Review Critique

After starting to write reviews more often in the beginning of 2019, the Academy has played a huge part in my productivity and consistency with putting my thoughts out into the web. So first of all, thanks to everyone who reads/acknowledges my stuff, it's nice knowing that I'm not just writing into a void. 

After writing around 90 or so reviews in the past year and a half though, I'm starting to feel like I'm writing the same review over and over with how I tend to structure everything. I like how I review albums, and obviously I'm going to be my own worst critic, but I really want to try and up my game for 2021 since I've come to really enjoy writing about music in the past year or so. 

I generally like how I talk about albums, which is mostly objective and analysis focused with a splash of opinions here and there, but anything can be improved. I also like limiting myself to only a few paragraphs for better reader retention and to keep myself concise. Here are some of the rules I try and follow:

• Give proper background about the album. 
• Have a clear, overall opinion or topic of the review. 
• Always cite at least one song or part of the album to go along with an opinion/idea. 
• Always explain any blanket terms, like "production" or "mixing". 
• Avoid conclusions that end in "this sounds like/reminds me of X band". 

Any constructive feedback is appreciated, I just want to try and write the best quality reviews I can for 2021. So, how do any of you keep yourself from just carbon-copying reviews from album to album, and is there anything in my reviews that doesn't exactly fit or feels meaningless? 

Xephyr, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy your reviews & don't see much necessity to make any changes to your current model. You always have a well-informed & well-defined opinion that I universally respect even though I may not always see things the same way as you due to our differing backgrounds & tastes.

There are a couple of points that I'd like to make on reviews in general though:

1. I always like to see people providing some detail around their previous experience with the band in question & their back catalogue at the start of their reviews. I think this helps people to understand the reviewer's relationship with the album/band/subgenre a little better before hearing their opinion. You'll see that my first paragraphs generally try to set the scene in this way.

2. If someone includes a track-by-track analysis in their review then I either skip that section or stop reading altogether. I see very little value in putting together extravagant descriptions of every track for people that more often than not have no prior experience with the release & therefore have no sense of context. It simply doesn't mean anything to me & comes across more as a platform for the author to show off their writing skills more than anything of value to the reader. 99% of the time when I read a review I just want to find out what the overall album sounds like & couldn't care less if track 5 has a longer breakdown than the tracks around it or the closing number is the fastest on the tracklisting. I'll find that out if/when I listen to the release myself.

3. I find reviews that recycle information from the internet or other reviews to be pretty pointless.  I'm looking to hear people's personal perspectives & don't want a summary of what other people think or of the content of the band's Wikipedia page. A lot of the time when you read reviews that take this approach you find that the reviewer's opinions on the release tend to follow the common consensus too & that defeats the purpose of reviewing an album. I like to read fresh opinions that ask new & interesting questions & for that reason I'd encourage people not to read up on releases before reviewing them if at all possible.

I agree that there is probably very little you need to change, Xephyr as your reviews are always very well-written and give a good idea of what to expect from the release.

As a non-musician I find it difficult to talk about the technical aspects of a release, so I tend to focus on the atmosphere and emotion of a release (these are the aspects that interest me anyway) rather than chord progressions, song structures or what key the song is in.

I am no great writer, but I do enjoy it. However, I don't always feel the need or inclination to write an essay about a release, so often throw in single paragraph reviews which hopefully will at least fulfil Daniel's hopes to get a flavour of a release. I know some people don't approve, but surely it's better than a release having nothing written about it and to be perfectly honest , I just switch off to really long-ass reviews as they either get too technical, stray from the point or just become boring.

Finally, I also like to get an idea of how the reviewer relates to the release and really enjoy reviews that have a personal touch and may relay some interesting tale of metal fandom that doesn't really says much about the release, but a lot about the writer and their life as a metalhead.

I don't have much to add here, so will simply state that I really enjoy your reviews Xephyr. That said, I say do whatever you enjoy doing, otherwise you risk the dreaded burnout.

I think I've done a good job of avoiding burnout thus far, I never completely force myself to listen to new albums or write X amount of reviews a week. I revisit music that I actually feel like listening to whenever it pops into my head through the day, so I've been able to listen to over 250 new 2020 albums and over 900 in total in the past 2 years without necessarily feeling put off by it. 

I wish I could do more of Sonny's review style so I could be more casual about reviews on occasion, but whenever I start writing something in that vein I either end up writing a multi-paragraph review or get one or two sentences in, run out of things to say, and scrap it. Just not my style. 

Track by track reviews are interesting, since I share the same opinion as Daniel. My eyes just glaze over and I keep scrolling. Technically my Blackwater Park is a track by track review, but I still structure it in a way that reads like an analysis instead of a bulleted list. I think it works out, but it's a lot of work if you really want to talk about every single one of the tracks. 

I've been trying to get acquainted with more music theory related stuff because it goes along with how I write, but having never taken any classes or anything it's pretty tough to truly talk about music in that way. Nor do I really want to. I think that the objective music theory aspect can be interesting but loses its luster after a while because at the end of the day the question is always if you thought the album sounded good, not how many different chords there are or 5th major harmonic pinches the guitar did. 

Well, it's been a year and while I'm sure it'll be more of the same response as last year, I definitely successfully upped my game from 2020. I wrote less reviews overall this year, but I feel like the quality of my stuff has continued to climb. I noticed that I'm writing longer reviews in order to get my point across, normally ending up with 4 pretty substantial paragraphs during any review, some being even longer. I don't think that's a bad thing as it shows I generally have more things to say about the album, but I still try to limit myself to that 4 paragraph zone in order to stop rambling and not make it look daunting to the reader. I started valuing conciseness this year as my reviews got longer and longer. 

I also feel like I didn't end up finishing as many reviews this year because my standards skyrocketed, which is a good and a bad thing I guess. Actually, I just went back to count and 41 reviews was more than I thought to be honest, so this year was more productive than I thought. Of those 41 reviews I can't point to any that I'm not happy with, apart from the Black Metal Clan Challenge where I was forced to write about albums that I didn't have a lot to say towards, like Thy Mighty Contract and Black Vampires of Imperial Blood. Clan Challenges and Monthly Feature reviews have proved to be incredibly difficult for me, as sometimes I just can't figure out the base to center the review around. I've tried to do the more off-the-cuff method, but just like in 2020 it's ended up with me reverting back to my normal style of writing as I feel like I'm not really providing anything of value if I'm not structured. 

Highlights this year were:

• Dog Fashion Disco's Adultery which took months of thought and 3 full re-writes to get right.
• Lucid Planet's Lucid Planet II for being incredibly detailed and getting noticed by the band for the Infinite Feature.
• The vocalist for Ravenous sending me a nice message about my review of Hubris and (surprisingly) agreeing with one of my criticisms. 
• My review of Kaatayra's Inpariquipê making the front page feature of RYM. 

Plus a bunch of other more lengthy reviews like Frontierer's Oxidized or finally getting around to Ocean Machine's Biomech. I'm happy with how my review process and output is going so, honestly, I doubt I'll make any sort of goal for 2021. Forcing myself to write more reviews or finish X amount of Clan Challenges just seems like a way to be in perpetual writer's block, so maybe I'll make a point to try to write more creative, unique reviews like Adultery more often. Also to just have more confidence overall, since I stop writing about albums I really enjoy because I feel like my thoughts or conclusions aren't good enough. 

I've also written less reviews in 2021 than in 2020. The official and unofficial reviewing challenges that I've done in 2020 were quite a ride, but after doing them, I've decided to tone down the amount of time to write reviews so I can focus on other accomplishments here and in the outside world, especially now when I have to be thinking of feature release submissions and good songs for the Revolution playlists. My reviewing quality has stayed comfortably the same, in my usual 6-paragraph structure: two introductory paragraphs (mainly one describing the backstory of the album or the backstory of my experience with the album, and the other describing the album's aspects), 3 paragraphs about the tracks (not everyone likes the track-to-track thing, but I try to keep it interesting, even sometimes adding a story to go along with them), one concluding paragraph (a final summary of my thoughts and possible recommendation to others), and finally, a list of favorite tracks and highlights.

Wow, you guys put a lot of thought into reviewing to actually be able to have a "style". I tend to just try to put my thoughts down as coherently as I can with varying degrees of success. I don't try to overanalyse albums as I think people need to make up their own minds, but rather just try to give a flavour of the release so that maybe people can judge if it might be something they would enjoy or not. As I've said before, I have zero musical talent and know nothing of musical theory, but I do know how music makes me feel and I figure if I can communicate that to others then it may help them discover something new (and maybe entertain a little at the same time).

Also, with the site being relatively new, we still have a majority of releases with no reviews, so I figure it's better to say something about a release, even if it's only a paragraph or two, rather than nothing. Maybe this approach sometimes makes me sound like an asshole who hasn't got a clue what he's talking about, but frankly I don't care. Hopefully, at least my passion for the subject comes across if nothing else! Either way, it's what I do and will continue to for as long as the music moves me.

I actually don't ever plan to write a review any more as I simply don't have the time. What eventuates is that I start to write a short synopsis in the forums & sometimes find that I end up writing so much that it organically becomes a review, at which point I'll cut & paste it into the release page. I like it that way because it essentially means that I'm never under pressure to write a review. I just end up writing them when a) I have the time & b) I have a lot to say. I don't even need to make a decision on whether or not I'll do it. It just happens naturally.