Sunday, March 15, 2009

The struggle of reviewing something extremely polarizing


Link
I know I keep linking to music reviews from the same site, but I think a lot of the writing on CokeMachineGlow is entertaining and intriguing, if needlessly wordy and pretentious. You usually just have to pretend the reviews have nothing to do with the album in question. This particular review brought up a question about criticism: If something's so extreme that the vast majority of people will not like it, do you have to qualify your review with warnings? And what;s the difference between liking the idea of something ("sounds good on paper") and actually enjoying the thing itself?

Using "Cities of Glass" by noise rock band AIDS Wolf as a starting point, Calum Marsh discusses the dilemma of recommending such an inaccessible album:

"Few bands, even those who specialize in abrasive music, come off as such an outright affront to standard conventions of taste and sensibility. Make no mistake: Cities Of Glass is a fucking assault. This is the kind of album that critics love to review because they get to come up with all sorts of creative ways of saying that this is loud, noisy music that is difficult to talk about in any context other than just how loud and noisy it is. Which is a shame, really, because for me what’s most exciting about Cities Of Glass is that it raises a lot of questions about the nature of not just music (“Is noise really music?”; “Are certain kinds of sounds inherently more appealing than others?”) but, more interestingly, about music criticism and the problem of taste. For instance: I generally like this record, and would recommend it to others, but I know perfectly well that most people—and not just Joe Top-40 or your grandparents, but discerning listeners who think of themselves as people with “good taste” in music—will not enjoy it."

Marsh avoids describing the loudness and noisiness and instead focuses on how polarizing the loudness and noisiness is. Based on the above average score and lack of complaints besides "other people wouldn't like this", it's interesting to see in the final paragraph that there's a reason he doesn't describe the sound in depth: he doesn't actually like it. "I think the album does a lot of really interesting things and has a lot going for it, but it isn’t very much fun to actually listen to." This review gave me a similar feeling: it asks some interesting questions, but isn't very effective in describing anything in particular about the music. I wanted him to take a risk and tell me why, regardless of what most people would think, this music is potentially worth listening to.

This review has almost no opinion, and yet I still found it worth reading. Hmm...

1 comment:

Ellen Jilek said...

It's interesting, the way he uses the album to go off on a related tangent. And yeah, even though he didn't say much about the album, I think it was worth reading as well.