I'm going to start running music reviews on this blog, mainly as part of my weekly newsletter style posts. I sort of already have, actually -- I wrote a very brief review of Yapping Portal's "blue fifty-six" last week. I'd like to take a moment to explain my approach, and explain the scoring system I've devised.
So my basic philosophy re: music criticism is that it is more or less impossible. Music is the coolest thing that exists, and it persistently defies attempts at quantification through anything other than the ears and heart. Which is to say, I can never tell you something about an album that wouldn't be better explained by you listening to the album.
Except, well, maybe I can? I've listened to a lot of music, and I think about music a lot. I possess basic musical education, and have written many songs myself. As a result I'd say I'm probably a little more observant than the average listener, at least when it comes to the nitty gritty of songwriting, composition, and production.
Criticism can't actually adequately encapsulate a thing, but it can make you look at the thing with a little more depth. This is hard to do with music because language is a blunt instrument and music is a pinprick beam of light calibrated to find exactly the point of residence of the human soul, even if that point is in fact nowhere. I'm going to try anyway, because I'm an obsessive compulsive freak. My goal basically is to say things about music that are sort of interesting, and that maybe prompt people to think more deeply about music. This is the basic thing criticism is for.
Music criticism at large is a little too close to advertisement for my comfort. This is because we live in the era of both music as commodity and writing as commodity. I can't pretend like I exist outside of this, but I intend to resist it a little. I'm not here to recommend anything to you, to shape any zeitgeist, or assume any particular posture. I'm here to think a little too hard about stuff and encourage you to do the same.
So all that said, I've devised a scoring system, for no better reason than I think scoring systems are fun. I realize this sort of rubs against the anti-commodity stance I just took up, but rest assured: my scoring system is stupid and vague, designed to tell you more or less nothing if you haven't actually read the review. It exists for purely organizational purposes, as an offshoot of the system I'm using in my personal notes to keep track of things I've listened to.
As an offshoot of my notes, it relies on symbols available in my phone keyboard's shift menu, compatible with the plain text note taking programs I tend to prefer. It has five ratings, they are as follows.
□: The square is the lowest possible rating. It is for albums I do not like. I anticipate not using the square very often, because generally speaking I find stuff that I like more interesting to write about. Some examples of a square album, off the top of my head: City and Colour's "Bring Me Your Love," Taylor Swift's "The Life of a Showgirl," anything by Imagine Dragons.
○: The circle is the "it's complicated" rating. It could mean I enjoyed an album but it made little impression, that an album had some standout tracks but wasn't great overall, or any number of other things that reside between "I like this" and "I don't like this." This is the most "just read the review" of the ratings. The quintessential circle album is Kate Bush's "The Kick Inside," which includes several of the best pop songs of all time, but is overall sort of flat.
☆: The single star is for albums I like and think are good. These are albums I would recommend without reservation. I beg you not to perceive a single star as a 3/5, despite it residing at the mid point on this 5 wide scale. It would be more accurate to say that it covers points 6 through 8 on a ten point scale, but it would be even more accurate to say that numerical ratings of art are nonsense. I'm all about broad categories. Star albums are stuff like Nirvana's "Nevermind," Chappell Roan's "The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess," Kendrick Lamar's "GNX," Jim Croce's "Life and Times," and Kate Bush's "Never For Ever."
☆☆: The double star is for albums that knock me off my feet. The really great stuff. These are albums I love, cherish, and obsess over. The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," Charles Mingus' "Mingus Ah Um," Carole King's "Tapestry," Beyoncé's "COWBOY CARTER," A Tribe Called Quest's "The Low End Theory," Lorde's "Melodrama," The Strokes' "Room on Fire," and Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love" are all double star albums.
☆☆☆: The triple star is reserved for my absolute favourites. There is very little critical distance between double and triple star albums; the difference is almost entirely in my own personal relationship to the work. A new to me album will basically never get a triple star, but any double star album is liable to become a triple star if I spend enough time with it, or if it happens to align with some important point in my life. An example of this fluidity would be Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain," which went from 2 stars to 3 as I wrote about it for my 1971 piece and realized how much I love "Can You Get to That" and the guitar work of Eddie Hazel. Beyoncé's current trilogy is another potential example: if the third album blows my mind the way "COWBOY CARTER" did all three of them are probably going to move into the "favourites" category. I think it's important to have a category for this kind of thing, both because personal experience is a huge part of how people relate to music, and because knowing what kinds of things I consider favourites can tell you, the reader, about my perspective in general. Some triple star albums: Harry Nilsson's "Nilsson Schmilsson," all six White Stripes albums, The Mountain Goats' "Full Force Galesburg," Joni Mitchell's "Blue," Madvillain's "Madvillainy," Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense," Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka's "Eartbound OST," Thelonious Monk's "Solo Monk," Fiona Apple's "The Idler Wheel...," Sleater-Kinney's "Dig Me Out," Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain," and Kate Bush's "The Dreaming."