Pitchfork stays true to it's ass-hattery roots

For the last year, I thought Pitchfork had turned a corner. Long despised for being indulgent to a fault, taking contrarian opinions for the hell of it and hyping up bands that no one really likes, Pitchofork has actually been more responible, balanced, and actually journalistic since gaining the spotlight however unmerited it may be. Sure enough, today they came out with a particular prickish move that reminded me of why I hated them in the first place.My issue is with their review of British Sea Power's The Decline of the British Sea Power would have gotten the much larger following they deserved. So what do they do with their latest album's review, a review people have been waiting for even since the album came out in the UK over a month ago? They give it the number "U.2" seemingly to show how much the band rips of of U2 (and in the minds of Stephen Deusner, 2000's era U2, which leads me to question whether Deusner actually listened to the album, or All that You Can't Leave Behind, for that matter).I'm fine with it getting a negative review. While it frustrates me that the review will probably be more influential than it should, I understand that's a part of the process. But to not even give it a number ranking is wrong on so many levels. For one, there's no way for anyone reading it to know how negative Deusner really thinks the album is. It's one thing to have a review consisting of a monkey drinking its own urine. At least that gets it's message across. But an entire legion of readers don't actually read the reviews, just the numbers attached to them. If you don't get that, you shouldn't be working at Pitchfork. It's bad enough that Pitchfork's rating system gets knocked for completely arbitrary. But even admitting that it's arbitrary, what it is supposed to accomplish is a ranking of some sort of universal scale of awesomeness. There's no place for commentary on the specific content in the rating system: if so, wouldn't U2 get a U.2 Rating? Would I'm From Barcelona get a 32 rating based on the number of band members they have?Pitchfork's come way too far to resort to this kind of bullshit again. It's one thing to do this coming out of Ryan Schreiber's basement, it's another when you've got an entire freaking movement at your fingertips. At least have the decency of giving a heavily-anticipated release a real number.