Are Spoon the 'best' indie rock band of the past decade?

Apparently.

(Taken from The Guardian, 18 February 2010)

In December the US website Metacritic embarked on a campaign to find the "best music of the decade". The site, which aggregates all the reviews it can find of as many albums as possible, collated 10 years' worth of album reviews – around 7,000 – to find out which artists had been the most critically admired over the previous decade. Near the top of its chart were many of the names you might expect: Radiohead, the White Stripes, Tom Waits, Sigur Ros and Elbow. Bob Dylan nestles at a respectable No 15. But top of the list – the best reviewed group of the 2000s – were a little band from Austin, Texas, who take their name from a Can song, and have been going for 17 years.

Metacritic's announcement that Spoon's four-album run from 2001's "stellar" Girls Can't Tell to 2007's "well, stellar" Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga received the highest "accolades from music press and music fans for their impeccable songwriting and addictive songs" took everyone by surprise. Everyone, that is, except Spoon's singer-songwriter, 38-year-old Britt Daniel.

Read more here...

site aggregators - a couple of queries

I've a question for those good folk at Any Decent Music What happens if you want to source a site or magazine that doesn't actually give a star rating? Or have they immediately renounced all claims on critical authority because they've refused to reduce a highly subjective form of commentary to a numeral?

And do you think it's entirely  accurate to claim that The Sunday Times (for example) gave Joanna Newsom's a mark of 10 when it was, in fact, one writer.

What a weird way to judge music.

some links via Twitter

A taste-maker critic talks about being a taste-maker critic.

A vaguely meta-critic site.

Another relaunch for the most ill-thought out (and arrogantly put together) site on the web, MySpace.

Post-Napster myths of the Digital Age.

A column about pop music (with good reference to the way music is designed for consumption).

Bloganthropy.

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?

Meta-critic's end of year list from 2008.