Music review putdowns so brutal they affected your enjoyment of the music in question for years

This thread idea might have been done before but I can't really be bothered trying to verify one way or another.

Today I have been thinking about this line from Tom Ewing's underwhelmed contemporaneous reaction to Chain Reaction's Interstate:

"Monolake’s album already sounds a bit dated, like something 808 State might have produced three or four years ago if they’d bought a couple of Oval records"

A dismissal so perfect and devastating that I think it caused me to underwhelm (the actually very good!) Interstate for about two decades or so.

List your own examples, ideally possessing at least two of the following three qualities:

1) Beautifully articulated
2) Highly persuasive
3) Rather unfair

deafheaven

It didn't actually change my relation to the song, but it has become the first thing I think of when it comes on and has effectively overshadowed it in my mind so I figure close enough - someone on Freaky Trigger, possibly Tom E himself, refering to Wyclef Jean in "My Hips Don't Lie" shouting Shakira Shakira "like an elderly relative who's lost sight of her at local festivities".

Definitely not 1) but this stray in Tim Jonze's NME (I know, I know) review of Mogwai's Happy Songs For Happy People basically collected Jim O'Rourke, Sonic Youth and Wilco in one terrible swoop when I was 17, and my feelings for each are, to varying degrees, still recovering now:

Mogwai aren’t the sort of band to harp on about how they achieved a neat atonal effect by restringing their guitars with Jim O’Rourke’s pubic hair.

two kinds of brutal putdowns:
* rude about an act I like, I stopped reading that writer.
* enjoyable rudeness about an act I didn't like, made me laugh at the time, looking back it was probably borderline bullying or missed the point
I don't remember any I still enjoy, sorry.

I guess there is a * here for trolling, but that's a different art

I can't remember where I read it, but a reviewer once compared Stuart Staples from Tindersticks to Vic Reeves doing his club singer voice and I could never get that out of mind from then on.

tbf that was the first thing most people think when they hear him sing.

"Shit sandwich"

Back in 1977 Creem (I think) did a one word review of Can’s self titled album that simply said “Can’t.” Not saying that review put me off them necessarily, but I didn’t investigate any Can albums until about ten years later.

in 2003 my then girlfriend was American and a Tindersticks fan and I had to explain to her what "Tiny Tears" was, and sadly it seemed to ruin the band for her.

I remember a reviewer whose opinion I trusted really rip into "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers", remarking that by the 7th or 8th section it gets so self-absorbed that you're ready to push the guy off the lighthouse yourself, made me think the piece was a needlessly overextended mess the first few times I listened...alas, I sorta figured out that dramatic inner turmoil was sorta VdGG's whole shtick

I remember as a teen in the early 90s shelling out for NME and Melody Maker and feeling like they were super insightful and honest compared to the American publications at the time that just wrote about how great everything was. As an impressionable American teen, I figured the music that the UK papers didn’t shit on must be really good!

Oh except for the ones that they shat on using language that made me think I would actually like the music—- like Julian Cope

There was a series involving mockery of The Shamen that still makes it hard for me to take that band seriously

I found NMEs and Melody Makers at the library in the late 80s. That's where I found out about Mudhoney.

Lol I think I read about Mudhoney when you did … but in Sassy Magazine … cute band alert iirc

Not quite "affected your enjoyment of the music in question for years" but one I remember that broke the spell for me was Pitchfork's review of Salt Marie Celeste by Nurse With Wound:

Finally, in the last few minutes, Stapleton silences that MIND-ENERVATING RAIN MAN noise and hits the "bubbling lava" button.

hahaha

Miles Davis on the Steve Miller Band.

er, what now with "Tiny Tears"?

ha, same question

a doll that cries?

Yeah it's a brand name -- used for a few decades iirc -- for a crying doll.

I'm trying to think of an example here but I can't, conversely I have dozens of on-hand examples of good reviews that got me into bands

OK one I do remember is a brutal takedown of the first Pixies record, maybe in Puncture? to this day the only Pixies song I like is "Gigantic" b/c Kim Deal

there was some line about "gratuitous tits" on the cover iirc

also remember an outraged letter to Flipside re: a major label ad: "this Alice In Chains shit is supposed to appeal to us?!?!"

Feel like I might have examples of this, and possibly from Tom Ewing too, but can't think what, because all that's coming to mind is my friend describing Geddy Lee as sounding like a cartoon witch and how I've never really gotten past that.

LOL

I definitely ruined Animal Collective's "Strawberry Jam" album for a friend and fellow fan after saying the vocals were mixed too loud

thankfully i don't pay attention to the kind of music critic who does this anymore because they are unilaterally toxic leeches and the worst people imaginable like fuckin christgau and anyone with a clear heart and a sense of self-respect has more valuable opinions about music and i trust myself and my own fuckin ears.

i mean i used to care about what critics wrote but then i grew up and also the internet happened making criticism even more useless than it already was.

i think the opposite situation, an act praised by critics, has colored my ability to enjoy music much more.

tangential to topic but i remember reading a review of Ivy Ivy Ivy-era Primal Scream in NME? wherein B@rbara €llen? said that Bobby Gillespie would never be a rock star because of his “tragically fat thighs” - this is in the context of sporting a pair of leather trousers & playing MC5-derived rock

while bobby seemed to move on just fine from this criticism, teenage me was thereafter very self-conscious about the relationship between my own thigh situation (solid, load-bearing) and my dreams of a life in rock and roll

this body shaming from barb will not stand

er, what now with "Tiny Tears"?

Yeah, was curious about this too, but I've never heard Tindersticks. The only "Tiny Tears" I know is a Godflesh song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL0DawPa9bM

xxpost So you want to be a rock'n'roll star? Well, listen close to what I say.
Go and get yourself a Thighmaster and squeeze that thing ten times a day.

hahaha

I recall a review (in Creem maybe?) for a Queen album that identified Brian May as having "the ugliest legs in Christendom." Which made me self-conscious about my own gams, being that I was of a similar build as the once-and-future astrophysicist.

simon reynolds on black rebel motorcycle club: "Just those words, before you even hear the music, are mentally exhausting: please no not this again. "

Tiny Tears is a doll that you fill with water and it "cries" - I didn't realise it was a British thing and not an American thing until that moment

https://www.johnadams.co.uk/collections/tiny-tears

ahh, we never had crying dolls in the US. I wish we did. We had GI Joes with kung fu grip instead.

have to say though, makes me like the song even more

we had dolls that peed, though!

https://www.reddit.com/r/70s/comments/1jgyys0/some_dolls_from_the_1970s_any_one_have_these/

we also had dolls that pooped and lied about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr4k6JFNUXU

i once wrote some words re an album that were not positive about a sample heavy big beat album.
accused the producer of using fake samples.
got ripped to pieces by the pr as the samples were all genuiune and cleared and therefore £££.
took a long time before i was able to listen to the album again.

I dont know if this fits the bill but the notorious MM review of Souvlaki Space Station where Dave Simpson said their music was "like drowning in a bath of porridge" put me off listening to Slowdive for years.

Needless to say, they had the last laugh.

I remember Slowdive as having been the canonical victims of the MM/NME game of "building them up to knock them down". When they turned on them, I remember one hack suggesting that "their next album will probably be called My Mummy's Got a Volvo".

It's particularly pleasing that, as you say, they're having the last laugh.

They should call their next album Bouncing Back

Complete with Shakin' Stevens endorsement? (That might make me listen to it)

Growing up, indie music magazines really had it out for people like Sade and Enya, who were described as bland, tasteful coffee-table music for mums and dads. That, to me, is wild to think about nowadays. Especially Sade

People/bands - i'm not getting into that right now

Yeah I'm taking a bit of an extreme position which I don't know I would really go to bat for, but I don't think there's a clear dividing line between funny zings and "nasty and small minded insults".

yes this describes how i feel about it too. (and sorry i didn't read the whole thread probably missing some good and thoughtful comments.)

i can definitely think of times i've had my own bubble burst about something i've venerated, just by gaining broader experience. usually it isn't "wow this avant-garde thing is utter wankery" it's more "wow this thing that sounded so profound feels kinda shallow and/or fake to me now." it's not like i suddenly hate it more that the signal isn't coming through any more because my station changed.

I wish I could remember who wrote it, but I recall a review of Dylan's Christmas album that said something to the effect of "when an ancient Dylan sings 'I'll Be Home For Christmas,' it sounds like a threat." I think I laughed at that for a full five minutes.

also, "808 State getting into Oval" sounds...great?

Maybe an idea for another thread: negative reviews that had the opposite effect on you, made you think, "that sounds great!"

^ a much more common experience for me

Obey the Time by The Durutti Column was slagged off as "dance music for sleepwalkers" by one of the rags, and I was like, where do I sign up?

Well, I must say, I rolled my eyes as I read the quote in your opening post, because denigrating music for sounding "dated" is one of the lowest forms of criticism.

However, Ewing is a skilled writer and critic and it's in the next paragraph that he actually delivers the death blow: "if Interstate had the sounds and ideas to match its Kraftwerk-allusive title nobody would care about its slight lack of ‘originality’. By and large, though, it doesn’t."

― Vast Halo, Thursday, 19 March 2026 08:38 (thirteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Okay so let’s talk about reductive thinking.

Tom’s diss here wasn’t that the Monolake album sounded dated per se. It was rather that its strenuous attempts to sound like the future (which it still sounds like tbh) itself end up having the opposite effect, carbon-dating the music by never letting the listener move past the question of whether it has succeeded in summoning a particular notion of what the future sounds like.

And there’s thoughtfulness here: in 1991, 808 State themselves sounded like “the future” - it’s tough to find anything before then that one could say fully captures what the group was achieving on tracks like “Nephatiti” - but by 1996’s Don Solaris, in their attempts to continue to represent the future of dance music, the group was reduced to repackaging other artists’ sonic innovations - albeit drum & bass and trip hop rather than Oval - sometimes in a way that felt pretty on the nose, like getting Louise Rhodes to sing on a track that sounds like a rip or Lamb’s “Cotton Wool”. And I really like Don Solaris! But it has that undeniable elegiac air of a group themselves trying desperately to wring a final drop of creative relevance out of their brand before retiring permanently to the pasture marked “nostalgia acts” (Orbital’s Middle of Nowhere, an even better album from a few years later, has a similar quality at times, though to a lesser extent).

What Tom’s putdown seeks to capture is not the perils of sounding like the past, but the inevitable risks attaching to trying to sound like the future.

I remember in a metal zine I read at the time the regular black metal reviewer really ripped apart Ulver “Bergtatt” calling it an unoriginal snoozer of a record by just another bunch of Norwegian bandwagoneers attempting to copy Burzum and Darkthone, unconvincingly.

I always thought it’s an excellent album but sometimes, I can see his point.

bad or negative reviews that sold you on an album

My copy of The Wasp Factory has a load of the absolute worst reviews in the front, would be good if a band did the same.

A photo caption next to a Dario G album review that simply stated - "Dario G: Awful".

Impossible to separate from any future mention of Dario G, his death being no exception.

The all-timer (for me anyway) is David Cavanagh’s brutal review of Monster in Mojo (and the accompanying cartoon which made Michael Stipe look seasick). It seemed especially harsh as Cavanagh had five-starred Automatic for the People a few years before that. I know everyone hated Monster at the time but this specific review really stuck with me as an insecure teenager. I was embarrassed - “everyone knows I’m an REM superfan - will they tease me if they read this review???”

Later on Cavanagh gave solid reviews to New Adventures in Hi Fi and Reveal, neither of which I really loved, and they were probably instrumental in my developing adult sense of “oh ok, it’s okay to like what music I like and not worry about what other people think”

A friend of mine once said he doesnt like Destroyer as Dan Bejar sounds "like Kenny Everett imitating Nick Cave", which I found hilarious as I can kinda hear it. Although it wasnt strong enough of a diss to prevent me from enjoying his music

My brother pointing out that Holger Czukay sounded like Kenny Everett putting on a silly German accent has always stuck with me.

[a legendary indie music biz dude who rose from a self-published zine to head a big label] Ionce blind-itemed the Hold Steady on his FB as "Charles Nelson Reilly fronting Soul Asylum" and I have never not thought about it since

Ok this one now comes to mind, Marcello describing Tom Waits' Real Gone as "bringing to mind Steve Wright in the Afternoon taking the piss out of Tom Waits". Never heard the album, mind.

The 1983 Rolling Stone record guide was brutal about a bunch of acts I was curious about and it put me off for a few years: Devo, X, Siouxsie. It made me feel bad about some acts I already loved: Doors, Sabbath, AC/DC and Moody Blues. It did permanently kill my ability to enjoy The Doors in an unqualified manner. The general valorization Springsteen/Van Morrison/heartland stuff I internalized for years, even as that strain of sincere rock was never going to really get me.

[a legendary indie music biz dude who rose from a self-published zine to head a big label] Ionce blind-itemed the Hold Steady on his FB as "Charles Nelson Reilly fronting Soul Asylum" and I have never not thought about it since

― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Friday, March 20, 2026 8:58 AM (fifty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

wow, that one's dead on. yikes

"Charles Nelson Reilly fronting Soul Asylum"

Sounds dope.

There was this one band, I can't remember the name, but some people said they sounded like Warren Zevon fronting R.E.M. and man, they were dead on.

It wasn't so much a damaging insult but before I'd ever heard a note of Slayer, Guitar Magazine wrote a review of Undisputed Attitude citing the one drawback was that "Tom Araya sounds more and more like Sam Kinison on each album".

So the first few times I listened to them, it was all I could hear

Die Kreuzen's singer actually reminds me of Kinison but it doesn't bother me.

Just like every beautiful person probably looks like hundreds of people you don't like (especially their family members).

food for thought

"this album sounds like your in-laws" ohhhhhh fuck no it's ruined

"This album contains notes of Nick Nolte, your Anthropology professor, and Corbin Bernsen's shoes. It pairs well with Yellow-Tail Shiraz"

This album is a mix of your high school bully making out with your high school crush and that metal scraping sound the mailbox makes when you open it.

*shudders*

i once read somewhere that the track "My Heart" by Neil Young, which opens Sleeps With Angels, sounded like a song a lonely Kermit would sing while sitting on a log somewhere, and ever since then I can't unsee Kermit singing it. It didn't affect my enjoyment though, as much as adjust it.

neil young is very lonely guy just thinking baout things

Heh, I have always thought the Muppets could do a killer version of 'Cripple Creek Ferry' on After the Gold Rush.

oh my god

i would love for that to exist

Kermit doing "Tired Eyes"

"Charles Nelson Reilly fronting Soul Asylum"

Another good Hold Steady one, I once heard someone on WFMU describe them as a cross between Gene Vincent and Books-on-tape.

in the same way you can sing a lot of Emily Dickenson to "Yellow Rose of Texas", my mind is now racing through the Neil Young catalog in Kermit voice

Heh, I have always thought the Muppets could do a killer version of 'Cripple Creek Ferry' on After the Gold Rush.

― Ward Fowler, Friday, 20 March 2026 15:44 (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Pleeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaasssseeeee

Cripple Creek Ferry as performed by Emmet Otter’s Jugband

To expand on that Reynolds quip for instance, it was like.. me going from appreciating this group for its relative darkness and humorless-ness (compared to other nu garage bands or whatever), but then with Reynolds quip it was like having a bunch of The Mission UK records being dropped onto my head or something.

xps good post, Tim

That reminds me of a NME report circa 1989 where they went to a goth fest, and one of the exhibits was "the phone from Merciful Release records office".

ceddy set back the progression of my ultimate love of Radiohead when he shit all over The Bends in Spin haha. this was when I was 14 and didn't know that highly idiosyncratic tastes were one of our friend's hallmarks.

Adjacent if not exactly the same -

I can't hear the Specials's "Ghost Town" now without immediately thinking of the Father Ted episode where the DJ only has that one record. And it does colour the experience of listening to it now

I came here to post the rtc solange example, Rushmore rtc post for sure

going back many posts, but I really don't think Tiny Tears by Tindersticks is "about" the crying doll. The lyrics don't make any sense if it's "about" the doll. It maybe references the name of the doll but that's a different thing. I'm not sure why such a reference would make anyone think about the band differently.

I've been enjoying Tool's Lateralus recently and a Pitchfork reviewer gave it 1.9/10. I'm not sure I've ever heard an album that bad. Did they have a habit of spite scoring back then?

i think it's a fibonacci joke

xxp it isn't about the doll, I never said it was about the doll, but everyone in the UK would have known what it was a reference to.

i saw The Church a few months ago and introducing “it’s no reason” Steve Kilbey mentioned a review that called it “puff the magic dragon on bad acid”

and while not exactly the pinnacle of music criticism, i now find it very hard to not hear the puff-the-magic-dragon-ness of what i used to think was a pretty tremendous second-tier Church song

(after playing the song Kilbey conceded the reviewer had a point)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0Kep6Ifa-E

Damn I love Seance, putdowns be damned

damn

I have the greatest respect for Nick Launay but that respect does no extend to the (damned) snare sound on Seance

(It is still a great LP!! there is no shame in being slightly lesser than Heyday and Blurred Crusade)

yeah that is hideous for sure. But it can become kind of meditative, as if Ploog was hitting a garbage can for atmosphere.

I feel like my own brain is doing this any better than a music writer could do

Just today I was like “Jim Morrison is just Frank Sinatra taking off his shirt” and “Ray Manzarek, pioneer of the ‘wearing ski gloves’ method”

I’m watching Avatar right now and I’m like “this is The Lion King (PS3)”

But maybe these disses are site specific (my brain, my experience)