Apparently, for some people the phrase “fucking awesome” is just a bit too ambiguous.
Karl Fluch, music critic at the Austrian daily “Der Standard”, may be a nice fellow not least because of his admiration of everyone’s favourite yellow people, but his writings about music are worth shit.
If you want to read his review of Sunday’s Tool concert here in Vienna, it’s here (in German).
The whole review is filled with factual inaccuracies, and while I’m not surprised, with Fluch having a certain history of knowing next to nothing about Tool but still writing about them, I’m a bit disappointed they sent him. After all, there must be at least one critic on their staff who can keep his pretentiousness at bay, at least until he’s done describing the set-list or the number of people who actually did not leave the concert before it was over.
It’s one thing to slag off a band for shoddily produced sound or a boring presentation, but criticising a concert on the basis that the songs are not your typical 3 minute pop-songs is not just stupid, it’s really fucking stupid. Especially when each of the musicians on stage played a flawless set.
In the end I do have the suspicion, that the only reason Fluch is allowed to write about Tool is a bet he made with the rest of the staff that he would mention Henry Rollins in each and every piece about them. No matter whether he’s got anything to say or not.
I watched with interest the discussion, and hey, Fluch achieved his aim. Every TOOL-Fan talkes about the review. And you have to confess that some aspects in the article are great, and even you had to grin. “Dinosaur-flatulence on the furnace!”
Well, I don’t know whether a critic’s ultimate goal is to piss off everyone involved with the music they write about. If so, well, yeah, he’s achieved that.
And yeah, he seems to have a penchant for interesting phrases, but he’s still trying too hard to be another Schachinger.