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.