Darren Hughes of Long Pauses on the cliché epidemic in music reviewing:

Eh, no excerpt. He just quotes a dozen or so music writers all saying this album’s like Disney. Funny to see them all with no pants. And while not endemic to music reviewing, it’s probably worse there as most writers have no technical knowledge of microphones or sheet music. So no A-flat sonority above contra D, a line taken from the notes to a Silvestrov symphony. I only vaguely know what it means, like whenever I find Harvey Pekar liner notes in a jazz CD. He writes lucid, technical music criticism that I, as an illiterate musician, can barely parse. Mea culpa. For better or worse, I learned playing & reading about alt-rock and noise– back when I read reviews, they were all texture and pose. Lots of nice prose, often with nothing whatsoever to do with the disc. I.e., performance crit, the music of words, not music. I doubt much has changed.

One of these day’s I’m gonna take this up on my other blog about Japrocksampler, the *cough*-titled book about 70s freakrock on the earthquake islands. Until then, I’ll wait for the day when all us online comics critics trip over ourselves to post at the same time the exact same thing in the exact same words about, I don’t know, some book that doesn’t exist yet, like New Uncle Scrooge Adventures.