a grammar

“music review cliche bingo”

Please find below notes on how I feel about each item included in Flavorwire’s boards for “Music Review Cliche Bingo.”

The notes are mostly boring, but I’m posting them mostly so I can share my belief that record-review staples — much as they can be tired, maddening, imprecise, or just plain lazy-ass writing — also serve a purpose: they want to create some common jargon between readers and critics, so we can communicate about how something sounds and feels without having to get all technical about it. There are a lot of instances where I’d really rather hear a critic say a guitar part is “angular” than fail to reinvent the wheel and say it sounds “purple” or “like a bicycle on stilts” — at least both of us have some common idea of what kind of guitar parts get called “angular.”

This gets really clear if you’ve ever been involved in recording music (or maybe drinking wine?), this world in which everyone always wants everything to sound more “warm” or more “punchy.” Sometimes these words are totally vague and meaningless. (There’s a producer who claims he once got a meddling label executive off his back by taking a big non-functional knob and labeling it “ZOOM” — when the exec said something needed to sound “zoomier,” he pointed to the knob and let the guy adjust it until he was happy.) But some of the words mean something, however imprecise, and there are people who will translate them directly to parts of the frequency spectrum: if something needs “air” or “sparkle,” that’s a problem with the stuff around 10KHz; if it’s too “boomy,” that’s an issue around 120Hz. We’re groping around trying to talk about sound: if people say “airy” often enough that we all have similar ideas of what it means, that can be a pretty productive thing.

That said, I’m sure I have used every last one of these, at some point, and I’m sure I’ve used some of them pretty lazily. Even if you don’t count when I wrote terrible reviews in college.

ethereal. You will not want this one in an important bingo space unless you’re reading reviews from the early 90s. People seriously dropped off using this after it was deployed to point to every dream-pop and shoegaze band in existence. Its vogue is so closely tied to that scene that Lush had an actual song called “Etheriel.”
head-bobbing or thumping. See also “loping.” I actually like terms that describe how people might move to the music, and “head-bobbing” is one of them — you read that and you get a pretty clear idea of the tempo, beat, and mood. “Head-bobbing” might be like mid-tempo hip-hop. “Head-nodding” is slower and more stoned than that. You know how that differs from music that’s “toe-tapping” or music you might pogo to.
haunting. Where, just recently, did I read someone saying something great about how being “haunted” works — something about the different combinations of sadness, fear, and wistfulness that can go into it? Whatever it was, it’s not usually what people mean when they call every tenth melody “haunting”; this one’s been ground down pretty far toward uselessness.
return to form. This is just a polite way of saying you think an act used to be great, then got really lame or boring or confusing for a while, but now they sound good again. Perhaps you’re saying it politely because of love — because you really did like them, and have been giving them the benefit of the doubt all through the lame/boring/confusing period, hoping they’ll find their way back to you.
lovechild of. I can’t think of the last time I’ve seen this. I’m going to consider that fact a good thing.
hazy/breezy/dreamy. At least there are three of them, and more where that came from. Sometimes I like to switch it up and use something like “cloudy” — hopefully it still triggers the same stuff (i.e., you know what I mean), but hey, at least you got to look at a different word that time. [UPDATE: “Breezy” doesn’t really belong here, does it? It refers more to ease, — a sense of lightness, blitheness, casual skill. Breezy’s a crisp drink on the patio, not a hazy dream.]
soundscape. I think this one took off about 15 years ago, because what it refers to is something that sits in the middle ground between composition and production — two things that really started blurring into one another across the length of the 90s.
pseudo- or -esque. I am a big fan of just using “sorta” and “kinda,” though I understand why editors will cut it out. I like to think that people will appreciate it if you save things like “pseudo” and “esque” for when you really mean them, and just send out humble old “sorta” when you honestly do mean “sorta.”
visceral. Sometimes I get the feeling that regular listeners insist on some distinction between music that entertains the brain and music that hits you in the gut — a lot more than critics do! The whole practice of criticism involves teaching your brain and your gut to cooperate.
gem. In addition to the critic-as-miner metaphor — digging through the whole history of music to find these rare, shiny things — it’s partly a way of saying something’s great in a small or unacknowledged way: a gem is usually from before, some lone small thing twinkling in history.
atmospheric. Also somewhat dated, I think, though I’m happy that these days it’s less often used to just mean “lots of reverb.”
catchy. To be honest, I think “catchy” is the most successful “we all know what this refers to” word going, here — even more successful than stuff like “funky.” We might have wildly subjective ideas about what actually qualifies, but the word is almost more about intent: we can all spot catchy as a goal.
unique/inventive/innovative/experimental. I like how this list proceeds in an orderly way from a quality to a value judgment — first you’re just unique, then your uniqueness is an invention, then it’s a useful innovation, then you’re out on the edge doing useful “experiments” for others.
irresistible. I’d like to think I mostly avoid words like this, which sorta suggest the author’s reaction must be universal — I can’t resist it, so it’s irresistible. Although sometimes things really do feel that way, or even shoot for that quality.
vibe. Here’s the thing: at some point you start running out of words to refer to something’s feel/sound/mood/atmosphere. I usually consider running down to the point of “vibe” to be a bad sign, and then can’t bring myself to use it without feeling like a hippie — until I run into the same problem in the next paragraph, and occasionally give up and just run with “vibe.” This works best when you’re writing about an act whose members you’re pretty sure would use a word like “vibe” in describing what they’re trying to do.
nostalgia. Well yes, recognizable emotions are pretty handy tools for talking about music. Though I think maybe this is driving at the ways we use “nostalgia” to call something retro?
post-/-fi/-wave/-gaze/chill-/-core. Sometimes I feel like sub-genre names have the same problem as political scandals, where everything is a Gate — it’s sorta recombinant, which makes it hard for new things to get in. This is why I was actually happy to hear “shitgaze,” because it meant that a NEW ITEM (the “gaze” from “shoegaze”) had slipped into the mix. Same with “step.”
infectious. I’d like to travel back in time and use this solely for hair-metal bands. I would also want to buy Motley Crue enough soap and bottled water that I’d never wind up hearing that ridiculous dick-in-the-burrito-so-it-won’t-smell-like-another-girl story.
penchant for. We really should be coming up with better ways of describing tendencies. “Tendency” is not the answer either, I don’t think.
paved the way. The funny additional subtext with this one is “paved the way for us to cover/notice this.”
tinged. Just another kinda/sorta/penchant word.
on acid. Does anyone still use this in earnest? Non-ironically, not in scare quotes, not put in someone else’s mouth? I can’t think of a time I’ve seen this deployed without calling attention to what a cliche it is — and that’s even counting the reversed version, where something sounds like an acid-fried band NOT on acid.
croons. Well this one’s originally technical, a specific singing style — you could even say it relates to the history of microphones and recording technology — but it does bug me when someone seems to be reaching for it just to avoid saying plain old “sings.”
raw/fuzzy/jangly/crunchy. More than anything, it’s these words-to-describe-guitars that are a jargon. You learn them by reading reviews and then hearing the bands in question, and eventually — maybe — we all have some small overlapping sense of what a jangly guitar sounds like. And we all go to bed happy.