A prod from Pitchfork can give a band a bounce

For most of the time since its launch in 1985, Spinmagazine has been a successful dedicated college rock magazine. The monthly US equivalent of the NMEis now, though, in a seemingly terminal decline and probably has been since the self-proclaimed chronicler of "all the music that rocks" put the very unrocky Beyoncé Knowles on its cover last year - and had a bunch of subscriptions cancelled in protest.

Ex- Spineditor Dave Itzkoff says the musical bankruptcy of the once totemic magazine can be put down to one word: Pitchfork. "Pitchfork helped put me out of a job," says Itzkoff, speaking about the now hugely influential website that can quite literally make or break a band. "As Pitchfork's influence has grown over the last few years, at Spinwe consulted the site as both a resource and a measuring stick - if it was lavishing attention on a new band, we at least had to ask ourselves why we weren't doing the same. By then our value as a trustworthy and consistent filter had waned."

Pitchfork's very precise reviewing system, in which an album is rated anywhere between 0.0 and perfect 10 - carries so much clout that record shops have been known to refuse to stock albums that have received bad reviews on the site. It was instrumental in bringing Arcade Fire to public attention.

One grateful beneficiary of Pitchfork's largesse is Kevin Barnes, the man behind the eccentric indie popsters Of Montreal. A type of psychedelic Bee Gees (if you will), Of Montreal have been releasing really good albums since the mid-1990s, but are only now beginning to come in from the margins thanks largely to the very positive Pitchfork review of their most recent album, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?. The review was a very high 8.7 (which is in Arcade Fire territory) and the album was lauded as being "astonishingly good, relentlessly catchy, ceaselessly fascinating and inexhaustibly replayable".

It's quite the done thing now for musicians to actively deplore what has become known as "The Pitchfork effect" - that sudden bounce a band get from a good review on the site - and even Arcade Fire themselves are beginning to get a bit sniffy about Pitchfork's role in breaking them to a global audience.

For Kevin Barnes, though, there's no such denial of what the review meant for him: "People say it's dangerous that such a website should wield so much power in the music industry, but when you look at it, what real chance does any band have - outside the Kelly Clarkson type of pop music acts - when it comes to getting a fair hearing. Pitchfork is totally independent, there are no controlling interests to satisfy and that can only be a good thing for musicians," he says. "The corporate media used to have such a stranglehold on what was published but thankfully that has all changed now. It's a very good thing that it exists. There is this misconception that it is just for indie bands, but it covers a whole range of music."

You can forgive Pitchfork (or "Bitchfork" as it known by sulky badly-reviewed bands) a lot for their championing of bands such as Of Montreal. You can forgive them their utter pomposity, their indier-than-thou snobbery and their "we're so fuckin' real, it hurts" attitude simply for continuing to rummage away down the back of the musical couch and finding the odd, neglected gem.

Things are certainly picking up for Of Montreal, and they have just been selected to headline a Nokia Trends Lab gig in Dublin next Wednesday. These are a series of worldwide multimedia shows which deal with established artists, breaking new bands and all the spaces in between. If you're going to the show, get along on time for the first support act, an intriguing new Dublin act called Pinky, an ex-choir boy who has sold his soul to rock'n'roll.

Of Montreal, Sergeant and Pinky play Crawdaddy, Harcourt Street, Wednesday, 8pm www.ofmontreal.net