noodles wrote:
Goat wrote:
Being self-critical, I suppose my reluctance to cut review length is based on the fact that I don't see why writing about an album in 400 words instead of 100 is significantly worse. Just because a new breed of net users supposedly haven't the patience to read the whole thing, doesn't make it inherently useless in and of itself. People still read lengthy magazine articles and newspapers, and reading hasn't vanished as a pleasure or even a skill.
I find that unless someone knows an album really really well they won't have 400 interesting words to say about it (and in general less writing = better writing, and yeah, that the internet destroys my patience). imo anything beyond the 5-6 sentences it takes to say what an album sounds like, why you like/dislike it, and maybe what the band has done in the past should be mercilessly hacked away unless they perfectly express some of the most interesting thoughts that have ever entered your head.
I pretty much agree. I always had a very hard time writing reviews at RYM unless I was intimately familiar with the work. By that point the length would be way too much to handle and would ultimately be hard to imagine and too vague to do any good.
The good Doctor Abrams (of Oprah fame!) that I had in college told me one trusim when I went to get a speech idea approved. He always told me that I could not discuss sound or audio in any way without doing so through the audiotory sense. If I wanted to do a speech describing how to set up an amplifier, I best bring one in and physically do so while explaining what is going on.
If you didn't get that, audio has the least amount of adjectives to describe it despite being our most accurate and broad sense we have. It does not do well turned into descriptive non-literal words.
I like reading reviews of things I like and I like reviews that immediately tell me of things I would not like in an album.
I like reviews in general, but I think you seriously need short sound clips embedded in there so that at the very least a sense of the words can be clarified.
For example "The melodic passages that season the more obvious themes of the song really add a sense of excitement. The end of the last chorus demonstrates this perfectly with lead gutarist Olaf Thorsen's brief flirtation with improvisation hidden far in the left channel underneath an already overwhelmingly ambitious arrangment"
(then there would be a player you could click that would play the 15 seconds long chorus line and the relevant part discussed above at the end)
Somethign like that doesn't just give an opinion, it broadens every single reader's understanding of the song, or for those virtuosos out there at least gives an alternate way of thinking about it. That's what I want from a review. How it made someone feel, not how we can compare it to some hadful of reference albums it is assumed we've all heard.
I just think sometimes with reviews it's like reading "The Annotated Watchmen" without ever having read the book or having a loose idea of what the original is about. You really need to hear it and then read the words for the words to have any meaning.
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