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Artist: Jodis

Album: Secret House

Reviewer: Bryan Reed

Tiny Mix Tapes, 2009

Writing Disorders: Purple Hemorrhage

Most Emo Phrase: “has only himself and the gently, repetitively, and monotonously billowing dust at his feet to talk to”

Bryan, you have a slew of metaphors in this review that could use some work. Here’s a good example:

“Isis’ ability to expand chest cavities with a masterful handle on dynamics is dulled to a subtly varied whisper”

I don’t get it. Isis has an ability to make people inhale? I’m fairly certain that tends to happen several times a minute regardless of the music in the room. Maybe Isis also has the ability to blink eyes. Oh, but you’re not done with your metaphor:

“Khanate’s fearsome, chest-crushing dirges become, here, something less like impending death and more like an afternoon nap.”

I guess I just don’t get the whole chest metaphor. I reckon it has something to do with emotion, since the heart is in the chest, but I can’t be sure. But if that’s what you meant, I’m sure you would have just written “heart-crushing.” Whatever you meant, it still seems dumb to think that a band’s music pulverizes ribs. That would make for an interesting warning label at Wal Mart.

Like many album reviews I comb through on a daily basis, yours is difficult to read. It’s hard to sift through it because you cram sentences to the brim with information that you don’t really need and metaphors that you could do without. Case in point:

“Plotkin’s bass and Wyskida’s sparse drumming drive the album”

Bryan, you don’t have to name the band members when it’s fairly obvious they’re playing their respective instruments. And for the reader’s sake, it’s best that you don’t gum up sentences with names as cumbersome as those. You could have just written this:

“the bass and sparse drumming drive the album.”

If you feel like you’re not giving enough credit to the artists without naming them, feel consoled that they probably don’t want much credit anyway in a review that rips their album.

Let’s go back to your metaphors, because I still have issues with a bunch of them.

“This record is a desert, and Turner, marooned within it, has only himself and the gently, repetitively, and monotonously billowing dust at his feet to talk to. This is everything wrong with drone (monochromatic epics with no forward movement), doom (mind-numbing repetition with no hypnotic payoff), and post-metal (tepid stewing in a false-dynamic haze).”

So…everything wrong with three genres of music has to do with a metaphor about a desert that you made up? I personally thought that everything wrong with drone, doom, and post-metal had to do with Turner floating on a vast ocean, with the waves lapping the side of his raft. Guess I got the biome wrong. Damn.

And then there’s this:

“Jodis is merely layering muted, washed-out colors”

I’m pretty sure that as a band of musicians, Jodi is layering sounds, not colors. Unless you’re one of a handful of people on Earth who hear in colors, Bryan, you could benefit from sticking to ear metaphors. Or you could write this:

“Jodis is merely layering muted, washed-out sounds like dull colors on a canvas.”

Yep, it still sounds awful, but at least you qualify knowledge that music is made of vibrations, not pigment.

There’s a bunch more I could bite at in this review, but I’ll just tackle one of your concluding sentences:

“When slow, heavy music succeeds, it succeeds for tonal shifts, modal developments, and a constant forward motion”

Whoa, check out Bryan Reed here. He’s returned from his treacherous quest bearing the secret to successful metal. While he’s sitting on that knowledge instead of using it to make his own music, I’ll offer my own two cents. I say a big part of any kind of music succeeding is the ability to please enough amateur critics. And that’s a pretty crappy way to choose the winners and losers.