TV on the Radio and Portishead Battle It Out for Album of the Year

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Perhaps you aren’t aware of it, but deep in the trenches of music criticism, there’s a war being fought. With only a month and a half left in 2008, nerds around the world will soon be forced to choose an Album of the Year, and there are two major contenders: Portishead’s Third, an utterly bleak comeback album that makes the band’s earlier work look like High School Musical, and TV on the Radio’s Dear Science, a step forward for a band of Gloomy Gusses who suddenly seem almost optimistic. In the interest of helping music critics and music-critic-wannabes, here’s a helpful graph comparing different aspects of the two albums.

mojo-chart-portisheadvstvotr.jpg

Result: 7-7 TIE! See why this is hard?

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Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

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