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.