Nit Picks, Pet Peeves and Guilty Pleasures 1.3: Reviewing The Review

Reviewing the Review Part 4d: The Rubric

Category 5: In The End...

Variety: One of the most important pieces of creating a good album is making it exciting from front to back, and the easiest way to do this is to create an album with a variety of sounds, so that the listener is kept on the edge of their seat, excited to see what the band will through at them next. Nobody wants to hear an album made of ten songs that sound exactly the same, are built around the same structure and occupy the same emotional space. In order to be awarded a high variety score, an album must have multiple instances in which the sonic or emotional textures are changed, and little change in tempo is always welcome.

Lasting Impression: Lasting Impression is pretty simple- it’s an entirely subjective category that looks at how much of an impression the album made on me. Was the entire listen enjoyable? Did I want to listen to it again after it ended? Did I ever find myself in the middle of Theory class just dying to hear that one sequence of songs from the middle of the album? The Lasting Impression score will often go up if there was something really creative or exciting on the album that I had never heard before, or if it in some way manages to separate itself from the pack. Conversely, the score will go down if a band constantly rehashes material that other bands have covered, even if the album is a particularly good example of that material. Lasting Impression is the final word on whether or not you should buy the album, since it attempts to look at the whole album, and asses how much of a mark it left on me and how exciting the album the album was as one coherent piece.

Nit Picks, Pet Peeves and Guilty Pleasures 1.3: Reviewing The Review

Reviewing the Review Part 4d: The Rubric

Category 4: Album Presentation

Album Structure: This looks at how well an album is put together. Do the songs flow nicely between each other? Are transitions logical? Is it too long or too short? This rewards a band (and a producer) that not only know how to write good songs, but knows how to put them together to make the entire album an enjoyable piece of art. For an album to get a good score in this category I have to be able to say that I enjoy listening to it front to back without skipping songs or gravitating towards certain parts of the album. The album should come together as whole piece that has a consistent flow and narrative. It should have carefully placed high and low points and should make listening as engaging as possible.

Production: Production is a pretty simple category- it takes into account how the album was produced. This category does not look at whether or not there was a lot of money thrown into the production of the album, but it looks at how well the album is produced. An album can be marked down for being over-produced as well as underproduced. Basically what I’m looking at here is how good everything in the album sounds. Does the producer bring all of the instruments and effects together to make a compelling and cohesive sound, without sacrificing the integrity of each individual part? Production is a particularly important category because it can affect other categories, most notably album structure and emotional landscape.

Nit Picks, Pet Peeves and Guilty Pleasures 1.3: Reviewing The Review

Reviewing the Review Part 4c: The Rubric

Category 3: Emotional Impact

For me, the Emotional Impact of an album is the most important aspect of an album. For an album to really bring me in, I need to feel some emotional connection to the music, whether it be through the music, the performance or the lyrics, “emotion” is very important. Emotion does not just refer to dark or sad emotions (I’m not talking about “emo” here), it refers to any emotion that can be felt through the music. It might be sadness, it might be anger, but it could also be excitement, or happiness. In order to look more closely at emotion in music, I split this category up into “Energy” and “Landscape”

Emotional Energy: Emotional Energy looks at how strongly the album makes you feel the emotion that it is trying to convey. If the music is fast and energetic, emotional “energy” looks at how pumped up the music makes you feel. If a piece is sad, this becomes a measure of how directly you feel that sadness. A band might be rewarded for using melodic and harmonic ideas that do a particularly good job of complementing the emotion mood of the song, but it may also have to do with the lyrics, or the individual performances (particularly of singers).

Emotional Landscape: Emotional Landscape evaluates how well an album creates a particular mood or world. This category looks at how interesting and immersive that world is and how well it is brought to life through musical ideas, lyrics and production. For me this is a particularly important piece of an album, because one of the things that makes music most powerful to me is it’s ability to take me out of my world and immerse me in the world of the music. That is when I am most impressed by an album or song, when I feel a deep connection and involvement with the music. This category is most important for concept albums and musicals, as it looks directly at the world of the album and evaluates the bands ability to create that world.