>>64273892
High quality features. Mostly decent coverage of music. Great listings for shows.

Don't buy too much into the number rating system, just read the reviews and listen to the releases yourself. Also, their shilling of PC Music was pretty lame (Andrew Ryce is a goon), but that's died down.

>>64273970
Hate me if you like, but I'm typically into experimental electronic yet have come to find I like a lot of PC Music. (Before I've ever heard of RA, even.) Not the generic pop ballads, but I think the songs SOPHIE has a hand in are great dance tracks if you can accept the tweeny vocals as part of the experience.

So far I've agreed with pretty much all of their reviews and been pleasantly surprised by the recommendations I've tried so far.

>>64274190
Sophie is obviously talented when it comes to production, but I can't shake the sense of disingenuous intellectualism in all of the PC music work.
They benefit from all the pop tropes they want to analyze, but are somehow exempt from criticism. Hard is a cool tune though.

>>64275090
IMO people are attributing more of the "le post-ironic post-modern post-critique" thing to them than they've ever seen it themselves. I found this interview interesting:


http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/pc-music-are-for-real-a-g-cook-and-sophie-talk-twisted-pop-20150522

>Is there an element of satire to what you do? Are you making fun of pop music?

>Cook: No, I mean, I never set it up in that way. Everything can get interpreted as satire, in that very cynical way. But when we were doing Pop Cube with Red Bull, there was a really good moment quite early on where they wanted to scope out what we were like. Within the first minute, they could tell we weren't pranksters. We take it seriously. This is a big part of our lives. There's no way that satire could be at the core of anything.

>Sophie: Why would you bother investing so much of your time and energy in something that's basically laughing at something and not contributing anything? I don't think that's a worthwhile use of your time.

>Cook: One of our intentions is to try and push pop music and make it experimental and accessible, and put an interesting noise or personality as well as a good melody. Sometimes people just don't like how it sounds, and they're like "Oh, well, I can't justify this. It must be a joke." But we're really just trying to see if we can make something stick culturally.

I think it's fair to call some of the tracks a bit tongue in cheek but I don't see it as some sort of social or cultural critique. I think it's just some guys experimenting with bright sugary pop.

>>64275192
Ultimately, the only tunes I think stand on their own are the ones that offer something on the production side, so basically a few of the Sophie singles.

Older groups like Aqua seem to have most of that sounds covered imo. I guess what makes people so unhappy is the amount of coverage it got on RA as some sort of new movement, when as you said, it was just a couple of art school dudes making pop music.

>>64275636
Yeah, I can't really argue with that. I am personally interested in seeing what he does next, though.

>>64275717
If you like cheesy sounds in dance music, Traumprinz's DJ Metatron output really hits the spot (in case you havent checked it out).