Annoying Things in Metal Reviews

[WNxScythe]

What really pisses me off is when supposedly "intellectual"/high quality magazines/papers/ezines review some crappy worthless generic punk album and praise it. I remember reading a quote from the NY times stating that Angels and Airwaves' (Blink 182's lead singer's new band) had moments of "sheer genius". I nearly fell backwards laughing. Seriously.

 

[cookiecutter]

Here's the difference: "mournful" is in general usage and its relationship to be emotive content of music is obvious. "Face-ripping" is one of those bullshit metal cliches with no actual relationship to anything.

Plus, it sounds fucking stupid.

I agree with you here My Man.

 

[V.V.V.V.V.]

For the record, Angels And Airwaves are not "crappy worthless generic punk" (as in, they are none of the four, really). Stop being as ignorant as the people most metalheads hate (OMG ALL DETH METUHL IS GROWLIN AND SCREAMN AND NOIZE).

I also really hate when a reviewer describes every little thing that happens in a song (I think this has been address though).

 

[Cythraul]

Art is communication - that is, it is ABOUT something. The primary purpose of any review should be to tease out what that something is and then relate the work's effectiveness at conveying it. This is metal - you already know what an album "sounds like" without needing a reviewer to obsess about the aesthetic gloss.

Generally, people read reviews in order to get a sense of what an album is actually like, e.g. its aesthetic properties and, if one gives a shit, what the music conveys or communicates. Some reviews simply aren't informative, and that includes those reviews which fail to say anything or say too little about an album's aesthetic properties. If an album does something interesting aesthetically and adds to the genre in that manner then it's reasonable to expect one to take note of these features. I mean, how the hell am I supposed to infer what an album is like by reading something like "This music represents the eternal triumph of death over life, blah blah blah." Those kinds of reviews are often extremely vague. I can certainly infer something about the nature of a particular musical work by reading these kinds of reviews, but it's not exactly clear how much. It doesn't seem like it would be much. And anyway, if one could listen to an album and justifiably make all these inferences about what the work is communicating, then it would seem as though one could infer roughly the same by reading a review which focused solely on an album's "aesthetic gloss." But of course, I'm not quite sure how you're demarcating between the "aesthetic gloss" and the other relevant properties of musical works so...

Furthermore, the following seems confused:

This is metal - you already know what an album "sounds like" without needing a reviewer to obsess about the aesthetic gloss.

One may know what metal bands tend to sound like or what properties are common to all those instances of what we call "metal music" but it certainly doesn't follow from that point that one knows what a particular album is like, certainly no more than it follows from the fact one knows that certain aesthetic properties tend to convey certain things that a particular album communicates such and such. Of course you did put "sounds like" in quotes but it's not clear what you were trying to convey with that.