Metal Reviews

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Zadok, great summary of and response to Craig's posting. I'll add to this and say that I think part of Craig's complaint derives from two separate viewpoints of what scoring systems are like. We use our own descriptions, but I believe most people who see a 100-point scoring system think in terms of what a school uses for grading:

> 90: A (kickass release that's going to be on my playlist for a while)
80 - 90: B (decent job, pretty solid, and I'm pretty happy if I hear it again)
70 - 80: C (nothing to write home about, but passes muster, I could hear it on the radio and not hate it)
60 - 70: D (not great, I don't really care if I ever hear it again)
< 60: F (worthless shit)

That bunches almost everything at the top end of a 100 point score. On a grade-style scoring system, any artist who cares enough to do a decent job has a shot at getting at least 70 -- it's not necessarily us saying every album is great if we give a rating like that. If one made 50 a truly average score and not a failing score, I imagine we'd get more of a spread in review scores.

But then again, maybe not as much as one would think. Writing reviews takes time, a bit of research, and repeated listens to the album, and who wants to spend the precious little volunteer time one has available writing about something one hates? Like you and some of the other reviewers, I'd rather introduce people to what I think is good than burn cycles castigating what I don't.

Negative reviews are pointless unless you can pull a RedLetterMedia and do a great job of dissecting something crappy that everyone is familiar with. (Or I guess they make more sense in the realm of books/movies, where the pool of new mainstream material is small enough that there is the possibility of reviewing everything that comes out.)

One solution I can think of to the perpetual high scores might be some kind of collaborative ranking. Like so that we can look at the views and see "hey five of the reviewers here liked this album, maybe I should check it out even if I don't normally like power metal."

When I was reviewer for a website my main issue was that for almost all the promos I got they were decent and I gave them a 7/10 and then never listened to them again once the review was written. Made the whole endeavour seem kind of pointless.

The trouble with this is that I get little enough time these days and some weeks can't write anything at all. Asking me to listen to a minimum of six extra albums a week and provide a rating wouldn't work... Be better to get rid of scores altogether.



I know what you mean re the relistenability of random promos, writing about an album can suck the enjoyment out of listening to it - but I find that genuinely good albums don't have that problem.

Some good points from everyone here, time for me to add my two cents: I absolutely agree with the notion that the scores should only be used as a guide, but they don't seem to be doing very much guiding.

Certain reviewers here give all their reviews scores from 88-100, ok fine, they review what they like and love. However, a consistent stream of scores in the 90s on power metal albums doesn't give a reader like me, who is typically skeptical of power metal, a read on those 2-3 power metal albums per year that I absolutely should give a shot.

Reviewers I've known a long time like Zad and Charles, and checked out many albums based on their recommendations, generally score a bit lower and broader, but album after album in the 70s and 80s range still tends to blur together eventually. Scoring albums is no science though, and why should anyone here be reviewing stuff they don't like?

All this said, coming towards more consensus on two tiers for love and like might be helpful.
Such as: Tier 1--this is a genre defining album for the year and worth a listen across listener interests,
and Tier 2--this recording is good, recommended for fans of the genre only.

As a disclaimer to my comments, I am of course still thankful this site exists and that people take the time to do reviews.

Reviews are going to naturally reflect personal taste towards a band or a style of music. A power metal guy who reviews the newest Stratovarius or Gamma Ray record will likely have a different rating than a guy who is almost strictly into black metal. What really grabs one person about a particular record may totally irk someone else about it. It's the nature of the beast. Personally, I just enjoy reading honest, well-written reviews regardless of the band or sub-genre. I loathe Limp Bizkit with a fiery passion but Zadok's fun rap/review of their last record made it a particularly noteworthy entry that week. If you read enough reviews and listen to enough recommendations by a particular writer, you will get a sense of what they value and enjoy in a new or classic release. If their opinions typically match up with yours then stick with them. If not, move along to another reviewer. It's not a perfect process, but as long as the reviews themselves maintain a high level of quality, I'm satisfied.

I think I see both sides of the issue here. On the one hand, I understand that the reviewers here have very limited time and are essentially volunteering to deliver us a service- from that perspective, I don't expect all of you to review every album whether you enjoy it or not. And I understand that review scores are arbitrary and that each reviewer has his or her own guidelines for reviewing, along with their own conception of what a review score means. For example, for me a 60-70 means a good but unremarkable album, whereas for Chris a 60 is close to complete shit. But I do think think that there can be a tendency here (and on other fan review sites, whether of music, books or movies) to accentuate the positive and engage in hyperbole, especially towards bands whom the reviewer likes. Not every good metal album deserves an 85+, and it can become impossible to wade through the reviews here to actually figure out what's worth checking out and remarkable and what's just another decent and average album.

As a sidenote, I'd say one of the most irritating examples of this "cheerleader review culture" that happens occasionally on this website is the tendency to write "ALL OF THEM" or write in eight songs in the "killer tracks" section of a review. Maybe I'm an exception, but I can think of three or four albums I've ever heard in which all tracks are equally awesome. The "all of them" answer is not helpful at all for people willing to check out a new band/album but who don't want to listen through the entirety of the many albums that receive 80-100 scores here.

I don't remember exact percentages from when I was reviewing, but a lot of the things that I reviewed, I reviewed favorably solely because I was going out of my way to provide attention to albums that I personally enjoyed and wanted others to hear. In terms of being a cheerleader for random bands that I like, I was totally guilty. But that doesn't mean those ratings weren't warranted by the bands. With the number of reviews that one can produce in a given time, berating awful albums is difficult to develop motivation for. If there were forty reviewers on the site and competition for albums that I loved was an actual thing, then I would have had time for trashing albums, but they just never deserved my time because I had better things to write about. Gotta love that article for calling the site out though lol.

Ironic: Goat was way too indulgent of a h8r who was criticising him/us for being too indulgent of metal albums.

Basically if you want people who do a job on a purely voluntary basis, many of whom have a tiny amount of time to actually do it in the first place, to suddenly start producing reviews that are 'representative of the metal scene' as if that were some genuine, legitimate responsibility (it isn't), you need to start giving them money. Then they could quit their day jobs and spend all that extra time wading through all the mediocre promos they get churning out reviews which say "yeah this is lame" and which nobody reads. In my case I am wedging in one review every few weeks wherever I can, and to be honest if I felt there was an obligation to give airtime to crappy albums, I would not bother. Thank you but I will stick to writing about things that I am actually enthusiastic about, so as to avoid being sucked into a black hole of utter pointlessness.

I wonder what anybody would get out of the site if we reviewed the boring albums in proportion to the rate at which they arrive? Yeah it would probably make it more 'honest' to give it a tagline like 'the best in today's metal scene' or whatever. POINT TAKEN. But that is a banal observation considering it was turned into a blog post of that length.