Names withheld to protect the clueless.
From an email I sent to a friend of mine who I often cackle about this sort of industry bullshit with:
Oh, how I hate this band based on the press release before I even hear them… let me count the ways….
Unpronounceable series of letters/weird-ass characters and glyphs for a name: check.
“Expansive musical tastes and range of inspirations”: check.
Said range includes Hunter S. Thompson: check.
Inspired by “dreams/nightmares”: check.
Apparently trying to emulate the worst aspects of bloated and self-indulgent NIN from the last 20 years and saying so as if it’s a good thing: check.
Mentions little known pioneer of the genre for hipster cred: check.
Claims to be “avant-garde”: check.
Namechecks Kanye West: check.
Mentions “positive vibes”: check.
Mentions this one time he was an intern [read: coffee-fetcher] at a studio where something successful once happened: check.
Use of “wunderkind”: check.
Contains the meaningless phrase “groove-based songs”: check.
Contains the cliche phrase “darker electronic landscape”: check.Funny thing after I made myself skim the tracks despite all this: they’re not bad, actually. Not stupendously terrific [not that I give a fuck about what might pass for great electronic anymore anyway], but not terrible as his press release’s buffoonery would indicate.
Shoot the fucking publicist. Or, more likely, the girlfriend pretending to be a publicist.