Artist: Freedy Johnston
Album: Rain on the City
Reviewer: Joshua Klein
Writing Disorders: Jargon Palsy, Idea Fever
Stuffiest Phrase: “an instantly unfashionable anachronism”
Self-Gratification: “other acts would trade his ellipses for exclamation points”
I get the feeling your heart wasn’t in this review, Josh. It’s over 500 words long, but so much is just stuffy filler that whatever points you make about the album get lost. It reminds me of a chocolate Easter bunny – a whole lot of air under cheap sweets. Take your opening paragraph, for instance:
“Breakthrough and backlash: with some exceptions, the former eventually begets the latter, no matter how wrongly deserved. The transition is part of the natural balance of things, and many artists unable to circumvent and survive the inevitable have been left behind, wondering what went wrong.”
Josh, that is one of the stinkiest globs of BS I’ve come across in the new decade. What I think you’re getting at is this:
“There’s often backlash following breakthroughs, and many bands are unable to survive it.”
Introducing new low-fat BS! You get the same lightweight flavor, with 70% less empty verbiage! Come on. If you’re going to write hollow thoughts, Josh, you could at least be brief for our sake. Sadly, brevity doesn’t appear to be in your marrow:
“There are glimmers of jangly power-pop in songs such as “The Other Side of Love”, country in “Livin’ Too Close to the Rio Grande” and “It’s Gonna Come Back to You”, and soulful 70s AM rock in “The Devil Raises His Own”, but none of those are really what this record is, either. Or rather, they are, but the disc is deeper than its default templates.”
That sentence wasted almost as much space as your bloated opening. Once again, allow me to offer a humble rewrite:
“There’s jangly power-pop, country, and soulful ‘70s AM rock, but the disc runs deeper.”
You don’t need to pair an example with every genre you named, especially when those examples are all songs with long-ass titles. We’ll trust that there’s country music somewhere on the album. And what the hell was that schizoid bit about what the album is and isn’t? Make a decision and live with it. We don’t need your thought process mapped out in full schematic. And Jesus, man, do you realize how neutered you make music sound when you write stuff like “default templates?” You’re writing about art, not WordPress features.
When you’re not inflating sentences to burn space, you’re building them on weird structures:
“That much anyone aware of Johnston’s past highpoints probably could have predicted.”
Josh, when you have a clear path to walk from point A to point B, why do you insist on tunneling underground with a spoon? That sentence reads like you translated it directly from Latin without rearranging the word order accordingly. When Microsoft Word underlines a phrase in green with the suggestion “fragment (consider revising),” it’s a good indication that you’re not making a point as clearly as you could be.
Most of it just made me roll my eyes, but there were other parts of your review that just baffled the hell out of me:
“As a practiced journeyman, Johnston remains first and foremost an observant and tuneful chronicler of odd characters”
I hear journeyman Johnston is also an accomplished shoemaker hoping to reach master status by wowing the guild with his keen grasp of leather and awl. I smell BS…
“His take on bossa nova, for example, “The Kind of Love We’re In”, impressively skirts light rock kitsch, and the song is better minus the knowing wink that lesser writers might have leaned on for support.”
Wow, so many questions spring to mind. How does someone impressively skirt light rock kitsch? How does someone just BARELY skirt light rock kitsch? How do writers lean on winks? What the hell are you talking about?
As if this airheaded review wasn’t lazy enough, you tacked on the laziest rating possible: the ever-popular 6.7. If you’re going to jerk off in words sometime again in the future, Josh, you might want to keep it under 400. Otherwise the stains show. Now go clean yourself up.
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#1 by Moeez on July 27, 2010 - 6:42 am
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Very funny review, but a question still lingers: How DOES one “skirt light rock kitsch” (tongue-twister)?
#2 by Matt Wendus on July 27, 2010 - 11:43 am
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I think a more pressing concern is how to up-skirt light rock kitsch.
#3 by Austin on August 2, 2010 - 3:21 pm
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I always remember Mr. Klein from the horrible opening first paragraph of his review of Crowded House’s Time on Earth:
“Last spring at Coachella, the reunited Crowded House was given the thankless task of preceding the reunited Rage Against the Machine on the very same stage. Needless to say, reports were mixed as to how well the crowd, swelled by Rage fans staking out an early spot during Crowded House’s set, responded to the band’s comeback. But despite the antipodean group’s intermittent success around the globe, there’s never been a clear place for a songwriter like Neil Finn.”
Besides sounding like he doesn’t really know much about Crowded House, this has always smacked me as a case of him really wanting to talk about Coachella and not Crowded House.
~Austin