Review Etiquette and Rationale

^ Yep, it's him, often one of the least informative and thus least useful (professional) reviewers around.I often find myself complaining about him due to his work too often failing to meet several rather important basic criteria for a review.

Kingcrimsonprog wrote: A few personal choice things, I don't like when a review scores each individual track. I have no reason to dislike it, and don't understand why I do, but I still do for whatever reason.

I give out a lot of five star reviews... but this is because often only five star albums move me to write.
If something is bad I usually don't have anything to say about it, unless it is a warning about poor quality amateur DVDs being sold as if they were big budget affairs.

As for my likes and dislikes... I think I might have accidentally stolen UMMR's style. It wasn't intentional but I did notice when I got here that I had started to think it was the best possible way to write.


I recently wrote a blog post about what I dislike, phrases in particular: http://kingcrimsonprog.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/3357/

What I also dislike is a lot of negativity, superiority complexes, trying to prove how smart you are and other general bad personality traits.

A few personal choice things, I don't like when a review scores each individual track. I have no reason to dislike it, and don't understand why I do, but I still do for whatever reason.

My absolute number one pet peeve is when a review isn't about the album. If its a story about how you went to download festival, or a rant about when the band sold out, or a question about amplifiers, or something else that isn't actually a review.

UMUR wrote: ...well there are actually people out there who like music like that...

And they're sick shits!

Nah, just kidding ;-)

I haven't heard the album you linked to there, nor wish to for that matter, but for albums such as that it is hard to respect the artist. 

Yeah and I would be lying if I didn�t admit that I find such reviews entertaining, but they are not very respectful.

I only have more because I have more stuff rated.  Most of the .5/5s are singles.  Quite a few of them are singles that were on the radio, and you guys can guess how much I hate goddamn public radio.

These are my statistics from RYM:

Edited by UMUR - 05 Jun 2012 at 3:04pm

adg211288 wrote: Yeah sometimes no matter how hard I look I can't find much to say about an album, especially ones I gave mid-range ratings to.  Of course negative reviews are the hardest to write. But I think the important thing to remember is that honesty is the best approach, and in my experience artists appreciate that. It's definitely possible to write a negative review while being respectful.  Actually thinking about it, on the talk of professionalism with reviews, I think that the ability to write a respectful negative review is about the ultimate test.