Album: As Good as Gone

Reviewer: Jared Bier

Tiny Mix Tapes, 2010

Writing Disorders: Jargon Palsy, Ambiguity Sickness








Irony: “for the sake of convenience”

Rise of the Machines: “the album — a distinctively aggregate entity”




Jared, back when I was a music louse, I used to write reviews like yours here — maybe not as hard to read, but just as vague and pointless. Judging from the vapid copy, I’m guessing you weren’t too thrilled about reviewing this Nudge album. Maybe you plucked it off a thin list surrounded by screamo albums. Maybe your editor cleared the backlog onto you. Maybe you burned the week procrastinating. I don’t know. If it’s any consolation, I reckon most critics would have forced the same four paragraphs of airy jargon too. It’s easier than admitting you have nothing to say.

This whole review could have been about three sentences long, but you padded it fluffy enough to nap.  I nearly did after reading stuff like this:

“With some genealogical backtracking, one could probably put together a rather convincing argument suggesting common antecedents and, thus, the common qualities shared by these aforementioned genres, but the album skitters about too often to reveal the connections.”

Jared, I’m gonna let the lard speak for itself because that ridiculous sentence got me thinking of something else. Sometimes I wonder what critics would sound like if they actually sat down with a band to criticize them mouth to ear. I reckon you’d probably just clutch your knees and mumble praise, but based on your writing, anything’s possible:

Jared: Hi guys, this was a solid 50% effort, but next time you might want to skitter less. I think it would help weirdos like me better ascertain connections between common antecedents after a good genealogical backtracking.

I really hope Matt LeMay is the only outcast in a world where critics confine their jargon to the internet. If you really blow stuff like that past your lips in conversation, I’d recommend drugs.

It probably wouldn’t hurt. You’re not the clearest cat in the alley, Jared, and it’s your own fault. Whatever miniscule points you make get buried under all the clutter heaped on top. Read this:

“Nudge’s isn’t by any means a brand that thwarts all stylistic categorization”

Now read this alternative:

“Nudge’s style doesn’t thwart categorization.”

Ahhhh…Allegra.  Want another example? Good, because I’m giving it:

“And for every such triumph, Nudge roll around to throw a monkey wrench into the whole business of tidying up”

Jared, I’m assuming the most important part of that sentence is the monkey wrench throw.  So why did you need to say Nudge rolled around to throw it?  Is it imperative to specify they didn’t sneak up, bellyflop in, or shuffle over? When you’re writing about a band with a common verb for a name, it’s maybe not a good idea to follow it with two verbs.

It’s disappointing to see you on RipFork again for mostly the same reasons — jargon, tedium, ambiguity.  Your reviews make listening to music sound like scrubbing limescale, but for what? What’s the payoff? After clogging a short review with all that piffle, you concluded As Good As Gone “lacks…unity.”  Whoa, call the fire department to douse those flames. Insight alert.

Let’s wrap things up, Jared. I’d like to spit out your cotton ball so I can go earn money. I think one of your criticisms aimed at the band can help illustrate a cure for your own bad writing:

“would have benefited from a few more pieces serving to fill in the gaps.”

Considering the gaps in this review, you might want to look in the mirror, kid.

Album: /\/\/\Y/\

Reviewer: Jonathan Dean

Tiny Mix Tapes, 2010

Writing Disorders: Idea Fever, Jargon Palsy, Toxic Tedium








Review Length: 1,184 words

Irony: “attempting to mask its own vacuity by trading on the readymades of authenticity”




Being an editor for Tiny Mix Tapes must be the easiest job in the world. I’d been suspicious all along, but this latest glob of gristle really drove it home. Y’all work weekends doing nothing or is it strictly 9-5? I’d be amazed if you clowns even check the band name before publishing a review. I guess it all looks the same on a résumé.

Even though a fourth grader could have edited this stinker better than “Jay” in the editing department, you’re the one who wrote it, Jon. Blame’s on your shoulders. How much longer did you spend writing this junk than listening to the album? I don’t get the impression you burned many of those hard hours editing, focusing arguments, or choosing words judiciously. When you write for a zine with D-Team quality assurance, responsibility begins with you. You really dropped the ball.

Jon, bear in mind Tiny Mix Tapes does nothing to jazz up text. No pictures, barely any links – just paragraph after boring paragraph of word junk. You were already one of the most long-winded critics I’d encountered when I first featured you, and you didn’t take your foot off the pedal this time. When the body of your review leaves sidebar elements in the dust, it’s usually a good indication you should wind things down.

So many sentences were ripe for picking, but here’s a slice off your first paragraph to start:

“Because of her willful and calculated aestheticization of the subaltern — third-world poverty, radical politics, terrorism, and guerilla warfare — her critics have consistently sought to derive a coherent politics from M.I.A.’s postmodern dance pop.”

I’ve got a lot here, Jon, so I’ll break it down piecemeal. I want you to start by thinking of the words “willful” and “calculated.”  Something calculated is willful by definition, wouldn’t you say? You could have plucked two feathers off this fat chicken by omitting the redundant one. A few hundred more and you might have had a hot meal instead of a feathery bowel movement. Next!

“derive a coherent politics”

I’m sure folks will rush to your defense on this one, but I’ve never heard a dude say he’s going to run for office because of a politics. That sounds weird. I just figured it was a typo until I caught “an ethics” en route to “a politics” once again in the last paragraph. Maybe I just don’t have a chops for pairing plural nouns with singular indefinite articles, but I still think it’s needlessly confusing. Next!

“aestheticization of the subaltern”

Jon, if that’s even a word, it shouldn’t be. Forget about belting it three times fast – try saying “aestheticization” once out loud. Just once…try it. Since you used some form of the word “aesthetic” six times in this review, you really could have left that clunker home. Instead, you dropped the same deuce in your closing paragraph with two other silly words ending in –ation.

“deterritorializations”

“valorization”

Jon, has it ever crossed your mind that maybe music (or writing) isn’t best served by such retarded shop talk? If you’re going to make up words to explain how a girl didn’t lick your balls the right way, try keeping them under 21 letters.

I know, I know. Brevity’s not your thing. I mean, how could it be? A dude who carped on this album for “lurid didacticism” and “telling rather than showing” couldn’t possibly sink to such an uncouth level of understanding. Well bravo, Jon. In the salmon run to bash this album in the most roundabout way, you definitely edged ahead of your peers. It never ceases to amaze me when I see music critics ream artists for sub-par writing…with sub-par writing. Here’s one of my favorite bits:

“The Message” emphasizes the hyper-stimulation and over-connectedness of post-smartphone reality in a particularly clumsy, ham-fisted way”

Oh, but writing four hyphenated compounds in 20 words is graceful, Jon? And aren’t we still IN the smartphone reality? No one calls the invasion of Poland a “postwar” event or Full House a “post-television” show. That’s dumb.

I could bury your essay in red ink all night long, but I think the worst part is the way you constructed it. I feel like a broken record bitching about music lice never using the word “I,” but this time it just got completely out of hand. Way I see it, the only thing worse than writing absolute statements in the 3rd person about an album is making your narrator unsure of himself:

“it cannot help but seem”

“it seems an irresistible temptation”

“seemingly formulated to frustrate”

“seems to fall apart by design”

“seems paradoxically to emerge”

Jon, dropping “seems” that much in an album review written like a definitive treatise just gives the impression you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. And isn’t that the whole point of omitting yourself from your own opinion? To sound like you know what you’re talking about? Like a journalist? Well, kudos to you for giving the media an even worse reputation. But hey, at least it’s not truffle fries.

Album: Topp Stemning På Lokal Bar

Reviewer: Jakob Dorof

Tiny Mix Tapes, 2010

Writing Disorders: Jargon Palsy, Infectious Punctuation, Idea Fever








Stuffiest Phrase: “a lovely cut of starlit nu-soul, enhanced by flashes of Wilsonian counterpoint”

Hyphen Foul: “keys-as-cicada-swarm”




Jakob, been a few months since we last brushed words. Hope you enjoyed the time. Congrats on getting your reviews under the ten century mark, but you’re still throwing the same crap on a smaller bun.

Your writing’s awful as it was in January because you don’t edit. I trudged through, but I don’t read music reviews like most folks. I paste sentences into Word docs so I can study them. That’s how I roll. Riding bareback through this junk’s enough to chill a man’s balls. Take this heap a words:

“It’s even more the case for a band to do so not as a duo-plus-volunteer beat machine (à la colleagues like Y.A.C.H.T. and jj), but to split the meager makings among five or six real, hungry musician-bodies (ones with audibly expensive keyboard habits, to boot).”

Jakob, you ever seen “Clean House?” This black woman shouts at people for holding onto too much crap. I’ll wear her pants for you again, but one of these days I want you rocking those hips and sorting your own sentences. First things first:

“to do so not as a”

Teachable moment here, Jakob. Strings of tiny words like those tell internet brains to skip ahead. And what’s ahead? Two hyphens. If Margret’s gotta stand three feet back just to read your lines, she’s not gonna give you the blue ribbon. I can’t picture most readers hopping word hurdles either just to learn about a band they can type into Grooveshark. And come on…four parentheses in one sentence? Curves are for women, Jakob.

Let’s move onto the next glob a words, eh?

“Generally speaking, the eight tracks/38 minutes of the album proper consist of groove-heavy, synth-poppin’ workouts that could have well been produced by James Murphy (though they ain’t), and make for topp stemning (a “great vibe”) in the gym, the car, and maybe even the local bar, as advertised on the tin.”

Call me nuts, but maybe a 50-word explanation jumps orbit on generally speaking. When I speak generally, I drop like, “That was cool,” or “She’s hot.” You know, general stuff. Try it sometime. At least you whittled down a character of space with “ain’t” in there. If your idea of relaxing the pace is writing like Casey Kasem every 20 words, you’re way too tense. Try Anusara.

I want to come back to Grooveshark for a second, Jakob. Maybe writing confusing nonsense about sounds is fast becoming a lost art in the internet age, but not fast enough. Case in point:

“The squiggly instro-funk of “Fot I Hose” sounds like an update of the kind of 70s jams cataloged on Cinemaphonic’s Soul Punch comp; “Verdens Største Land” ably blends Air France’s lithe synths with Vampiric afro-beat appropriations; and the opener “Grønt Lys I Alle Led” approximates the result of Jens Lekman ghostwriting a tune for Los Campesinos! post-Ritalin prescription.”

Wow. This band must be thrilled they got you to translate their music overseas. Did you get credit for “instro-funk” in the dictionary of hyphenated music BS or is the request still pending? Maybe they can add two entries for clarity. Can’t be confusing squiggly instro-funk with the regular sort these days.

Quoting all this stuff’s pushing me into your preferred length, not mine, so let’s cap things off with your discussion of the “definite missteps” on this album:

“Perhaps worst of all is the fact that this disc doubles its length in bonus tracks; they’re easy to ignore, which makes it a forgivable move, but as such it also feels like a bit of a waste”

So a bit of a waste is worst of all? Wow, better yank two stars off the board. That’s some heavy shit right there. Really kid, I don’t understand the point you’re making here. You saying it’d be UNforgivable if those bonus tracks were impossible to ignore? Do you normally pee on music that holds your attention or are you just fumbling for something to dislike?

I gotta go, but just for fun let’s see what comes after that last bit:

“…it also feels like a bit of a waste. At best it comes off a bit brazen and cocksure”

Try a bit of rereading to find a bit less repetition. Not that I need to point it out, but sometimes pussy footing leaves a stain, Jakob. Besides…a bit cocksure? A bit brazen? That’s like saying your review was a bit awful.

Let’s not mince words.

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.

Album: Presidence

Reviewer: Jonathan Dean

Tiny Mix Tapes, 2010

Writing Disorders: Jargon Palsy, Infectious Punctuation, Toxic Tedium








Comma Foul: “It should be noted, however, that Excepter do not promise resolution, or even coherence, to their audience.”

Most Sterile Phrase: “the group seems to eschew the notion that their explorations are leading to a terminus or apotheosis”




Jonathan, I’ ma call you Jon because the full name gets me too aroused. And since I already nicknamed Jonathan Keefe with an H, you get the Jon Arbuckle spelling. So, Jon, let’s start with a snip from your review I think sums up the whole 800-word disaster:

“the word ‘tedious’ comes to mind”

Jon, this review was so skull-numbing that I forgot I had a brain for a minute or two. I’m assuming your aim as a writer is to attract readers, not generate the most groans per minute per paragraph of text. Crap like this has me wondering though:

“These improvisations are rhizomatic — not predicated on the assumption that structure is a desirable endpoint, but rather content to allow song structure to bubble up and dissolve with its own logic and duration.”

Jon, that’s not a word. Even if a reader remembered enough botany to know you meant an adjective based on the origin of a plant’s root system, he’d probably still struggle to connect it with the rest of your BS. Did you seriously use the phrase “predicated on the assumption” in a music review? It’s not a legal brief, Jon. Sometimes people dance to this stuff. Well, when in Rome, I guess. My belief that you can change your awful writing is predicated on the assumption that you have any moxie left in those balls. Here’s to hoping.

Let’s imagine for a moment that I’m a listener curious about Excepter. Maybe I’ve heard some scuttlebutt round town that their music pops boners or drove some poor girl to get jiggy with it. In my quest to know more, I stumble on your review:

“Their longform, improvised jams are not rooted in post-punk or psych-pop like those of their neighbors Black Dice and Animal Collective. Unlike Gang Gang Dance, they do not tend towards deconstructions of worldbeat, nor do they engage with the minimalist drone traditions that inform the work of Growing. And although their instrumental palette…”

Never mind. This band sounds dull to the third power. You know why, Jon? You sucked the life out of it. Look dude, most readers aren’t drafting a Pentagon report on the Brooklyn noise scene. You think you could have sexed this up a little bit by leaving out the long division? This is music, not inventory. Even if this band didn’t light your fire, you might have extended a shred of respect by not making them boring by proxy.

Take a knee, Jon – this is a teachable moment. You see, reading detailed descriptions of what a band’s music sounds like is like reading a transcript of a basketball game. In case you haven’t noticed, we no longer live in a world where experiencing new music means enduring radio DJs or taking a trip to the local record store. Back then it made some sense to translate an album into paragraphs of Helvetica so folks could ration their time and money. Things have thankfully changed. If internet users want to sample a band, they can use any number of free listening services, and they can do it immediately. If you want to put a band’s sound in context, then do it with snappy points and hyperlinks, not this:

“Excepter have been ritualistically refining their own brand of shambolic, drug-damaged, future-shock folk, balancing tense, psychedelic profundity with a lackadaisical disaffection bordering on camp.”

Or this:

“uses the basic kosmische template to create a minimal soundscape propelled by a chugging analog synth and a kraut-inspired bass rhythm, embellished with ornamental flute trills”

If you don’t want to get with the times, you might at least consider injecting some personality into your writing. If you shoved some first-person shims under this whole wobbly table bending under the weight of your jargon, you might have reached some balance. It’s not a bad idea for an opinion writer to actually express an opinion every once in a while with the words “I,” “me,” “my” or “mine.” Plus you get the added bonus of coming off as a person, not a robot programmed to link contemporary artists with made-up adjectives. If you’re really that boring in real life, then I think you’re in the wrong field here. As a writer, you’re a communicator, Jon. And a communicator without charisma is pretty useless.