Dear Editor,
I just finished reading Raoul Hernandez's review of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers'
Hypnotic Eye release, or at least trying to get through the review [“
Phases & Stages,” Music, Aug. 22]. With sentences like, "After said Valhalla, Nirvana, Laurel Canyon, all ensuing work tangles into decades of spot-the-antecedent Venn diagrams," and "Thirteenth Heartbreakers disc
Hypnotic Eye can't compare to the Angelenos' first efforts as has been suggested, Beatlesque songs with Stonesian testes, nor do proclamations of the great garage band revival hold any water in the face of these native Floridians' mid-Seventies emergence from the swamps of Gainesville," I was wondering if I was reading an album review or being subjected to some kind of acid test. How about writing a review that gives an opinion of an album without trying to shoehorn every bit of knowledge that you have about the band, rock music, the world, and literature into a slogged together group of pretentious sentences? Seriously, did you guys read this review before printing it? Proust would shy away from the sentences used.