Music Critics Are Dicks - Puke, Poetry & Imagine Dragons

I started writing a review for a band called Imagine Dragons a few months back and never finished it. I never finished it because by the time I got to thinking about what I would write, I felt like such a terrible dickbag that I fully severed my relationship with the music website I had been writing for, for over three years.

I just opened up the unfinished file because I saw that Imagine Dragons were playing at Launch Music Festival in Sacramento later on the year. Below what you will find is why I cannot be a music critic anymore. Something, musically, so inoffensive and not really all that evocative, one way or another, made me just spew bile all over it. Not even real “I just ate spaghetti” barf, just uneventful, acidic bile. No poetry whatsoever. So yes, I think there is something slightly beautiful about puke, but there is absolutely nothing beautiful about hyperbole just because.

I started out listening to each track and writing down my initial thought or feeling.  I got as far as track 11 before I realized I needed to stop, think about why I had predetermined that this album wasn't cool enough for me and walk away.  Who would you rather be: the guy raging balls, jumping up and down, grinning like a fool and screaming the words to every song with all your friends, or the skeptical dickhead in the back - arms folded, loudly sighing and making sarcastic comments with the person next to you that you wish you were fucking but don't have the balls to even try.  I know what I am.

Imagine Dragons – Night Visions 

1. Radioactive – car commercial edm puke 
2. Tiptoe – “let’s make an 80’s song”-said the transparent, soulless band with no identity 
3. It’s Time – oh I know why I feel like ive heard this song before, it’s one of those “I go to a cool church” songs 
4. Demons – throwaway 
5. On Top of the World – some sort of fucking Vampire Weekend walkabout tra-la-la bullshit 
6. Amsterdam – this kind of rocks, so why does it not really feel like it? 
7. Hear Me – not a terrible song 
8. Every Night – an actual terrible song 
9. Bleeding Out – this piece of music does not need to exist 
10. Underdog – hey, I would listen to this. Postal Service-y without the moleskin journal entries 
11. Nothing Left to Say - ehhhhhh.....