24th
lookingformyshadow asked: What do you think it needs a good review? How do you do to convince someone to listen or not listen to an album? Do you have a like a basic structure and from that you start writting or you just start writting whatever you want? Is it difficult for you to express yourself? Another question that has nothing to do with this: how imporant is for you the live performance of a band or artist?
I think the most important thing to do with a review is to figure out what you think is the most interesting thing about your subject, and what it does well, or what it doesn’t do well. Your job in the review is to convey those thoughts. It’s good to have a sense of what the artist is attempting to do - it’s generally a bad idea to give someone a hard time for failing to do something they weren’t trying to do, but at the same time, I think it’s fair to question whether an artist is working up to their full potential and maybe should be working harder/aiming higher. If you’re going to be negative, I think you should offer some sort of constructive criticism and point out what they did get right. It’s rare to find something that fails on every conceivable level. As far as structure goes — it depends on format, but for a longform Pitchfork type review, I like to open in a way that sets up a bit of context and lay out my take on the record, and then the subsequent paragraphs expand on those ideas. I try to write things in a conversational voice — you don’t want to get bogged down in jargon or get too stiff, just try to keep the language simple and direct, and crack a joke here and there. More answers: I have been writing every day for over a decade so at this point, I find it pretty easy to express myself in words and find that I don’t overthink and second guess myself very often. As for live performance — it can be a major part of a musician’s act, or a relatively minor part. You can’t really judge every artist by the same standards, you kinda have to take them on their own terms, but a great live act is always a positive thing. A bad live act isn’t necessarily a deal breaker.
