I have been reading record reviews for about 20 years now. I am almost constantly dissapointed with them. I think that there are two major flaws with just about any record review:
- The reviewer is far too enamoured with the sheer geekiness of the act of reviewing a record.
- The album is all “buzzed” up and therefore it must be good so lets talk about all sorts of tangential things and call it a record review.
As examples of these two axioms I can refer you to sites that are full of reviews that fall into one or both categories:
Pitchfork has some useful info but they are definite victims of their own smarmy reviews.
AllMusic.com‘s reviews seem to vary the most, likely due to the ever changing cast of writers. But they have much more focus on band history and discography then any of the other resources mentioned so they deserve some mention. Round about 6 months ago they did a complete site redesign, While it looks all fancy and stuff, it is so slow 90% of the time to be almost useless.
Prindle’s site suffers almost exclusively from the first problem. In fact most of the reviews just seem to be the author strutting his rather juvenile sense of humor and writing style.
In some other universe, one that seems to be populated by aging baby boomers that still buy music we have W&A’s Record Reviews.
All three sites have some useful reviews and I would rank them in order from most useful to least useful as I presented them above.
There are also many print magazines that review records. The most useful that I have found are Skyscraper and The Big Takeover. Both are almost 100% focused on indie music and as such will not really deal much with stuff that is either on a major or otherwise popular.
Some record reviewers seem to eschew any type of star or ranking system. Personally, being a highly analytical person, I find this to be a major detriment to some reviews. In theory it is hard to assess a record’s value on a numeric rating scale but in reality I find it quite easy to do so and see no reason why all record reviewers can not also
do this.
I have often thought of starting my own record review site. Though I would want it to be a site where the readers rated the records and the scores were weighted and averaged to produce top N lists and such. This model is very much like a site that I frequent called RateBeer.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.