I'm with Will here....it's one thing to "not like" an artiste or band... that is purely personal taste.

But if a band or artise who you like (or even one that you don't like!) turns in what you consider to be a below-par performance in an environment where they have relatively large "exposure" then you should be prepared to put up a reasoned critique highlighting what you consider to have been "wrong" with the performance, rather than just slagging it off with a single word.

For example, the first time I heard "Fleet Foxes" (who've recently been "discovered" by Mudcat!) was about 2 1/2 years ago on Jools Holland and their performance was dire. The reason it was dire was that they were singing in a *completely different key* to the one they were playing their instruments in. It sounded horrible, and they didn't pick it up until halfway through the song, when their voices all shifted into the right key for the instruments over the course of 1 1/2 bars!

There was a YouTube clip of it for a while, but it seems to have disappeared now.

THAT was an OBJECTIVELY dire performance, whether you like "Fleet Foxes" or not. Anyone coming across them for the first time wouldn't have had a good impression at all.