Artist: W-H-I-T-E

Album: Sunna

Reviewer: Evan Burrows

Tiny Mix Tapes, 2010

Writing Disorders: Jargon Palsy, Infectious Punctuation, Toxic Tedium








Longest Sentence: 61 words

In Nomine Patris: “subject to all the laws and conditions its maker might design for it”




Evan, this review is so ridiculous it defies comprehension. First there’s your introduction – and I use that term loosely to describe the 300-word snooze fest where you explain all music as points on a line graph:

“Okay, start sucking on your Roswell-alien-shaped novelty water pipe: Imagine an axis where one pole is labeled ‘Structure’ and the other is labeled ‘Atmosphere,’ and every album ever made can be plotted along those axes according to the way in which the artist responsible negotiates these two categories of musical expression.”

Did you actually graph The Spice Girls and Limp Bizkit on your TI89 or is your abstract thought really limited to two dimensions of 7th grade math? I’m not even going to get into the shoddy logic of how “the construction or reconstruction of a world” could possibly be plotted on a simple X/Y axis because I’d only be encouraging this kind of sterile madness. If this is really what you do when you get baked, then you might want to stick to plotting simpler things like toilet paper or fruit. If weed’s got you playing pin the tail on the Cartesian plane with music, I just hope you do it alone.

After you ramble on like Ben Stein teaching Excel for another couple hundred words, you finally get around to mentioning the band:

“W-H-I-T-E’s starry-eyed debut full-length, Sunna, is the sort of album — in no short supply over the last three or four decades of popular music — that aims to attend to both ‘Atmosphere’ (what the accompanying one-sheet refers to as “experimental space sounds”) and ‘Structure’ (“pop melodies”) with an equal share of craft and attention.”

So all that tedious crap was leading up to the basic point that on this album, the band was trying to wed structure and atmosphere? Holy cow, that was certainly worth the lesson in charting function f(boring) = boring3 + 7boring.

That’s really what this review was: boring to the third power plus seven times boring. And make no mistake, Evan; it was entirely your fault. I can only speak for myself, but figure others might agree when I say your writing style can’t sustain interest in such a long, drawn-out form. And by drawn-out, I mean you wrote a 900-word review about how an album didn’t reach the upper right corner of a double axis graph. As far as your style’s concerned, here’s something to ponder. If one of your friends asked you what you thought of this album, what would you say to her? Would you say this?

“Standouts like “When We Were Young” and “Take Me out to Dinner” similarly benefit when Hanson exercises restraint in rationing his timbral ideas across the duration of each song, allowing them room to individually stretch their legs and really shine.”

Of course you wouldn’t. Your friend would be creeped out because nobody talks like that in conversation. I understand writing is different than speaking. There’s more freedom to deliberate, choose words, and expand ideas. But when writing becomes so divorced from communication, it’s just typing. Next time you type a review, read the entire thing out loud when you finish. It might tell you something.

Actually, let’s get a jump on things. Go ahead and read these out loud:

“a downright catchy, economical track that, through its developmental patience, reaches breathtaking heights while remaining texturally and melodically concise.”

“an ability to synthesize them in a way that compounds their respective energies through a tricky fusion”

First question: are you the least bit aware that your thoughts on art sound like an explanation of the Krebs cycle? Second: if so, why are you cool with that?

I’m going to wrap this up soon, Evan, but this next line of yours actually caught my interest – not because of any insight, but rather what I think you’re suggesting this musician should do:

“Nor do they sustain a listener’s interest when he shows his atmospheric hand too soon”

So you’re saying he should make sure he’s got a firm structure first? Oh, okay, I see what you’re getting at. Then maybe he can clasp his atmospheric hand around his structure, rhythmically moving it up and down the length of the structure. I think that would help to strengthen the structure – you know, slowly at first, then faster and faster. He shouldn’t concentrate too much on one part of the structure, though — maybe move the atmospheric hand down to the very bottom and play around there for a bit. It’s good to pay attention to the roots, you know? Yeah. Oh yeah. “Washes of towering, interstellar organ give way to bubbling” — Sorry, what happened?

You need time to find a new hobby, Evan, so let’s end with your closer.

“Although it’s certainly a well-worn, debut-record-review cliché to say so, it seems to be as apt here as it often is: What Sunna suggests for W-H-I-T-E’s future is the most exciting thing about it.”

Well, Evan, at least you can rest assured that you covered your ass in the wrong place. Toodles.