Head full of sermons, mouth full of spiders.

I've never been one to fast, but I understand the mental and spiritual benefits that such a practice affords. I'm not sure if one can give up anything other than food and still call it a "fast," but I think I'm going to "fast" by relinquishing my obsessive consumption of music criticism for a long while. I might make some exceptions for truly important critics (for instance, Ralph Ellison's "Living With Music" is a book I've meandered through for the past couple of years, and I'd also better mention Lester Bangs to keep Phil off my case), but for the most part, I'm done with the whole lot of critics.

There's a myriad of reasons for this "fast," but one of the ones that sticks out to me right now is the growing predictability of so many critics. A few weeks ago at the bar, Mark and I were discussing the new Son Volt record on the eve of its release. Regarding the expected review from the lords of cynicism over at Pitchfork, I remarked: "The reviewer'll give the album either a 6.8 or a 7.3, and they'll complain about Jay Farrar's obscurantist lyrics and how h/she grew weary of his Guthrieish politicking."

Wouldn't you know it, a few days later the Pitchfork slapped "Okemah and the Melody of Riot" with a 6.8.

When the criticism at Pitchfork is not predictable, it's often the case that the writing is absolutely atrocious. The nadir of Pitchfork's gobbeldygook po-mo garbage writing occurred in the review of Richard Buckner's recent album "Dents and Shells." For instance:

If it wasn't already apparent, Richard Buckner's sixth album, Dents and Shells, drives the point home: The man is nearly immutable. With the exception of his forays into folk-rock (Since and Impasse), Buckner's evolution has been judicious and purposeful.

Wait, so he's "nearly immutable," but he's progressively and "purposefully" (isn't all evolution purposeful?) evolved over his career? Which is it? The immutability or the evolution? You can't have it both ways.

Dents and Shells continues to explore Buckner's shadowy continent of song, a Symbolist mirror-world where bright glints of detail fleetingly flash, then submerge, cloaked in shifting fogs.


What on Jehovah's whirlin' earth is that supposed to mean?!? A "symbolist mirror-world"? Gosh, I thought Buckner was just a dude who wrote really good country songs about divorce and alcoholism, but I guess I was wrong.

Buckner is the disembodied Eye roving freely within impossible spaces, cataloging impressionistic signatures through a hazy lens.

Guh? Buh.

In this sub-world, the sky is a grid, the stars are vertices, the horizon of a distant shore is an x-axis, and the shells dotting it are the spiraling integers of the Fibonacci Sequence.

Fibonacci? Someone paid attention in Math 101, but unfortunatley it doesn't offer a clue as to what this album sounds like.

By listening at the numbers, he upturns the precise shells of logic and reveals dents in the sand that contain the mysteries skirting the outlines of natural law.

Gosh, I didn't know ol' Rick had so much in common with Steven Hawking.

Regardless, it's this very sense of hermetic isolation-- and of a person's consciousness not creating music, but actually becoming it-- that makes each Buckner album feel like a fresh adventure in a recurring dream: No matter how well you know the landscape, its topography remains amorphous and impossible to chart.

Well, I'll agree that each Buckner album is a "fresh adventure," but I'm not convinced of the logic of a statement that claims one can "know" an "amorphous" landscape. Must have something to do with the "outlines of natural law" or something.

We'll see how long this fast lasts. Maybe I can use the extra time I'll have to get some more sleep so I don't get so cranky at something as insignificant as indie-music journalism.

:)