Album: Forgiveness Rock Record

Reviewer: Calum Marsh

Cokemachineglow, 2010

Writing Disorders: Scorn Disease, Idea Fever








Most Emo Phrase: “a sense of gravity that it doesn’t really carry on its own”

Irony: “insisted on inflation and indulgence so stubbornly”




Calum, I like your name. I can address you as an Amish man, rash ointment, or sexual plague without even saying so. Versatile.

Let me use a phrase so many of you do. To be fair, I was two snaps away from thumbing someone else’s 1,700 word review. She had a university spoon so far up her bottom, she actually footnoted her opinion of a Hole album. Even if you didn’t win that brown ribbon in bare knuckle fluffing, Calum, you still grabbed an honorable mention in the smug tug. Down this nine mile review, you laid down points an editor could have fit in fortune cookies.

Smear an art pucker tight as yours over too much space and it starts stinking quick. Take a whiff, Calum. You dealt it, so it’s only fair you smell it. These are your first words:

“That’s a contentious little rating perched up above this text…”

So right out of the gate — first move — you shout about treating music like we measure consumer confidence or oil life in modern cars. Percentages. I’m intrigued. Tell me more.

“(it’s)…the lowest this record has received from a professional criticism outlet by Metacritic’s count, and so let’s just acknowledge upfront that the position I’m defending in this review is an unpopular one.”

Dude, what is this? You tooting your own horn? That a horn I hear? What kind of man demands acknowledgment with his first sentence? Calum the Magnificent? I ain’t acknowledging figs, you fop.

And clear me on something here, son. We talking the same Cokemachineglow that serves 5 page reviews in point-11 font…on one goddamn page? What kind of meal is that? A hard to read meal is what it sounds like. This the same “professional” site that couldn’t get one of six editors to blot your pee stain down to maybe a thousand words? I don’t know what’s worse, Calum: refusing to whittle something that long, or actually editing down TO that length.

What was so brilliant you couldn’t spare one 95-word sentence in the explanation? You spent a third of the review braying like a mad ass about people only liking this album because it’s by Broken Social Scene. Same could be said about any album by any band if you’re cynical enough to see it. Thank God it only took around 900 words for you to finally OD on U2 demerits and your love for Ryan Dombal. Then I was lucky enough to spy a couple mentions of the album under “Record Review” in your heading:

“Forgiveness Rock Record doesn’t provide anything interesting to talk about in and of itself”

Right, and your first six paragraphs were diamonds in the dung. I’m sure right now Pulitzer’s applauding your decision to smother the only two songs mentioned under half a paragraph devoted to defining “pop.” You name more songs from previous BSS albums than the one you’re supposed to be reviewing. If that’s not putting corn in the hole, I don’t know what is. And as if rewriting the Magna Carta about an album wasn’t bad enough, you berate a battalion-sized Canadian indie band for not being minimal enough:

“musicians who continue to prove themselves unable to let a good idea breathe”

Now while you’re munching leafy greens to boost the irony in your blood, I’ll say this, Calum. Regrettably, I couldn’t locate your submission to “Canada’s Sex-Enthusiasts’ Journal” so alas I couldn’t learn the right way to let a good idea breathe. If breathing means writing something longer than George Clooney’s eulogy, I’m glad the whole world isn’t hooked on hyperventilating. Next time you’re itching to spread Calum, just skip to the infection.

I’m late for work.

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 shitty”




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 dead 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 fucking 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 infectious punctuation 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?

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.

Album: Odd Blood

Reviewer: Conrad Amenta

Cokemachineglow, 2010

Writing Disorders: Scorn Disease, Idea Fever, Jargon Palsy

Longest Sentence: 68 words

Stuffiest Phrase: “a well attuned if hypertrophied sense of style”

Unintended Irony: “it can’t help but come across as unintentionally absurd”




A week after discovering your existence, Conrad, I’m still struggling to understand why you write the way you do. Read this sentence:

“Worse, this desperate paternalism is exploded sonically to nth realms of crass pretension, cramming every last space with splurges of computer-generated excess that mostly belie a lack of vision or forethought; the band are, in the parlance of staidly academic critics, wanking.”

I’m sure if I point to your own pretension, excess, and paternalism coursing through that sentence and the whole review, you’ll glibly state that it was all for the irony. Instead of going down that road, I’ll add a little of my own irony to the pot. You see, the most fascinating thing I unearthed about you is that you actually play an instrument. I’m assuming you’re Conrad Amenta, drummer for the Canadian band Books on Books. If so, you’ve got skill behind a drum set. I listened to the tracks up on MySpace. What I can’t understand is what drives a competent musician to vomit such scurrilous bile onto other artists’ work. Here’s a snapshot of the puke in case you forgot:

“That record was mostly shitty and had absolutely no sense of scope or direction”

“see also: their stupid band name”

“the unremitting bullshit of boneheaded opening track”

“the excremental wave of this band’s approach to songwriting”

“An overcooked vanity piece from a band inflated by praise”

While I admit that there’s a rich history of performers dissing others in interviews, I can’t say that I’ve come across many 1,000 word rants written by musicians against their peers. Then again, I suppose anything is possible in the creative Mecca of the Ottawa rock scene. Drumsticks or not, you write like a prick. And you’re not even brief about it. You write like a prick incapable of editing his thoughts down to something less than “entirely superfluous.” Examples?

“the heart-warming entropy of a self-truncating simplicity”

“a nebulous referent and yet all-important to getting these artist’s appeal”

Thankfully you only used the word “quasi” twice in the course of this review, which helped to whittle away the girth on sentences already fat on modifiers. Speaking of sentences, I’m trying to steer my criticism away from people’s grammar and spelling, but for someone berating a band so savagely, I’ll make an exception. You don’t exactly have a firm handle on your editing finger.

“true progression comes in the form is seamless integration”

“The same mentality is presented her without irony, used a vehicle for something Meaningful”

In the future if you’re so close to deadline that you can’t spare even one reread, you might consider writing less. While I’m sure some readers would be absolutely crushed if you put a cap on your thoughts about why a band’s latest release deserves an F+, you might actually attract some replacements who value readability.

If you explore RipFork, you might notice that I have a thing for the phrase “to be fair.” You know, when a critic donkey punches a band, and then gives it a pat on the back in the same sentence? To my delight, you continued the trend of so many others:

“That record was mostly shitty and had absolutely no sense of scope or direction, but, to be fair, there were some very melodic and occasionally addictive tunes.”

To be fair, huh? Well, to be fair, Conrad, I’ve included a video of your band so that folks can see what YeaSayer’s up against. Sexy.

ATM Angel

Books On Books | MySpace Music Videos

Album: Journal of Ardency

Reviewer: Conrad Amenta

Cokemachineglow, 2010

Writing Disorders: Scorn Disease

Longest Sentence: 61 words

Most Emo Phrase: “It’s just nothing to get excited about.”

Most Sterile Phrase: “a chug that builds clumsily and is appended mechanically to an otherwise important contribution to the EP’s consistency”

I was apprehensive writing about anything produced for Cokemachineglow. I’m still half expecting Conrad to email me and reveal that the site is the musical equivalent of the Onion and that I’m a moron for actually taking it seriously. The writing on the site is such a caricature of bad music writing that the people who churn it out either have no self awareness or are great liars. Either way, I’ll take a stab at it.

Conrad, you start your review with a series of fat phrases fenced in by commas and semicolons. I’m still fighting to understand what points you were trying to make under your leaden language, but I could at least detect the scorn you harbor for this band and others. After a string of grouchiness and a botany metaphor to cap off your barely comprehensible opening, you write this.

“None of this is entirely fair”

So the only reason you wrote that hideous opening paragraph was to kick a band (and 3 others) in the left ball as a way of demonstrating your benevolence by sparing the right one? If your review does anything besides typify Sarah Palin’s elitist liberal America, it demonstrates the fungus at the heart of music writing: ass-covering. You fling insults at this band and its music and on the other side of the period, pad it with praise. I don’t have enough primary source evidence to back this up, but I’m still going to say that you do it as an insurance policy. Just in case someone takes issue with your opinions for some other reason than making fun of your writing, you can quickly retort with evidence that you supported the contrary view. Let me fling a few examples your way:

“derivative of those bands who themselves derive from New Order, Class Actress, and other bands of their (admittedly stylish, achingly cool) ilk”

“the band’s hoary predictability, its cliché key tones—which, oversaturated in the mix, getting their retro all over the damn place, could have been the band’s defining feature—are suitably offset by Harper’s undeniable presence”

“simple emulation, no matter how comprehensive, is not abhorrent. It’s just nothing to get excited about.”

So, on the off chance somebody takes issue with you calling the band’s tones cliché, you can always fire back that they’re suitably offset by Harper’s undeniable presence. Score one for you. Or maybe my theory is complete bunk and you’re just a dick. Maybe both?

In the end, the only reason for your endless bitching seems to be that this band and others sound like New Order:

“Or the song snippet “Let Me Take You Out,” which, in addition to being the band’s one attempt at a traditional band setup (i.e. bass, guitar), is so plagiaristic of New Order as to be immediately disposable”

“Less wholly derivative of New Order than derivative of those bands who themselves derive from New Order”

“one catches oneself wondering, out of all of the bands doing this, if there’s an effort underway to capture what essential and contextual adventurism made New Order so enduring”

Maybe Class Actress has never listened to New Order. Maybe music has reached a point where bands play music that SOUNDS like other bands’ without even intending it.  A fair amount of time has elapsed since a guitar was first plugged into a socket, Conrad. And if your grounds for ragging on a band is that they sound like another that first popped up 30 years ago, then you’re a bloody idiot. It’s hard to be a pioneer when 99% of the world has a name on it, which is why it’s pretty stupid to judge bands by 1980 standards in the first place.

I’ll end on a rare bit of nonsense that doesn’t mention Joy Division 2.0:

“If Class Actress’ full length maintains a similar ratio of hits to misses, they’ll have little to worry about”

Especially since the misses were classified by a dude who wrote the phrase “aesthetic echolalia.” Keep writing, Conrad, even if you mean it as a joke. I’ll still get something out of it.