"The undeniable whiff of rejuvenation"

Neil Kulkarni may sadly no longer be with us, but his words live on - most recently, in this review of the new Liam Gallagher and John Squire record by the Quietus' JR Moores.

As Moores rightly observes, Kulkarni was "one of Britpop's fiercest, funniest and most doggedly unforgiving critics", savaging the supposedly Golden Age of the mid-90s as well as its malignant legacy. Moores quotes his fellow scribe liberally and to good effect, and evidently relishes the task of serving up more shoe pie in a similar fashion.

Take this zinger, for example: "One of the best things about this album is that Ian Brown isn't singing on it. It's unlikely Squire will ever work again with that tone-deaf, nunchaku-wielding prannock who occasionally emerges from his conspiracy rabbit hole to charge £40-a-ticket for karaoke routines less tuneful than Jim Royle's anal wind."

But Moores is evidently not only smitten with Kulkarni's style - he's also taken on board the late writer's dictum to never lie (one of several principles he set out in a 2009 article for Drowned In Sound). And that strict adherence to honesty means conceding that the lovechild born of the Gallagher/Squire union is actually not quite as ugly as feared.

At the end of a week when I've seen yet more people asking (apparently earnestly) on Twitter what the point of music criticism is in 2024, this makes for a perfect answer. A good review entertains, provokes, enlightens, intrigues and perhaps even influences. Before reading Moores' assessment, I had less than zero interest in listening to the record; now, there's a (small) part of me that feels like perhaps I should.

Sadly, such reviews are few and far between these days. As Moores notes of Kulkarni, "Nobody writes like that anymore. Why not? Because market forces won't allow it and too few people care enough to challenge the tsunami of copy that's blander than Gregg Wallace's Harvester breakfast." Let's be thankful, then, that the Quietus continues to publish work by the likes of Moores in a valiant effort to buck that miserable trend.