I haven't been posting many journal entries lately! That's partially because I've been a little bit wayward, certainly bouncing between projects waiting for something to stick me, and maybe double-thinking basically everything I do creatively. (Those jobs were a bust, by the way. One never got back to me, and the other rejected me not through a rejection email, but through an update on a helpdesk ticket for a broken form on their website. I then got an automated email later that same day asking me to complete registration anyway, again, using the broken form. It's a fucking comedy.)

That'll probably sound like a lot of Anxiety and Self-Doubt, but it's really not. I'm not despairing, I'm pondering. I think the trip really flipped around a lot of my priorities, and now I'm wondering what I want to do, why I want to do it, and what I wanted to do, past tense, as I go back to being an Internet gremlin updating my websites and doodling between shifts at Whataburger. (I've never been to a Whataburger, but it's a funny name.)

It's probably best to go over each field in its own blog post (and some of this, I've discussed previously anyway), so let's start smaller. My album reviews. Back on Neocities, I did two paragraph album reviews of either stuff I liked or stuff people said I should cover. I started doing these again last year, and it's been a lot of fun. They take no time at all, and I get to talk about music I like. That part hasn't changed.

One of the albums I picked up in Wales was the self-titled debut of Remy Zero, a little band best known for doing the theme to Smallville on their way out. This was one of the first CDs I dug into getting home, and I found it to be a neat-sounding, definitely warped and a bit unpredictable, but not particularly memorably written alt rock record. I'll quote myself, since I don't think I'll be posting that review as it is:

This Alabama quintet produced the kind of album that Internet music fans seem to fawn over, rock music as sound exploration, a set of ten mood pieces that prompted Radiohead to bring them along on tour, but they're still a pop band at heart. By writing a 90s rock record without hooks, they don't please casual listeners, and the capital-D Discerning Music Listeners find this style old hat anyway. Another one through the cracks.
[...]
Remy should've leaned more on the vocals, really: the best songs on here, "Descent" and especially "Twister", are powered by the same deeply aching vocals as "Save Me" that'd fit them snug on a thousand teenagers' wallowing playlists. If you give this album a few listens, though, you start to grow warm to the ether-tornado-through-a-dusty-attic sound Remy Zero craft through their harmonies and acoustic guitar misery on tracks like "Gold Star Speaker" and "Shadowcasting". It's a cool album if you like eerie mope music—just don't expect to remember most of the songs by name.

I wrote the review, gave it a Good, and called it an evening.

And then I listened to it some more, and it grew on me, like a lot. There were days where I had it on repeat. I now have lyrics from it as my public Discord bio, and I might still rebrand the journal after the title of "Chloroform Days", because goddamn, does that describe my life these days. It's still not a perfect album, mostly suffering from a really slow ending, but yeah—it was never bad, just not immediate. And you might say "well that's great, Cammy, it grew on you", but that's the thing. It moved up from a Good to a Great—and I give fuckin' everything a Great.

That got me wondering what the point of even rating the record is when most things wind up a 4/5. Of course, I know why, it's to mark the album when it's not a 4/5, to praise the stuff I adore and to put lower the stuff I thought was lacking. I don't consider it grade inflation very much because I'm not elevating the stuff I find mediocre; I genuinely do really like every record I've given a Great. I suppose part of it is selection bias. I listen for pleasure, and I mostly cover albums I listen to. Of course they're all gonna skew upwards. If I was being asked to review more Bjork and Wolf Parade albums, they likely wouldn't clear the bar.

But then that got me wondering if you can truly give an album a negative review for being fine, but just not doing it for you, and if that's really the album's fault or the fault of the artist. I'm a big believer in John Peel's philosophy of "if a record gets made, it's because someone felt it needed to be made", and unless a record is truly disgusting or truly a gigantic misjudgment, someone's gonna find that record appealing. Then again, who decides what's disgusting or a gigantic misjudgment? Is it the band? The band is too personally attached. Is it the fans? They like it. Is it critics? They listen to 500 albums a year and get jaded from it.

Of course, everyone knows that an album review is pure opinion and that there's no objective metric you can use to measure albums, and in that sense, I wonder if my album reviews are more like curations, what you might like if you like this and so on. Thing is, I'm a weird listener who crosses all these boundaries, and I like a lot of things that don't really seem to cross over with each other when we're talking other people's tastes. Does that impact it? Can someone use my recommendations effectively if, in my head, two very different things go together, and they're not likely to like both of those things? (I'm leaning towards yes on that question, because it's my taste, and there's always more people like me than I figure. Still something I wonder about.)

So that goes back to the original question: if I just like most things I cover, does that render my scores meaningless? Most review sites and reviewers have given quite a few albums I really like very middling or negative scores, and is that disconnect between those scores and my routine Greats because of differences in purpose in covering the record, or is it because I'm a fan and not a critic? Can you give a negative review to an album you like? If I give Remy Zero a Good because it's so diffuse, does that betray my true feelings of really liking the record even though that might be a more accurate measurement of the album's objective merits?

I don't think it's fair to say that being a reviewer means being negative. I think it means being discerning—and I'm certainly that. I mull over aesthetic decisions and if an album has the songs or not, but I don't poke at records because I'm thinking of what they're not, I talk about them because I'm thinking of what they are. Going back to it, what Remy Zero is is a tidy slab of moaning, ghostly alt-rock that leans more on sonics than songwriting. It's not immediate, and I can see someone being underwhelmed at first or feeling it has no longevity. You do have to listen a few times for it to start really catching you.

It caught me, and it'd be cool to have turned other people onto it as well. I just have no idea if my recommendations will be useful because so much of what I cover turns into "it's really good if you're the right kind of listener". You can say that about a lot of records. I suppose that's why I've been calling them "recommendations" and not "reviews", because that's one thing I do know—I like them. (And yeah, for someone's hobbyist music writing, that's all that matters, I know—indulge me in thinking on it anyway.)