Decemberists
OK, so I've got a hunch. I think that the odds of me genuinely liking and becoming friends with the kind of person who finds the Decemberists to be nauseating, pretentious, or otherwise terrible are very, very slim.
I mean, that kind of person writes things like this:
You get the sense he scans encyclopedias for his cautionary chides, casually selecting tales famous as the boogeyman in their native lilt and fashioning them into cuddly Wes Anderson pirouettes, an indefensible, objectifying condescension born of bravado and ignorance. Meloy is so embarrassed to be from Helena—and America generally—that he wraps himself in pasts and cultures he could never understand, in an effort to co-opt their dramatic import.
Did you see the slam the Village Voice gave their performance in NYC? The above quote is from it. Except, see, it wasn't a slam on the band or its music or its live show as much as a spiteful attempt at being cooler than Colin Meloy. Stereogum linked it and started a firestorm in the comments between the lovers and the haters. And the haters all sounded so shriveled and mean.
Ott's words to Meloy:
I don't care if you're Slowdive or Sigue Sigue Sputnik: you will regret every minute you didn't spend laughing. Lighten up.
How 'bout you try taking your own advice, hmm, Mr. Ott?
(read the whole mess here)
Getting back to the point with which I started - sure, their sound, aesthetic, and hammy stage antics aren't everyone's cup of tea, and Meloy's definitely got the Anglophile thing going on a little, and they're not my favorite band in the whole world, but I do really enjoy them. I guess I just can't understand where this kind of sentiment comes from: "but when you have a frontman so oppressively irritating as Meloy, so wince-inducingly ironi-precious and egotistical, without any hint of genuine self-effacing humour (such as Morrissey's), it is difficult to pay due attention to anything else."
This person probably also hates the environment and is a political nihilist.
And smokes like a chimney.
UPDATE: OK so it turns out that one of my very good friends can't stand the Decemberists - and she's still awesome. She is also not the kind of person who would use the word "ironi-precious". And B says that Chris Ott is indeed a blowhard, but one who cares deeply about music. Glad to hear it - but he could definitely stand to take his own advice to lighten up.