Critical response

You could have been forgiven for doing a double take at seeing a review of Ed Sheeran's new album Subtract on the Quietus site. Times are tough, admittedly - but surely this was a misguided attempt to appeal to a, um, less discerning readership?

Not so. The album's release actually gave JR Moores the excuse he needed to sound off about artists (like "Our Ed") who are desperate for and delighted by positive reviews in their early days but who later adopt a belittling and dismissive attitude if/when they achieve superstardom and the critical tide turns.

Whether reviews have as much sway over opinions these days as they used to is certainly doubtful, given how easy it is to access music and listen for yourself - but totally irrelevant? As Moores notes, "the thousands of requests for coverage that cascade into writers' and editors' inboxes on a daily basis, sent from major labels, indie imprints and DIY ramshacklers alike" would very much suggest otherwise. In short, people still care what music writers think and say.

Moores has long been a champion of the artform (if it's not too grand to refer to reviewing in those terms), and this piece finds him setting out a commendably robust defence of the need for music criticism to be, well, critical. After all, what's the alternative? "Everything is as groin-tinglingly wonderful as everything else that came before it, exists concurrently, or will come thereafter ... Every review should read like the Argos catalogue's description of an elegant kettle. Most of them already do. Aspiring music journalists are advised to simply change the nouns in any given monologue from The Fast Show's Brilliant Kid."

Having taken Sheeran to task for his comments, Moores might have been expected to get on with the business of savaging Subtract. That he resists the temptation to shoot the particularly big fish in the particularly small barrel, describing the album as "FINE" (nothing more nor less), marks him out as a bigger man than me.

On a tangent, credit to Pitchfork for entitling an article about Sheeran's recent plagiarism court case "Ed Sheeran Finally Seems Useful"...