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Topic - Adam's Blog #3: On Reviewing
Posted: 21 Aug 2016 at 1:00pm By DippoMagoo
I never saw this topic until today, probably because it happened while I was in the hospital and before I had access to my laptop. One thing I can add: I've personally never had negative feedback on my reviews (even in one case where I wrote a terrible 0.5 star review on RYM the band seemed more interested to know why I hated the album than actually offended by it,) but I was involved with a bit of a siutation. 

Basically, back at the first site I was doing promos for, one of the reviewers made a forum post explaining he was working on a promo but hated the album so much he couldn't get through a single listen, and asked if people thought he should go through with the review anyway. He did, despite me and another person saying it wasn't a good idea, and long story short, I discovered one of my best friends on RYM loved the band in question, so I pointed him to the review and shortly after I heard from the person who ran the site that he had recieved an email blasting that review, and I knew it was my friend who did it, because he told me he had. I too thought the review was terribly written, so I did what I thought was the best thing to do at the time: I checked the album for myself and got to work on my own review. Well, surprise surprise, I loved the album but because I was a bit immature as a reviewer back then, my review looked like a blatant counter to the other review, and so I recieved a bit of negative feedback from the site before it got posted (we had a place where we worked on reviews and the admins of the site could see what the staff was working on before it was submitted,) leading to a heavily edited version being posted. 

A slightly revised version of the original review still exists on RYM, though I won't directly link it because even though I made some good points in it, I also made some of the most obvious mistakes a reviewer shouldn't make, the most obvious being that you should never write a review specifically to counter someone and make them look bad, which is essentially what I did. Yes, writing a detailed positive review can help when the only other review on the site for that album is negative, but directly mentioning other reviews in any way is an obvious no-no and back then I didn't know better. So basically, that whole situation was handled quite terribly by just about everyone involved. (For those curious, the album in question was http://www.metalmusicarchives.com/album/andromeda/manifest-tyranny, though I'd never post that review here for the reasons I already mentioned.)

Thankfully, since then I haven't had any similar situations. I have gotten a decent amount of positive feedback for my reviews over the years, though. In fact, I've gotten shout outs from the makers of my two favorite albums of all time (one of them was even for a review I specifically wrote for MMA recently) so that's pretty awesome.

My experiences are different from Adam's though, because I'm part of a team so I don't have to worry about encountering some of the challenges he faces. I pretty much get to pick and choose what I cover and know new albums from the labels will always show up for me. I do occasionally experience burnouts, but even then it's usually more struggling to come up with opening paragraphs for a review than it is not being motivated to listen to my promos. I did enjoy reading Adam's write up though, and can agree that a lot of the things he brought up on both sides would be problems.

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