A noter que The Stool Pigeon, qui publie cette merveille signée Alex Denney, vient d'annoncer qu'il fermait bientôt la boutique. On vous met les meilleurs, allez faire un tour sur le site du magazine pour la version intégrale.


Achingly beautiful — So lovely it hurts. 

Bastard lovechild — Is sex out of wedlock still considered edgy? So why would anyone still be writing that albums ‘sound like the bastard lovechild of X and Y musicians’? I mean, there’s a good chance your parents hadn’t gotten round to tying the knot by the time you were conceived. But so what? It doesn’t make you a latter-day Edmund from King Lear. Hell, it doesn’t even make you Jon Snow off Game Of Thrones. And he’s fucking boring. 

Conscious decision — As an interviewer, two words that tell you you’ve run out of interesting things to say, e.g. “Was it a conscious decision to make a more boring-sounding record this time around, or did it evolve that way naturally?” Let me guess: it evolved that way naturally. Also: please kill me now.

Deconstructionist pop — sounds like Animal Collective.

Elegantly wasted — Let’s be real: if you saw the pallid human blancmange that is Pete Doherty slinking down the street towards you in jeans and T-shirt, you’d give him the widest of possible berths. But give the man a trilby hat and a blood-spattered volume of symbolist poetry, and lo, he becomes “elegantly wasted”. It’s OK, we don’t get it either. 

Found sounds — Go out early onto the streets of Dalston one morning, and you’ll find wandering herds of hipsters out recording ‘found sounds’ on their iPhones, which they will then use as the basis for an experimental EP in the mistaken belief that they are John Cage.

Game-changer — OK, so you’ve seen Seasons 1-5 of The Wire, and have understood first-hand the failures of contemporary inner-city American life. You’ve said “sheeeeeeit” a lot to your smug friends who all appreciated the reference, and you’ve even written a blog for The Guardian comparing the series favourably to the novels of Charles Dickens. Now it’s time to “drop” some lame, hip hop-inspired slang into your review copy! E.g. “A$AP Rocky’s debut is a sizzurp-swilling, crunk-blazing game-changer of a record.” Shit is tight, yo.

Garnered — Bullshit word, as in “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy garnered widespread acclaim for his 786th full-length proper, Wenches & Pheasants.” 

Hotly anticipated — Nicked the leaked version off The Pirate Bay, never going to listen to it.

Impossibly catchy — Paradoxical phrase used to connote infectious qualities, e.g. “Spurred on by the increased mobility afforded by modern transportation, the impossibly catchy Spanish flu pandemic claimed the lives of 20-50 million people between 1918 and 1920. Ho, and indeed, hum.”

Infectiously upbeat — Another stock pairing; possibly revealing in that it implies that ‘music reviewers’ think of happiness as some sort of idiot germ to be transmitted in moments of low critical resistance. Presumably, critics would think sex is ‘infectiously upbeat’ as well, if they ever had any.

Jaunty handclaps — As opposed to what? Sombre handclaps? “As the credits rolled on the three-hour documentary exhaustively detailing the horrors of the Russian pogroms, songwriters Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn were inspired to add the jaunty handclaps that provided bubblegum pop smash ‘Mickey’ with the magic needed to make it a number one smash.

Jazz-inflected — Knee-jerk phrase employed whenever a pop/rock musician plays a major seventh chord and the writer panics. 

Long-player — Mildly pretentious stand-in for ‘album’. See also: moniker

Lynchian — OK, so you’ve established that the record you’re reviewing is ‘cinematic’. But, much as comparing an album to an entire artistic medium can be instructive, you’re hankering after something else, something a little less… entry-level. So why not take a punt on ‘Lynchian’? It’s what we were all thinking.

Meteoric rise — Don’t meteors generally fall? Perhaps “bread-like rise” would be more appropriate.

Number one in an alternative universe — see: pop for a perfect world

Pop for a perfect world — Trust us, you don’t want to know what a music critic’s perfect world looks like. But you can bet your ass it features Shins B-sides at numbers one to forty in the charts. And still they’d have the temerity to try and make a living from their self-important whingeing.

Prepping — Despite sounding like an arcane technique practised by debutantes to avoid their farts being detected by potential suitors, ‘prepping’ is what American music hacks insist you’re doing when you have a new album coming out. Horrifyingly, it seems to be catching on in the UK as well. See also: readying

Rule of three — As beloved of sub-editors with duff feature copy on their hands, the ‘rule of three’ is guaranteed to sell even the most unpolishable of turds to your readers, e.g. “King Creosote on his new album of B-sides, watching paint dry and why his fourth-favourite font is Arial Unicode MS.” Wait, three boring things for the price of one? Count me in!

Seminal — Uppity tag used to describe records whose dazzling originality the writer thinks will echo, Maximus from Gladiator­­­-style, through the learned cloisters of eternity. Then again, ‘seminal’ can also mean ‘pertaining to or consisting of semen’, so it could mean the record is a load of old wank.

Sophomore — Ridiculous, US collegiate term used as a stand-in for “second” when describing albums, e.g. “The Stone Roses’ second album The Sophomore Coming was a let-down for many.”

Soundscape — Substitute for ‘song’ used to describe boring shoegaze, post rock and elecronica records whose alternatively ‘majestic’, ‘eerie’ or ‘glacial’ instrumentals are supposed to evoke grand vistas of some sort. Dimly, the writer perceives that this is all Brian Eno’s fault. 

Stratospheric — Post rock records are too dull to listen to, let alone write about, so why not peg them as ‘stratospheric’ so we can all get back to doing something more interesting instead? You could also try using ‘mesospheric’ or, for slightly below-par efforts, ‘tropospheric’. But readers will only look confused. Honestly! Your talent is wasted on these people.

Tribal rhythms — sounds like Animal Collective.

“Unless you’ve been living in a cave / under a rock / on another planet for the past X months / years, you’ve heard…” — For the sake of argument, let’s suppose you had, in fact, been living for the past 20 years under a rock in a cave located on OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, currently the most distant planet known to man. I can guarantee you would still have read some berk rattling off this phrase, and started checking Gumtree for another, more remote rock to crawl under.

Vernacular — Critics love nothing more than letting us know they’re at the forefront of popular culture by cramming their copy full of idiotic youthspeak — “natch”, “emosh”, “vajizzle my nizzle” and so on. It’s why you all hate us so much.