Of The Guardian. Not crap. He's always worth reading. His review of the execrable Pigeon Detectives' new album is particularly good.

Petri Dish is beyond reprehensible. Boring, ignorant and not invested in any of the music he discusses.

The closest the UK has to PFM.

The Guardian's music coverage is risible (Kitty Empire and Stevie Chicks' very occasional pieces exempted).

Petridis writes so badly it makes me cringe. Why waste so many words on the pigeon detectives?

I think he's pretty funny most of the time, although he did once misquote me with regards to Robbie Williams' duet with Nicole Kidman:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/fridayreview ... 31,00.html

aldofarian wrote:The Guardian's music coverage is risible (Kitty Empire and Stevie Chicks' very occasional pieces exempted).

Petridis writes so badly it makes me cringe. Why waste so many words on the pigeon detectives?

Easy target, makes him look big without him having to put his own attitudes/style on the line.

Music critic equivalent of kicking over a kid's sandcastle.

It's like he's trying to imitate Charlie Brooker, but missing the point. Three crucial differences: Brooker doesn't seem in any way bothered about presenting himself as cool (if anything quite the opposite), he just amuses himself. Brooker is also passionately positive about things he likes, rather than just finding things that are easy to take the piss out of. Brooker is just very funny, Petridis only very occasionally so.

Petridis cowers in the shadow of the mighty Peter Bradshaw every Friday, a far superior critic in that he doesn't allow the economic certitude of what he's reviewing to affect his judgement. You could even say that this is all that Petridis does-he never mentions the actual music at all until at least 3/4's of the way into the review.

He does deserve some respect for the Pigeon Detectives review, although he shouldn't have let the fact that they're obviously a very easy target deter him from demolishing them more thoroughly, and in as much as he absolutely would not have written the same regarding the Kaiser Chiefs purely due to them shifting more records and having greater cultural visibility, he's barely less of a homogenizing, conservative force himself.

Week in week out, there is usually at least one reference to 'Scott Walker punching meat and screaming about Adolf Eichmann' or 'the more lumpen sections of the Arctic Monkeys fan base'. Both fill him with an equal horror, yet luckily he doesn't have to take music into consideration at all the following day when he's modelling trousers.

Isabelle Gall wrote:... luckily he doesn't have to take music into consideration at all the following day when he's modelling trousers.

Yes, Petridis's 'style' column is also terrible, although he'd have to pull all out the stops to beat Charlie Porter for outright pseudy twattery.

John Harris, who I think used to write a music column in the Friday Review section, used to get up my nose far more than Petridis. I think this was mainly due to the picture that used to accompany his articles, as his face might have been invented to accompany the words 'eminently' and 'punchable'.

John Harris. The only man ever to describe mid-70s Parliament-Funkadelic as "torture".

Petri Dish lays into Coldplay.

I find him pretty annoying, but I could say that about pretty much all rock journos. I usually enjoy his hatchet pieces though.