reviews [like the Shine On review] felt closed off and limiting, like you were talking to members of a club to which I didn’t necessarily want to belong.”

What’s happened to Pitchfork since 2006 is easy to oversimplify. Conscious decisions were made to embrace the increased responsibility that came from popularity—and with that, the prankster spirit was eroded over time. “Watching that go sucked, for sure,” said Kennedy, who ended his second stint with Pitchfork in 2019. The editorial voice also became less aggressive and reactive, as well as more open to the critical value of pop and major-label music in all its forms. Most Pitchfork figures seem to agree that this was, by and large, a good and necessary evolution. (Unless you’re asking Chris Ott.) But simultaneous to any conscious internal evolution, outside market forces were pushing the entire music industry in a direction that publications had to adjust to.

“Social media and late capitalism,” said Plagenhoef, who left Pitchfork as editor in chief in 2011, “have each sucked up so much of the energy around cultural conversation for different reasons and in different ways to the detriment of not only critics but entire industries.” Kaskie, who left Pitchfork two years after Condé Nast purchased it in 2015, brought up the way that culture started to homogenize; how Jay-Z was turning up at Grizzly Bear shows and Bon Iver was featuring on Kanye West records. “Suddenly you’re trying to cover everything,” he said, “just so you can make sure you get everybody to pay attention to what you’re doing, and you lose focus.” He went on, “To see something getting bigger for the sake of scale you start to disconnect, and that seemed like a tension point that may have happened at Condé.”

Still, Pitchfork has remained the most powerful voice in music journalism, even if that voice is simply less powerful than it used to be due to forces largely outside its control. Which is why it was such a shock that Condé Nast didn’t see enough value to keep from implementing a red wedding. Pitchfork, once the heavyweight champ, got knocked in the teeth, and it’s staggering. But it’s not down yet.

“I think the important thing is to not lose sight of that,” Schreiber said, in reference to the fact that Pitchfork, which he left in 2019, remains a highly popular site. (A Condé Nast analytics employee stated in January that Pitchfork had the highest daily site visitors of any CN title; a CN representative confirmed this after publication.) “And to know that a lot of these layoffs are happening because some people at the top of these corporations are just not making the most informed decisions that they probably could be.” One bright spot after the layoffs, Schreiber said, was that many Pitchfork figures were back in touch again after years of drifting apart. “I do think there’s an opportunity for a lot of us right now,” he said. “Maybe there’s a lot of appetite for trying to figure out a way for us all to move forward collectively.”

As for Jet, they recently reunited and are continuing to do tour dates to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Get Born. Reflecting on the road he’s gone down with the band, Chris Cester doesn’t regret anything.

“This is the thing with Jet,” he said. “Each one of us individually are quite capable of doing something complicated that’s harder to decipher, wander off for seven minutes, and impress people. But none of that shit gets remembered. And it’s not so much about having hit songs but it is about finding that thing in your creativity where it’s going to be remembered. You don’t want to be a fucking footnote, you know what I mean? All artists strive for it, and none of them admit it.”

While I was working on this story, a friend sent me a video from a wedding he attended. It was the bride and groom’s first dance, and the song they had chosen was Jet’s “Look What You’ve Done,” from Get Born. The song, a surprisingly tasteful ballad, sounds fresh—it feels of its time and outside it, as well. I wouldn’t call it a detour in a creative cul-de-sac. More like a stretch down a peaceful highway at night.

“You sound like you’ve got your shit together,” Chris said to me, while we were talking about Shine On. “What did you think about the album when you heard it?”

I told him the truth, which was that Get Born was a formative record for my 13-year-old self when it came out and helped set me on a path of finding a broader musical world as a teenager. (Pitchfork, in turn, helped substantially with that process.) But partially because of the initial influence of Pitchfork’s review, I had only really listened to Shine On in recent months and thought it demonstrated admirable growth from Jet. I particularly like the song “Bring It on Back,” which sounds something like Spoon doing an Oasis cover. It is not a glass of monkey piss, by any stretch. “Looking back [on Shine On] after all this time,” Chris said, “I’m really proud.”

At one point, I decided to read through other prominent reviews of Shine On that came out in 2006. They may not have gotten the clicks that Pitchfork did—and they don’t make me laugh like that foul, foul chimp—but they were decidedly more measured, thoughtful, and, yes, fair. More than anything, the other reviews are just a useful reminder that there are additional opinions of Shine On worth considering besides Ray Suzuki’s.

One that stood out was written by Alexis Petridis in The Guardian (score: 3 out of 5), published a few days before Pitchfork’s review. Petridis isn’t over the moon about the record, but he’s honest about having found some charm in it, too. “Nobody is going to buy Shine On expecting intellectual enlightenment,” he wrote. “It’s trad-rock ordinaire, yet something lifts it out of the ordinary: its cheek, maybe, or its freewheeling vitality, or the occasional musical surprise it springs. Perhaps most appealingly, given the current inhibitions of mainstream rock, Shine On doesn’t appear to give a monkey’s.”

Nate Rogers is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Stereogum, and elsewhere.