Artist: Taken by Trees

Album: East of Eden

Reviewer: Chris Molnar

Cokemachineglow, 2010

Writing Disorders: Idea Fever, Ambiguity Sickness, Jargon Palsy







Longest Sentence: 78 words

Stuffiest Phrase: “the disparate sonics within the artist’s oeuvre”



Chris, I’ve got people complaining I write too much about Pitchfork on a site named RipFork, so I’m going to rock the coke machine today instead. Don’t worry, it’s cool. I only just recently discovered the armpit you write for, but it’s already borne reliably rotten fruit to peel. I want to start off with this line you wrote:

“The songs benefit hugely from being brief and low-concept”

Chris, it’s funny you should mention that because brevity ain’t exactly written in your DNA. In the course of a 550-word review, you only wrote 13 sentences. That means you clocked an AVERAGE sentence length of 43 words. Maybe I lack the gene necessary to remember the subject when I finally hit the period 78 words later, but I don’t think I’m in the minority there. Let’s take a closer look at that monster:

“Somewhere likably between the full “world music” immersion of a band like A Hawk and a aw and the checking-off-signifiers-indie-pop of, say, Vampire Weekend (we snarl), Taken By Trees, Bergsman’s solo project, is able to focus on simple melodies and a comparably pristine sound quality rarely used for such tablas and South Asian guitar plucking (apart from New Age compilations), Bergsman’s appropriately breezy voice filling in cracks and making the whole come off as an incessantly relaxed affair.”

Now, I don’t want to wound your pride with these suggestions, just your Napoleon complex. Let’s start with the obvious. Couldn’t you have broken up that obscene block of text into two or three independent but related islands? Would that have killed whatever point you were trying to make? If so, might you have just eased off the ridiculous hyphenation or the useless parenthetical asides? What the hell is “checking-off-signifiers-indie-pop?” Wait, don’t even answer that. I’m too burned out from climbing your last K-2 to endure another giant explanation.

As a last resort, you still might have made your review readable by limiting your tendency to over-modify. Nearly every sentence is drenched with trapdoor adverb constructions to avoid making any firm points:

“East of Eden is a short, oddly satisfying album”

“Somewhere likably between”

“a kind of precarious and symbiotic balance”

Look dude, it’s not dirty to admit an album warmed your loins. You don’t have to have to cover up every like or dislike with a “kind of” or word ending in “-ly.” There are far worse things in the world than having some nincompoop get on your case for liking an album. Hell, if you actually played music, you’d run the risk of someone rating it a C- based on how “oddly satisfying” your music was to him.

The body of your review was bad enough, but nothing could have prepared me for your conclusion:

“Taken By Trees is too nebulous of a project to fit into any of these categories—personality-based for sure, but of a personality that makes an ethos out of curiosity, that’s dedicated to a kind of precarious and symbiotic balance without hiding behind or trying to harness unfamiliar sounds to a singer or band’s unstoppable sense of self.”

Holy God, man, can you check the air pressure in your head before it pops? If a reader has to draw a diagram of your insights in order to get past the first dash, you’re not doing a very good job. What was even the point? It’s not like your conclusion knocked buildings over with its power. In the end, you just provided a 40-word explanation for the phrase “personality-based.” Wow, someone call a seismologist, the needle just broke.

Chris, the next time you’re having a conversation, here’s something to think about. If you don’t feel the need to bore people into the mantle with giant stanzas out loud, why do you do it in writing? It might be hard to stomach at first, but awareness of your problem is the first step to any good recovery program.