You can tell that a music writer is out of his or her comfort zone when a simple CD review begins with a fucking 1000-word thesis on some semi-related shit. Take Shitcago's premiere dickless hipster website Pitchfork, whose Cosmo Lee leads a review of Opeth's new album by waxing theoretical for about seven hours on cool Mastodon-style prog vs. uncool Dream Theater-style prog. Yeah, I get it: Lee's rushing to explain the conspicuous presence of an Opeth review in The Land Of Sam Beam and Bon Iver. Still, that's what we in the biz call a Pretty Thin Angle. Plus, that shit ain't even accurate. Apparently, dude never heard that expression 'To flaunt ignorance is folly.' [Probably cuz I just made it up. Sucker.]
Anyhow, Lee's centerpiece is an undercooked and porous analogy that Mastodon is to Peter Gabriel-era Genesis as Dream Theater is to '70s-era Rush. Apparently, Lee was in a hurry to get back to beard maintenance since only in the loosest, laziest, lamest sense is this comparison accurate. The breakdown in logic comes when Lee points out that '[h]ipsters love Mastodon, but they won't go near Dream Theater,' since you'd have to be on crack to believe that any Velvet Underground fans were rocking Lamb Lies Down On Broadway in 1974. Is this to say contemporary hipsters have come so far? Wrong! And was 70s Rush so inorganic and cold? Nay!
When the review at last turns to the damn fuckin Opeth album, Lee makes up for all that cack with observations such as this gem: 'Opeth, interestingly, have straddled both prog aesthetics.' Oh! and that 'Watershed is an intriguing exercise in discontinuity.' Whatever the hell that means.
Here's some advice for you, Cosmo, if that is your real name: Get your hipster face out of Opeth's pants and get back to cultivating that indie chin-mullet. Hipsters Out Of Metal!
Probably Pitchfork Media Contributing Writer Cosmo Lee
2 comments:
Yawn. Contrary to this baseless, unfounded blog post, Cosmo Lee has been writing great reviews on metal for years. He's been a regular contributor to Decibel and Stylus (R.I.P.) for a long while, recently started doing metal reviews for Pitchfork and Allmusic. His blog Invisible Oranges is one of the best metal blogs around. Ain't no sense in criticizing the dude just because he's started introducing worthwhile metal albums (and, almost as important, a more plainspoken writing style) to Pitchfork.
this post is as arbitrary and meaningless and contrived as the article it's unfoundedly criticizing. get a life hipster
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