Artist: Hadouken!

Album: For the Masses

Reviewer: Ian Roullier

MusicOMH, 2010

Writing Disorders: Detachment Syndrome, Scorn Disease







Irony: “it should at least be joyful, unpretentious fun”




Ian, let me preface this by saying I thoroughly enjoyed picking over this review. And I want to thank you for all your online self-promotion. It really helps me to poke fun at a music critic when he’s written lengthy autobiographical tracts on several sites and runs a website bearing his own name. To show my gratitude before we begin, I’m going to give my audience a little reading aid. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine the species of human who writes such self-absorbed crap about musicians, so here’s a photo to place a face with the work.

Now, let’s begin. You didn’t really care for this album – I gathered that much from the empty rating circles. But let’s see if we can uncover a self-professed didgeridoo player’s motivation for hammering a band with boundless enthusiasm:

“Well, sometimes restraint and reason must be eschewed in a fit of seething rage. After hearing this latest set from Leeds-born London-based ‘dance-punk’ outfit, Hadouken!, feathers need to be spat.”

Or you could have just sent the album back to your editor and politely declined to write about it instead of throwing a word conniption. You were seriously thrown into a “seething rage” after listening to an album? Wow, I wouldn’t want to be a waitress who fudges your lunch order. Instead of a tip, I might get a frantic diatribe scrawled on napkins about my place in the sorry state of the food service industry.

Even though it’s omnipresent, I’m not even sure where your QWERTY rage is being directed half the time. At face value, this review seems to be more about your intense hatred of teenagers than your thoughts on the album.

“one amorphous clod of flaky, pubescent nothingness.”

“angst-ridden exuberance is all very exciting, but ultimately it’s a fruitless hormonal outburst”

“sounds like a bunch of teenagers screaming at themselves in the mirror in between squeezing their spots and wondering why nobody’s tweeted them for the past 18 seconds”

“they come across as snotty adolescents with an emotional range more limited than that of Paris Hilton”

Jesus man, I know it must be awkward being the only 33-year-old in the club, but you were a teenager at some point too. And just because most high schoolers listen to something other than “Jean Michel Jarre’s Franco-techno,” it doesn’t mean they deserve the ire of an older man’s tightly puckered hindsight.

While we’re on the subject of scrunched assholes, I loved this:

“Naming individual tracks and pinpointing their flaws is a foregone luxury”

Or maybe it’s something that men of a certain hue and a certain build have a pathological obsession with doing. I’m sure if pointing out flaws in individual tracks becomes an Olympic event, you’ll propel the UK to gold and glory, Ian. I for one was saddened that this record was “one amorphous clod” – an arena unfit to showcase your true prowess in that underground sport.

Speaking of pathological, if music criticism was a mental illness, you’ve got ample symptoms for a diagnosis. The ridiculous hyphenation…

“their drum-and-bass-castrated-for-mass-consumption sound”

The stupid metaphors…

“it’s about as hard as a knob of butter in a blast furnace”

The overreliance on adverbs…

“fantastically, stunningly groundbreaking”

The patronizing tone…

“everyone with half a brain sits and sniggers”

Capping it all off is your severe aversion to the capital “I” except when writing your own name. I’m still struggling to unravel why so many music critics lack the ability, but I think I understand why you’re so loath to write in the first person. Here’s something you wrote in your confusing, two-paragraph introduction before mentioning the band:

“Surely it’s a journalist’s duty to report back the truth”

By “truth,” I assume you mean your opinion about a purely subjective creation. Don’t get me wrong – I do cower in your gravitas.  You’ve written front-page articles on BOTH the Islington Gazette AND the Tottenham & Wood Green Journal, but in the land of subjective experience, you’re just one seven billionth. Use the first person, wuss.

I’m going to close on your opening here, Ian, because it’s still baffling. I don’t know if it was meant to be ironic or if you really have no self-awareness when it comes to writing.

“Some hacks feel the need to proclaim their love or lay into a band merely because they want to form an extreme black/white opinion that they can then spout in a review, feeling it injects some kind of ‘personality’ into their prose.”

For all your effort, Ian, you don’t really stand out from that crowd.