Some thesaurus-toting critic goes out of his way to blast Pelican (and Mastodon, Baroness, amongst others), while tossing a backhanded compliment at "real" metal bands like Gates of Slumber.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-11-24/music/pelican-s-sketchy-metal/1

yay for useless, dismissive critics and pretentious rags.

He sounds like some lame Anus.com reject.

Man, 2/3 of that article was completely useless. It seems the guy was bringing in random trivia and name dropping to fill space & to flex his "metal knowledge" so people actually take his snobbery seriously.

BTW - Am I the only one who finds it a bit hypocritical he uses the phrase "faux intellectual"?

Where did you say that piece was from? The Village Idiot?

I can't help but feel I know less about the writer's opinion after reading the article than I did before.

My own response:

"#
bitter on Tue Jan 12, 2010, 12:00:15, says:
you wrote, "The listener is left ultimately with a pointless technical pissing match." funny, in summing up your article, i'd suggest that "the reader is left ultimately with a masturbatory thesaurus fueled piss fit." some famous English playwright once quipped, "brevity is the soul of wit." you might want to tattoo that on your forehead.
"

Justin Foley of The Austerity Program wrote a big response on MetalSucks found here.

The article is way over the top although he happens to be right - Pelican is pretentious bullshit.

Written by jupitreas on 13.01.2010 at 00:28

The article is way over the top although he happens to be right - Pelican is pretentious bullshit.

the article is horribly ironic, in that regard. using pretentious bullshit to ridicule pretentious bullshit for being pretentious bullshit.

Its typical Pitchfork style stuff.

Now, I think all music journalists are guilty of being at least a little pretentious at times but Pitchfork made pretentiousness into an art.