Album reviews that haven't aged well

Music
#21

OK, nah, turned it off. Rubbish.

2 Likes
#22

Reckon you can draw a clear line between stuff like this and rise of the term “creatives”

#23

unpopular post but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this one - I think those criticisms are kind of fair to level at Slowdive if it’s not your thing? And I like the way he described the ‘better’ tracks.

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#24

“It’s a Greek dish - Culinary Ed” has absolutely done me

7 Likes
#25

Was it originally that long? Fucking hell.

#26

Marvel really scraping the barrel these days

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#27

For me, it’s not really about the review on its own, it more about how it’s a distillation of the prevailing opinion on Slowdive at the time and how they’d gone ‘out of fashion’. I bought the album when it was released (maybe even on the day it came out, I can’t remember for sure) but it does surprise me how popular Slowdive are 30 years later and how well regarded Souvlaki is now, at the time I thought that was it, they’d be a barely remembered indie band in a few years

4 Likes
#28

Ah i see what you mean! Yeah in that sense they’ve definitely had the last laugh

#29

I’m not too sure about that, but it was definitely A THING in the early 2000s to have concept reviews in your magazine/blog. Careless Talk Costs Lives used to be full of them (often written by Kieron Gillen, in the vein of his PC Gamer reviews that were the flip-side of ‘New Games Journalism’).

I may have dabbled in it with a few pieces for magazines as well…

#30

’ She doesn’t have the girl-next-door approachability of Kylie or the pin-up cool of Debbie Harry , she isn’t even that sexy! I’ve been listening to her records all my music-listening life and I’ve just realised that I’ve never [really] fancied her.’

Will never cease to amaze me how that got past editorial (sorry DiS).

2 Likes
#31

I genuinely still like that album. The anniversary tour was good fun.

Although there is an erroneous ‘was’ instead of ‘were’ in that review, and obviously 10 is insane.

#32

the noughties really were the fucking pits.

4 Likes
#33

I feel like this would have been more at home on tinymixtapes. RIP tinymixtapes.

#34

Stinks of “my mum says I’m edgy” energy

1 Like
#35

I loved this bit just for reminding me about how much I enjoyed that sort of stuff in MM (or maybe this is NME, I have no idea) in those days.

The guy seems to be a Guardian Music critic these days.

Edit: It’s also forced me to try to recall if I would have had a clue what a Slouvaki was in 1993. I think maybe not. I feel like Greek cuisine was mostly relegated to stuffed vine leaves, feta and olives in the supermarket.

#36

except I actually find this one quite funny even if it’s spectacularly unprofessional and mean

1 Like
#37

Also this when the score used to be “U.2”

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#38

I’m prob alone in wishing P4K had such strong opinions still. It’s so… safe & commercial now.

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#39

Absolutely. It’s not so much that they didn’t know what it was (which may well have been fair enough in 1993 for a number of reasons). It’s that they got so angry about it and presented it in a “I don’t know what this is, I don’t need to know what this is, and neither do you because Slowdive have brought it up so it must be wanky nonsense” way. Only for the ‘culinary ed’ to decide that the reader probably did need to know what it was.

4 Likes
#40

It’s the Melody Maker review. The NME one was more forgiving but still a pretty lukewarm 6/10. I don’t think Dave Simpson was seen as a ‘hatchet man’ that the editors gave albums to to give a damn good kicking like, say, Steven Wells for example

1 Like