Record Reviews Suck

[JonPorobil]

Rolling Stone magazine, on Good Charlotte's new album, The Chronicles of Life and Death:

Punk pop isn't brain surgery, but there's an art to it. Good Charlotte's awareness of that fact has resulted in a string of hit singles and some of the genre's most memorable tunes of the past few years. Three albums into their career, they falter by attempting to stray from the formula they've mastered. It seems they had too big a recording budget at their disposal: Though straight-ahead rockers such as "S.O.S." and "Walk Away (Maybe)" pack greater emotional wallop than Good Charlotte's previous bubblegum punk, the Madden twins and Co. junk up several songs with unnecessary flourishes such as the string parts on "Predictable" or the New Order-ish synths on "Ghost of You." Somewhere underneath all the slick production, a handful of truly great gut-punch melodies fight their way to the surface. It's a shame that Good Charlotte have made it so easy to ignore those hooks and focus on questions such as "Did they really need to open the record with a two-minute choral number that sounds like it came from the score to Edward Scissorhands?"
-Jenny Eliscu

Personally, I'm a little shocked that this woman is reviewing for a major music periodical and actually criticizing Good Charlotte for not sticking to the same old tripe that they're good at. I just finished listening to the album, and I must say that rather than missing their finely-tuned sensitivity to what pseudopunk boys and girls out there want to hear ("Girls don't like boys, girls like cars and money"), I applaud their ambition! The strings make half the album sound vaguely like Metallica's performance with the San Fancisco Symphony Orchestra, but less aggressive.

I'm not saying it's a perfect album. Far from it. But surely Rolling Stone and its critics should know better than to discourage a bland pop band from doing something different, arguably even unique?

[bz£]

... straight-ahead rockers such as "S.O.S." ...

But surely Rolling Stone and its critics should know better than to discourage a bland pop band from doing something different, arguably even unique?

Writing songs about Blue is hardly unique; Denyer did it better.

[JonPorobil]

No, that would simply be sos.

[erik]

shocked

Music magazines aren't really designed to be supportive, they're designed to give opinions and descriptions of music. I would stop reading any music magazine if I came across a sentence like "Well, it's something new, and I hate it, but they're trying something new, so... I GIVE THIS ALBUM 4 STARS BEST OF THE YEAR BECAUSE THEY TRIED"

If you try something new and it sucks, no award for effort.

[john m]

Man, I'm gone for one night and we're talking about Good Charlotte? What the fuck.

[Caravan Ray]

Just on the subject of Rolling Stone magazine - what sort of standard is that mag nowdays?

I've been reading the Australian edition of RS for over 20 years - and in the past couple of years it has become totally crap. The main thing I read the magazine for were:
1. Good record reviews
2. Good feature stories on political or social issues that had some sort of depth and went for 5 or 6 pages, and
3. (occasionally) Good interviews with musicians

Now, however, the mag seems to have really dumbed-down. The record reviews are OK - but they seem to dish out 4-stars far too often. The feature stories are gone - no story runs more that 1 page in length now (including photos) and the only good interviews seem to originate fron the parent mag in USA. Instead - the magazine is full of things like 'fashion features' where it's 10 pages of people in expensive clothes.

Anyway - I've been thinking of checking out the US version of the mag. and maybe subscibing. Does the US version still have decent feature stories in it? Or is the decline of the Aust edition just a reflection of the decline of the parent?

[JonPorobil]

shocked

Music magazines aren't really designed to be supportive, they're designed to give opinions and descriptions of music. I would stop reading any music magazine if I came across a sentence like "Well, it's something new, and I hate it, but they're trying something new, so... I GIVE THIS ALBUM 4 STARS BEST OF THE YEAR BECAUSE THEY TRIED"

If you try something new and it sucks, no award for effort.

Well, I agree with you in principle, but the sentiment of the review was more like "Why aren't Good Charlotte being Good Charlotte?" Intentional fallacy, yo. It didn't explicitly say that their experiments weren't effective ones; it was criticizing them for venturing away at all. That was my reading, at any rate.

Anyway, my subscription is expiring next month, and I'm not renewing it. Because, like Caravan Ray, I think they aren't the mag they used to be. I don't like their political articles because to me they read more like propaganda, and they haven't had a good feature story in quite some time (in my opinion). And now I'm finding this kind of sentiment in the reviews?

[erik]

My reading of it was "The choices that they made that were different, those choices sucked."

[JonPorobil]

My take on it, and the last I'll say of the issue, is that it takes something really awful to be worse than what Good Charlotte was before they made this record. They're not great now, but it's an imporvement by default.

[thehipcola]

I generally find reviews in Blender to be pretty good. And there are more of them, which is great for discovering new music.

[JonPorobil]

I'm a little skeptical about Blender because it's made by the Maxim folks, and every cover features some sexy singer being exploited. I had a subscription to Maxim that ended this past month - I never ordered it; it just started coming in one day for a year. I read some of it, but their humor was sophomoric and their music reviews (there are usually five or six per issue) were spotty at best. Is Blender any better critically than Maxim, at least?

[erik]

dude.

boobies.

[JonPorobil]

Boobies for kids under 18 whose parents still check the mail.

[Eric Y.]

every cover features some sexy singer being exploited.

not true. one of the first issues of blender featured christina aguilera in her dee snyder make-up. there was nothing at all sexy about that one.

(at least, one of the first issues i saw)

[JonPorobil]

Touché, but I don't think that really detracts from my point.

[j$]

The question implicit was surely 'why are Good Charlotte trying not to be Good Charlotte when they haven't mastered being Good Charlotte in the first place?'

Good Charlotte doesn't desrve a page on Songfight, let alone in Rolling Stone. They are the diet version of a diet version of a punk that should never have been allowed to exist in the first place. I am sure they are nice boys, but I would stop speaking to anyone who confesses to owning and liking a Good Charlotte album. A show of hands?

[mkilly]

I think Rolling Stone is a bad magazine. Blender's tolerable. It's clever, at least, and calls a spade a spade, generally. Spin's not something I like, nor do I much dig on any of the guitar or hard rock or bass magazines. I trust New Yorker for movies and books, and Entertainment Weekly for movies and music. Generally.

[Jim of Seattle]

The whole idea of reviewing albums for mass publications is suspect to me. People's tastes in music, and even more than that, their relationship to any given style or artist is so different, that it's basically impossible to write a meaningful review.

Case in point: Today a co-worker of mine loaned me a CD of a very famous (in Brazil) Brasilian crooner, who had released an album of American standards. Gershwin, Porter, blah, blah. (Interestingly, the best track on the album was his Brasilian crooning of Nirvana's "Come As You Are"). He thought it was great. He's also Belgian, and hadn't already heard "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" 552,000 times in his life, nor had the singer. He loved it, because the songs were so great, as was the singing. I didn't love it, because for me the guy wasn't adding anything to the already enormous body of tired standards he'd chosen. I read online more about the singer and the album. People either loved it because he was doing these beautiful American songs, or else hated it because he'd left his Brasilian roots, or else loved it because it was technically flawless, or else hated it because he clearly didn't understand the lyrics he was singing. So, depending on a lot of different perspectives, your reaction to any given album could be vastly different.

I'm listening to the SF Archive (randomized) this week, and a lot of times I'll start listening to a song, and not know who it is, and I'll think "I don't like this much", then I'll look at the player and see who it is and go "Oh, it's THEM? Oh, I see now. I like it now."

And with music there are an infinite number of frames of reference, as each person will hear an album relative to everything else they've listened to, and how they reacted to it. As in "This reminds me of _____, but it's better than _______, and more mature than _________, though less energetic than _________, so I like /don't like it because at this time in my life I'm feeling _______ and _______ and ________." Of course the reviewer has her own frame of reference, which usually isn't declared in the review, so you have NO IDEA where she might be coming from.

So my point is one can't take music reviews seriously at all. Movie reviews are different, because pretty much every movie has a specific goal, that is to tell a story as effectively as possible. Just about every review basically comes down to whether the story was told effectively. But with a music review there's no set agenda, so whether an album is empirically "good" or not is much more a matter of taste.

The best music writing I read is the annual Da Capo "Best Music Writing of [year]" which is always full of fascinating stuff. Highly recommended.

[j$]

Not to rely on reviews for your own opinions is of course the aim of every reader, but it's sneaky the way you can find yourself subconsciously taking things on board.

However finding a reviewer who shares your tastes, or whose opinions repels you, can be quite useful. Not 100% of the time (cos we're all different all the way through) but it's a good guideline.

i was listening back to some old SF stuff recently, and knowing more about the musicians from the boards helps me appreciate the songs more than if I heard them 'clean'. But that's one of the great things about SF. it's one of the places people can / are forced (!) to take the time to think more about what's in front of them.

Yay, songfight!

[Caravan Ray]

The whole idea of reviewing albums for mass publications is suspect to me. People's tastes in music, and even more than that, their relationship to any given style or artist is so different, that it's basically impossible to write a meaningful review.

I don't think I agree with this. I find (good) reviews quite useful.

It's true that everybody's taste is different - so a reviewer saying - "this is good/bad/whatever..." - is potentially meaningless. However, a good reviewer will place their opinion in a context that is meaningful. They will tell you why they think it is good/bad/whatever. From there you can extrapolate what your own opinion may be. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I've been reading Aust. RS for over 20 years - and in that time the record reviews in that mag have put me on to a lot of music I may not have otherwise listened to. Those reviews became meaningful because over time I got to know the style of the reviewers and the 'flavour' of the magazine.

I recall many years ago reading a review of Submarine Bells by The Chills. I had never heard of The Chills at the time, but the review was written so clearly that I immediately knew that that would be a record I would like. I went straight out and bought it and it became one of my favourite records of all time. (NB this is the only time I've ever bought a record blindly just on the strength of a review - but I'm glad it worked out well)

So while I don't always follow reviews blindly - I do find them useful, and I don't think it is impossible for them to be meaningful (obviously though, I'd never trust a review by a Belgian).

[HeuristicsInc]

It's interesting, I think reviews can be a good thing. But sometimes on, for example, allmusic.com, I find myself disagreeing a lot with the reviewer. Sometimes I think it would be good to collect, say, 3 different reviews by different people. But I guess that's a lot of work, and also database space.

On another note, it's especially good when a reviewer can relate the new album to a band's previous ones, and say how they compare... using that information along with what you already know of those albums can be helpful.

Here's something for you, the best record review I ever wrote (this was some years ago). You can decide if it's good or not:
Adrian Belew - Salad Days
-bill

[JonPorobil]

Well the thing about reviews isn't necessarily that you're going to let a perfect stranger tell you what's good and what isn't - otherwise you could just look at the stars and come away with an opinion. The paragraphs accompany the stars so that the reviewer can give you some context. A good review will tell you what the reviewer didn't appreciate without trying to cram an opinion down you throat, like Eliscu's GC review did. Belive it or not, that negative review inspired me to give the album a spin, because she hated the record for things that I normally like.

Therefore, I wouldn't go the lengths to say that reviews in general suck. But badly written criticism is annoying.