Artist: Broken Bells

Album: Broken Bells

Reviewer: Sam Donsky

Cokemachineglow, 2010

Writing Disorders: Idea Fever, Jargon Palsy, Ambiguity Sickness








Stuffiest Phrase: “a perfectly bland distillation of the formula that I had long since recognized but never quite grasped”

Irony: “the sort of thing you almost wish would just hurry up and be ty”




As you may have noticed, I read a lot of awful music reviews from many different sources. Some produce greater heaps of junk than others though, and Cokemachineglow occupies its own space altogether. I’m still unsure whether the whole site’s a gag or serious.  From what I’ve tolerated long enough to read, it seems like a place where writers burn time before becoming serial killers. I wouldn’t be surprised if Brent DiCrescenzo himself taught many of the writers how to wank.

Sam, I think you went with the wrong title on your thousand-word turd here. “Record Review: Broken Bells” doesn’t accurately portray most of the content of your article. First off, you didn’t even mention the band’s name over the course of 8 bloated paragraphs, and it took you nearly 400 words to drop the album title. What was so important that pushed those useful details to the back burner? Well, let’s take a look:

“Infinity will have to eat itself and then regenerate with a third arm and then lift weights with those three arms continuously until the sun collapses before there can exist a quantity commensurate with how much I used to love iTunes Celebrity Playlist”

“I used to ing love iTunes Celebrity Playlist”

“if you had asked me six months ago to name the definitive commonality on the iTunes celeb circuit, I would have said it’s a tie”

Sam, if it takes you three paragraphs to tenuously connect one thing to another, you might want to go back to the drawing board. I honestly had no clue where you were going with that “introduction” until I reread the third paragraph and finally noticed an angle. So really the whole point of that stupid parade of half sentences was to eventually name two songs by The Shins and Gnarls Barkley? Maybe you could have reached that staggering insight in one sentence instead of 23. Your intro was like an hour-long Ovaltine joke.

My eyes rolled so far back in my head I could see my brain, but I think I’m okay to continue into the body of the review. I’m ready to be dazzled, Sam. Hit me with your best shot. Fire away.

“Almost everything sags into the same, slow-grooved alterna-template, a least common denominator of half-hooks and atmosphere and faux-space-age slickness”

America’s universities really need to start giving out failing grades in English courses if only to prevent that kind of nonsense from escaping. Let’s move past your hyphen disorder for a moment so you can answer me one thing, Sam. What exactly is LEGIT “space-age slickness?”

Do you have a machine programmed to pull things out of your ass or do you still manage the old fashioned way? If there’s any template at work here, I’d say it’s you writing like every other music critic with little regard for an audience. Speaking of ass pulling…

“the triumph of essence over absence”

“new dope presented in the clothes of an old reputation”

“most certainly rep-able, it’s not ambiguous in the least”

Wow, does that vague BS come with fries? Even when you’re merciful enough to offer an explanation of these empty phrases, I still have no clue what you’re talking about. In the future, you might consider asking someone to edit down your work so it’s A) readable, B) interesting, and C) inconclusive proof of mental illness. Maybe you could ask these guys:





Sam, I did notice that you’re the recipient of a poetry prize, so maybe prose just isn’t your strong suit. After trudging through to the end of this abomination, I’m left with a burning question. Who actually reads this stuff besides me?

Tags: Ambiguity Sickness, Idea Fever, Jargon Palsy

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 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 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.

Tags: Ambiguity Sickness, Idea Fever, Jargon Palsy