I gotta fuckin' write something, this Art Fight stuff is a grind. Conveniently for the journal, to give us two whole posts this month, I have something to ramble about! Let's talk album reviews, because I recently hit a really special milestone with them: 100 entire albums in the database!
To review or not to review
When I was putting together the brand new mari.somnol on Macintosh Garden, bringing back my album reviews (and game reviews from cammy_v1—we'll do more of those next year, promise) seemed like a really natural fit for the big smorgasbord approach I wanted to take with it. One of the things I started doing pretty early into my Neocities career was album reviews, these little two paragraph sorta-advertisements (or PSAs, depending on the review) for whatever albums I liked and had been listening to at the time. I took requests a few times, I really enjoyed writing them, I covered some then-recent albums even, but for whatever reason, I left them on Neocities when we moved to our own hosting. 36 in total were written that first year. All but two of these has been returned to the database, as I hated how they came out for a while and now I like them again.
They never truly left, though. When I was working on mari_v2, I cloned my Neocities site and hid it in the files as the place you get sent to if you encounter a 403 Forbidden on my site (I was super into hiding stuff around my sites at the time, page comments, secret extra content, that sorta deal). A couple more reviews were written for old time's sake. On various versions of the Somnolescent Gopher, the album reviews again came with, occasionally getting little rewrites and one or two more being added to the mixture. It was still never something I really advertised though, more sort of a throwback when I was feeling fuzzy for Neocities.
Then came mari@macintosh.garden, and I wanted to bring the reviews back proper. Of course, at the time, I was still using entirely static HTML, so each artist got their own page I had to manually maintain and update for layout changes. I'm an idiot and I enjoy pain, so I dutifully did this, but it tempered my desires to write a ton more. 16 more were written between June 2023 and March 2024, when I came back from the Wales trip, a good chunk of those being written in transit on planes and coaches.
And then my learning PHP for Protoweb blew the doors off the whole thing. Suddenly, I didn't have to maintain dozens of different artist pages. I could just have the one read.php script and have it pull reviews from a database exactly as requested. I got the idea to integrate rewritten and updated versions of the Rediscovering entries into the mix (since that was how I covered albums between 2020 and 2022). Suddenly, I was flush with entries. Suddenly, I could write one a day, just add it as a new row in the database and upload the cover art. Suddenly, I could see reviews on their own, sort by year, sort by rating, see it on nofi, see it on lofi, and soon this year see it on hifi. Suddenly, an RSS feed of entries was realistic.
This has all led to a golden age of quick and dirty music rambles. Not only am I psyched to have some more 2018 Cammy stuff knocking around my site (I'm still really gooey and precious about my old work, given how little of it I even have anymore), but I've started considering the possibility of eventually covering not just my entire music library of over 400 albums, but taking more requests, exploring more music, and having this gigantic, sprawling encyclopedia of music according to me around. Because it's such a simple concept, I've not really talked about my perspective with it, but I feel that's in order now that I've reached a hundred of the damn things.
What I'm actually rating here
Maybe it's easier to say what I'm not rating, firstly. I don't rate albums by how novel or important they are. You're not listening for historical significance, you're listening because it brings you satisfaction, usually pleasure, but also catharsis or intrigue, or maybe multiple of those. I also don't rate albums by how big and experimental a statement they are. Bands are great vehicles to masturbate in, but eventually, someone's gonna peek in your car, and I'm not rewarding someone driving with one hand.
Here's roughly the questions I'm trying to answer with each review:
- How much did I like this album? (natch)
- How well did the band succeed at making the album they were trying to make?
- How much will fans of the style get out of this album?
I feel like people who are passionate about music use the word "bad" way too liberally. There are those who will say with no hint of irony that something not conforming to someone's concept of musical and lyrical quality doesn't make it bad, but will not extend that same courtesy to bands they hate. This is just a given, given that it's all someone's opinion anyway, but I do think that people still far too often judge music based on how cool it makes them look listening to it.
I'm a big believer in the John Peel philosophy of "if it didn't speak to somebody, it wouldn't have gotten made". It's probably funnier to just completely trash a record, but I only do that if it viscerally displeases me, and very rarely does a record actually do that. Otherwise, I only give it a middling score, because most albums have musical importance to someone, that someone just isn't me.
More honest music fans can recognize skill and quality work in even the most uncool, square, commercial places. People like to separate music out in these two worlds of "the underground" and "the surface", but culture hasn't worked like that in some time, if ever. Your childhood favorite indie musician recording in his parents' basement can get featured in a Lexus ad. The most experimental and weird bands were getting big label bucks in the 90s and 2000s to go and be "the next Nirvana", a hilarious notion applied to everyone from The Vines to Helmet to fucking King Missile. The 90s in general gave a lot of weird local favorites a quick spot of sunlight, and a lot of those bands went and peed on a major label's leg in the immediate aftermath. It was funny, and they aren't gonna miss the money anyway.
This is also why I don't call them "reviews" with the reviews themselves, even though that's what they are. I prefer the term "recommendations", because, although it's a bigger word, my goal is to focus on the albums that will appeal to someone who shares my particular tastes. Whether those tastes are too narrow to be useful or too wide-reaching to be useful (which has caused me grief in the past), that's up to you to decide. If I can turn anyone onto anything I like, I'm pleased.
How I write the reviews
Have you ever read a review from Pitchfork, and you forget it's supposed to be about the music and not how many other bands the author knows? Have you ever read a review on Sputnikmusic and the author literally goes track by track to tell you how much they like each song and why? I have. Too many times.
I keep my reviews to two paragraphs. The length of those paragraphs can differ, but nevertheless, I consider brevity a virtue and attention span a premium. Of course there's many, many things I can say about an album that I can't fit into two paragraphs, but the goal is to turn people onto stuff, not to write an essay. To that end, I try to keep comparisons to other bands to a minimum (that's lazy writing), and I try to be descriptive with what the album actually sounds like to listen to. I want someone to be able to get the gist of a record entirely from my written description, to appeal to a new listener through that description, while also having my opinion be apparent and entertaining, ideally.
If that sounds like a tall order—it can be. I'll sometimes have to sit with a review for a bit and play with it to make sure I like what I'm saying, and sometimes I spot things I could've worded better. I try to avoid editing reviews after I've done them, but it does happen and I'm not apologetic when I do.
How I pick albums
My selections are a little bit random right now. I have the stuff I'm really into, and of course it's easiest to write about albums I either know really well or are embedded in at the moment. I still try to shy away from really popular albums unless my opinion significantly differs from popular opinion on them, but as my focus changes from mere curations from my music library to covering everything I possibly can, it's inevitable that I'll be talking more about Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Aphex Twin, bands and artists people have actually heard of, and possibly agreeing with consensus.
I get the urge to do these deep dives into an artist's catalog sometimes, just because covering everything a band's made is satisfying to me in completeness. One of those two Neocities-era reviews that haven't been added to the database yet is R.E.M.'s debut EP Chronic Town, and that's because I'm actually holding it for when I cover R.E.M.'s music as a whole. Those take a bunch of time to do, and they're probably a bit repetitive to read, but I think it's definitely worth it.
The albums I'm covering right now err very much on the side of constant Great scores because I don't keep a lot of albums I don't like around (why would I). It probably makes it seem like I really like every album, but then I add some more Rediscoverings and the piles for Eh and Good fill up, and I'm happier with the balance. When I'm eventually covering more new finds than stuff in my library, I expect the scores to fall a little more unpredictably as well. Either way, I like music! It's not often something truly repulses me. I think I can still be critical of an album while still liking it—in fact, I think the people most aware of a work's flaws are its biggest supporters.
Where I'm going next with it
Speaking of Pink Floyd and Aphex Twin! I've recently been soliciting suggestions from people on Aftersleep, Worlio, in Discords, and of course here at home for albums to cover next in celebration of the big 100. Helps to break up the monotony for me and for you when it's not all just albums I know I love, yeah? I've got a nice, varied selection here, everything from Australian indie pop courtesy of Savannah to Elvis Costello courtesy of Caby to some Elliott Smith thanks to Davathan in Protoweb and a, uh, whole bunch of electronic shit I've never heard of thanks to bonkmaykr on Worlio (no idea where to start with any of that, but much appreciated!).
I've got plenty of interesting albums to talk about from my own playlists as well, though. There's a record from a guy named Josh Joplin that I was big into circa early 2020 on the list called Useful Music, and he's got this training in real classic American Songbook folk, and the album mixes in power pop and some really hilariously dated early 2000s adult alternative production (vaguely hip-hop-y drum loops!), it's a real fun one. I've been meaning to cover Music For Films, Brian Eno's second foray into ambient, all consisting of music cues intended for movies. There's some MP3.com bands still kicking around my Pandora! I've not even finished talking about all the classic Cammy bands like Failure, Silversun Pickups, Pixies, the Breeders, certainly Nirvana—no loss at all for what to cover.
The hardest part sometimes is just listening and then writing the thing. When I'm not inundated with Art Fight stuff between shifts at work, I'll hopefully get on it more consistently again. Less than two weeks left!
(Oh, and review #100 was One Part Lullaby by the Folk Implosion, before I forget.)
