Just noticed that of about 20 CDs reviewed on the first three pages of the Uncut website’s review section, only one has less than 4 stars; and that one, Sufjan Stevens, got three and a half.
Given that every new release by a wrinkly whose records stopped being “must-buys” 10 or 20 years back is hailed as being a “return to form”, I take what reviews I read nowadays with a backload of Saxa.
FWIW, if you held a gun to my head and asked me to itemize my music buying patterns, roughly 80% of the CDs I buy nowadays is back catalogue, with around 10% by new artists and 10% by old farts (sorry cultural touchstones).
How about you? Is there a writer of publication that has you hitting the record racks as quickly as say, Nick Kent’s wonderful Marquee Moon review in the NME did backj40-odd years ago?
But surely this is nothing new ?
I can still recall many a time when Q magazine (in its original Ellen / Hepworth incarnation) would give albums 5 star reviews – especially if that artist was one of the “features”. You would often see the same album reviewed as reissue a few years later with a much lower rating……
Because music is so personal, album reviews always have an inherent problem with who is actually reviewing – the “Punk Correspondent” is never going to give a good review to the new Genesis album, even if its the best thing they have ever done. I guess its just down to trying to extrapolate a “feel” for what the album is like from the description and ignoring the rating.
That said, with streaming these days, you don’t really need reviews to guide your purchases……
Good question. If it’s positive and I like the artist, I’m happy. Negative and I like the artist and the critic is clearly a sneering dickhead. Positive on an artist I’m not interested in, meh. Probably posing. Negative on an artist I’m not interested in…clearly a discerning fellow.
I don’t read many reviews.
Yes. I am that sucker who reads a review and will often fall for the hyperbolic guff and buy the fucker. Funny how now I write a few myself, how much the particular publication/website demands of the writer. I can pan stuff with freedom for one site, but another will only contemplate good reviews, which I guess is as much a sign of their need to foster goodwill with their market, if you will, who keep the site thus afloat. (Guess which I prefer writing for?)
These days, everyone’s a reviewer. Back in the ‘sixties, I bought albums on the strength of what I heard on the radio. Album reviews were taken seriously – both to write and read – in the U.S.A. before the U.K., where capsule reviews carried through into the ‘seventies. Looking back through old issues of the weekly music mags for reviews is pretty disappointing. Word of mouth (and the radio) was much more important than the reviews in the weeklies. Chris Welch (f’rinstance) was widely despised for not really liking “the Floyd” and giving Electric Ladyland a bad review. We liked what we liked, and if a reviewer liked the same thing we liked him, too. The N.M.E. in the seventies was the game changer – literate, interesting, and often hilarious reviews that could influence your decision to buy. That period didn’t last, and it’s maybe no coincidence that the reviewers got more up themselves when pop music slid into the ‘eighties. Paul Morley and his “Golden Age Of Pop”? I suppose if you were thirteen he may have had some weight.
The reign of the monthlies coincided with back catalogue reissues, box sets and reassessments, to lure back the demographic the weeklies had lost, and reviews started to get interesting again, just in time for the internet to render everything – including the business itself – redundant. Everyone was a critic, publishing their opinions on A****n and other open forums, with the pretentious huddling together at the high-end web sites animated by the ghosts of Paul Morley and the semiotic deconstructionists at the N.M.E.
Sorry – your question again? Oh – no.
I don’t think the internet has rendered everything redundant. I bought the Marc Bolan Uncut Special yesterday because I want to reference the subject in comfort, maybe late at night, not always via a screen.
Test Cricket, often considered in the same way, just delivered one of the greatest series in the history of the sport.
Those Mojo and Uncut Specials aren’t reviews, though. A different beast altogether.
I don’t read reviews generally, unless I’m specifically looking for something new to try.
Career overview/interview/historical pieces sometimes, if it’s someone/something I’m already interested in or acts that look to be interesting.
The part of Mojo or Uncut I take most pleasure in is their crosswords.
I pay more attention to them here than any music mag (who needs ’em now when we have each other?). I trust the judgement of The Massive in their different oeuvres more than music hacks (if they even still exist), as the body of musical knowledge an understanding between us is spectacular. Albeit particularly for BeBop Deluxe b-sides, Mahavishnu Orchestra, the Anti-Nowhere League, Elvis Costello, and Nick Drake.
“The Massive in their different oeuvres”… crikey!
This. The level of detail alone…
Yep there’s always someone here who knows something.
Don’t look at me, pal.
I love this set of bad album reviews.
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/schmidtt/rolling-stones-500-worst-reviews-of-all-time-work-in-progress/
Awesome page. Thanks for sharing.
……Eight months later
…That page is rubbish, I never liked it
😂😂😂
It is an interesting question. A bad review of a favourite artist will rarely dissuade me to buy the album in question. Occasionally I will regret not having paid heed of the review.
Uncut album of the month will often cover an artist I am unfamiliar with and has often lead me to check out an album based on a positive review Usually it works out well – occasionally it fails spectacularly – I am looking at you Joanna Newsom
A lot of people are. Middle-aged men, mostly.
Hey – check your “middle-aged” privilege, sonny.
I really enjoy reading a well-written passionate, knowledgeable, beautifully constructed review. The album itself is almost irrelevant.
I used to buy albums by artists I trusted, unheard. There have been times, I’ve bought albums unheard because I trusted a particular critic. Of course, there were some misses, but, to be honest, mostly hits. Nowadays, the best a good positive review can hope to achieve is a quick visit to a stream.
“I really enjoy reading a well-written passionate, knowledgeable, beautifully constructed review. The album itself is almost irrelevant.”
This, in a nutshell, is why I prefer reviews on this website to the print media…and yours in particular, @Tiggerlion : I haven’t gone out and bought everything you have reviewed, but I’ve always enjoyed reading them and I’ve usually come away with an alternative viewpoint to think about…
I’m the other way. The more try-hard the prose in a review, the more likely I am to dismiss the record. Silly, but a habit long ago learned from the inkies: if Morley or Kent or Murray was writing, chances are the review would be about them, and would be bollocks.
I might be being mean but it seems to me the harder the reviewer is trying, the less they actually know about how music works. You always end up with a load of stupid purple metaphors and words like “shimmering”.
Classical reviewers are less likely to be amateurs / non-musicians/musicologists, it seems to me, and so actually do a decent job of letting you know what the record sounds like.
Try-hard prose does not equal well-written in my view. It was Morley who put me off buying the NME all those years ago. I do enjoy Charles Shaar Murray, though. Kent a bit hit and miss. I like Dave Marsh a lot, though I don’t always agree with him, and Chris O’Leary on Bowie. Jon Savage and The Quietus leave me cold. Hepworth somewhere in between. And so on….
@fitterstoke, thanks. I hope you are well and coping in the lockdown.
Fair enough!
Agree but my memory of most rock reviews which are trying to be “well written” is that they weren’t. But like I say, I gave up reading them for that reason so I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of wonderful writing that wouldn’t have left me with the impression that the reviewer had never heard the music in question (or, often as not, any music at all). 😉
The mantra “anything paul morley reckons must be shite” will never let you down.
Tig’s reviews are the dogs bollocks. Unfortunately he’s usually talking bollocks, too. I enjoy his reviews more than the albums he reviews. My go-to man for reliable reviews on’t Word is, and always has been, Lodestone Of Wrongness. I flinch from his recommendations as from a sneeze in a bus queue, and he’s never let me down.
I think you mean we should take it that what Morley approves of we should abhor. As in Mozart and Minogue?
I accept that most fine of compliments.
I enjoy and enjoyed Morley, Penman etc. It made a welcome change from the blokey hard drinking hard living sad individuals that populated the inkies in the late 70s.
I’ll be alone in this, but I loved Steven Wells. His singles reviews were glorious.
This statement above is correct. Although I disagreed with him at least 50% of the time.
Morley, yes (at times). Penman was impenetrable.
Has any Afterworder read the Ian Penman book that came out last year, “It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track”? It got pretty good reviews…
I read it. It was fantastic. Even had a Twitter conversation with him on and off over a few months.
We had a lovely couple of hours tweeting about The Eagle Has Landed Xmas 2019.
I used to think that, but when Scott Walker signed to 4AD he did a great piece about it on the label’s website.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that he wrote the blurb on Slave to the Rhythm – Ian “Lovejoy” McShane had his work cut out there.
I read the reviews, but I don’t pay much attention to the scores. Rather I just look for signifiers that this might be the sort of thing I dig, or indeed not the sort of thing I’m interested in. Your tasteful but dull Americana album might be getting four and five stars across the board, but I’m not likely to enjoy it, whereas your mate’s three star chuggy Balearic dub probably would get a play at Dynamite Towers.
“Chuggy” – adds to critical lexicon. Mmm – chuggy!
Nowadays one can reference a bunch of reviews. Useful to see what is considered hot, like on Metacritic, if one is looking for tips, similarly with best of the year lists. The Afterword’s followed more or less the general consensus. Good with so many new records to be able to have something to go on. As regards reading reviews, it doesn’t matter if I agree with the judgement as long as it’s a good read. That’s what I got from the NME, some of the time.
While I will claim to have wild and delightfully eclectic taste in music, the truth is my parameters are relatively narrow. It feels like I set a course in 1980 at the age of 14 and that’s the road I still follow now. Broadly – I really like pop music and admire the craft of a catchy pop song. I honestly think it is harder to come up with Wake me up Before you Go Go than something musically impressive like Paranoid Android (say).
This got me away from my literally toxic group of friends who identified themselves mainly as punks and were hanging around with older kids who bunked off school to sniff glue in a local graveyard. I mention them because they were very, very serious about music and it sucked all the joy away.
It felt to me like the inkies employed writers who were of a similar mindset. Anything that sounded vaguely poppy was mauled or ignored completely in order to make room for something they considered Important. Even Danny Baker, who had a much lighter style than most is quick to dismiss a band based on their image or the latest single he might have heard on the radio.
To answer the OP I don’t recall being influenced by reviewers because I was not in their tent to begin with. Inevitably, I will have been influenced but not in a my-god-I-must-have-this kind of way.
I tend not to give much notice to music reviews, because I don’t know the people reviewing and what they like, so I don’t know what they are biased towards/against. Unless it’s Uncut, of course, in which case anything remotely Americana will get 4 or 5 stars. And as for the star ratings in the Uncut Ultimate Music Guides, I think they just roll a dice. It’s much easier if you are getting recommendations from people you know, as you have something to base your decision as to whether it sounds like something worth checking out, or avoiding like the plague if your mate recommending it generally likes shouty old rubbish.
My favourite rap blog, hiphopgoldenage.com, is excellent when they are ranking lists of albums. You can generally trust that if they say ‘these are the best 20 rap albums of 1995’ they pretty much will be. The only problem with the site is that almost every new album gets a glowing review.
My missus was always someone who would take as gospel anything that her mum or mates told her about a film/TV show. If one of them said it was good she would watch it at the earliest opportunity, but if one of them said it was rubbish she would instantly dismiss it, totally incapable of watching it for herself and making her own opinion.
….how can something about the golden age of hip hop contain any reference to 1995? The golden age stopped in 1991. Bloody youngsters…
I think I realised from quite a young age that what I wanted from the music papers was to find out tour and gig dates, which bands I should see, and which records I should buy.
Record Collector is the only magazine I see regularly and I do pay attention to the reviewers I respect and 5 star reviews. You can avoid errors by listening to the album for free now before buying and I must admit that more often than not I decide that I don’t actually need to buy the album.
The writer I would always seek out in NME was Edwin Pouncey, because he could almost invariably be reeled in to be given the weird shit to review that was nowhere near the flavour of the month, build ’em up/knock ’em down Birdland-type bobbins, that we were supposed to lap up. Jack Barron often had some fun dance stuff, and there was a world music boffin as well, but I don’t remember his name.
I look out for when certain AWers post reviews, because I recognize their style and know it’ll be interesting, even if not my cup of tea.
I’m going through all the album choices of 2020. There is far too much country, singer-songwriter and power pop for my liking, and the stacks of tasteful jazz leaves me a bit cold. But what I am finding really gratifying is that I’m liking albums from many different AWers, who I wouldn’t expect to like similar things to, and by contrast, not liking all albums by those I would expect to agree with. Being open to new sounds is a joyful thing.
I think the last album I bought on the basis of a review was the Fleet Foxes debut.
Since then nothing as I don’t read them anymore.
This was shared on Twitter this morning. This is proper writing and I remember reading this and thinking I need to hear these bands now!
http://www.phinnweb.org/retro/garage/articles/drug_attic.html