Artist: Kath Bloom

Album: Thin Thin Line

Reviewer: Stephen Deusner

Pitchfork, 2010

Writing Disorders: Idea Fever, Toxic Tedium







Longest Sentence: 53 words

Irony: “An earthy, unpretentious presence”



Stephen, you’re really freaking boring. You bore more than a wood borer through wood. And if you’ve ever split wood, you know those bugs can bore.

What exactly is your angle here? Appeal to people who enjoy their oatmeal both in the bowl and on the screen? Read some of this glop that forms a mere third of your introduction:

“So credit goes to Australian label Chapter Music for giving her a wider audience by reissuing some of her 80s albums, collecting her 90s output on the 2007 comp Finally, releasing a strong collection of new material called Terror, and organizing a tribute album featuring Devendra Banhart, Bill Callahan, the Dodos, and Mark Kozelek.”

You know, half of this wouldn’t be NEARLY as dense or tedious if you threw in a hyperlink once in a while or, God forbid, rationed your trivia. Look, back stories are cool. It’s nice to learn who artists are by virtue of what they’ve done and who’ve they’ve met. But when you lay it all out like crop tallies in a harvest almanac, it can quickly turn from interesting to “who gives a shit.”

Seriously, count up the number of nouns in that one sentence. You’ve got a record label, albums, reissues, and four different bands/artists – all in one sentence. Now I can only speak for my own prejudiced brain, but when I try to amble through a sentence brimming with that many things I’ve never heard of, I give up after a while.

Your review is heretically short by Pitchfork standards at a mere 500 words, but it’s still exponentially harder to get through. At least I can laugh at how Mark Richardson strokes himself silly in his 1200-word reviews of indie’s darlings or fume at how many hyphens Jess Harvell crams into one of her nauseating diatribes about a type of beat. Your writing is so boring it makes my nose itch. My brain actually concocts a physical distraction to break me away from your dull stanzas. That’s how bad it is.

Usually I can whip up some shtick about how someone’s metaphors sound stupid when taken literally or how dumb a string of adverbs looks when block quoted. In a bind, I can moan about how music lice shun the first person singular, or even throw mud when they rag on bands for not satisfying their narrow fetishes. But what can I even do here, Stephen? What can I even come up with in the long shadow of these clammy pickets?

“In conveying such emotional extremes, Bloom’s songwriting remains startlingly direct in its plainspoken poetry”

“Bloom sings a chorus that in other hands might be simply a bromide: “If we’re living, let’s get living.” In a sense, it’s her “Let’s Get It On”, a desperate plea to move beyond arguments and grudges and just be together.”

Truth is, I’ve got nothing this go-round, Stephen. You managed to bore me so stupid with your writing that I couldn’t even muster the energy to get my rocks off with another review. If you want to claim that as an honor, be my guest, but if you’ll excuse me, I gotta drop a Deusner.