The Automatik

I have been alerted to this piece of crap from our dear “friends” at Pitchfork magazine. It’s a review of Sloan’s last album, Action Pact. I hope that the fact that this review came out today and the album came out last year is an indication of the delay of its U.S. release and not laziness or apathy.

This is precisely why I don’t read Pitchfork. The majority of the writers there are more interested in the cadre associated with “I write for Pitchfork” (and whatever subsequent blowjobs/meetings with rock stars it may elicit) than what they are listening to or worse, whether the actual words they are writing accurately or honestly reflect what they are listening to.

Sloan is not anyone’s favorite band.

This makes them sound like Journey or Foreigner or New Kids on the Block. What a fucking dickweed this guy is.

It’s doubtful Sloan’s mom even places them in her Top 10.

Now, that’s just plain mean.

I also resent that he tries to dumb down a decade’s worth of peerless puns and otherwise heartfelt lyrics with this description:

…lyrics that range from the exhaustive task of getting a girl to love you to the exhaustive task of getting a girl to love you for a slightly longer period of time…

Granted, there’s nothing on Pretty Together or even Action Pact that reaches the zeniths of “G Turns to D” or even “The Marquee and the Moon,” but it’s still better than the shite that Jack White thinks is deep.

I’m even more insulted that he would compare them, albeit in an arguably favorable way, with the kind of testosterone-infused shlock that is 2 Fast 2 Furious, as if the mindless Ginos that worship movies like that would even care about Sloan if they weren’t actually played on the radio and in beer commercials.

I’m not going to argue against the notion that Sloan are at worst, derivative, and at best, pop Postmodernists, but it galls me that he seems to think that decorating one’s sleeve with those particular hearts is any less appropriate than, say, Interpol’s insultingly boring attempts to be New Wave. Granted, he isn’t the writer who gave Turn Down the Bright Lights a 9.5, but still. I can take journalistic liberties, too, you know.

To wit: fuck that guy.

The sad thing is, people are going to read his review, be (suitably) impressed by this guy’s obvious writing skills and agree with every word, whether or not they should. Furthermore, they’re going to let atrociously personalized detritus like this pass for “music journalism” and think that the warped, backhanded compliments nestled in between the outrageously inappropriate snark make it okay. Well, it doesn’t. And that’s what pisses me off the most.