Album Rating: 5.0

Talk is cheap!

Album Rating: 4.0

https://owlcation.com/stem/The-difference-between-animal-and-human-communication

Album Rating: 5.0

unga bunga?

Album Rating: 5.0

give me a sec lol you typed a whole novel and I hardly remember what I wrote in this review I was zooted af

Album Rating: 4.0

Pahaha okay throw a belated pinch of salt wherever appropriate; I didn't smell the blazehaze and took it more of a Big Sober Musing, so the ol' tome probs does much less justice to your thoughts n vibes than intended

Album Rating: 4.0

indulge johnny’s tome at least a lil bit noler don’t be a dick lol

Album Rating: 5.0

I will

and up until 2 weeks ago I was basically never not in a blazehaze

Album Rating: 4.0

johnny doesn't get it he's a complete norman

Album Rating: 4.0

wanna keep my life outside of a jail cell for the time being, unfortunately



will drink any of you under the table though, do not fw this wine mum bloodstream

Album Rating: 4.0

gonna mail you an edible one day and it will solve all your music listening problems fr

Album Rating: 4.0

i mean you're joking and i'm mostly joking, but that happened to a girl who worked for my company and it basically cost her fuck knows how many years' worth of trauma in and out of hostile courts before she came home with an international drug trafficking stamp on her record and negative career prospects. this country has absolutely no chill lol, dunno if she even had a chance to chomp the damn thing

Album Rating: 4.0

that is super fucked up did she buy it somewhere or did a friend just send it? cause how can they prove she bought it/ordered it?

Album Rating: 5.0

thank god there is good $3 bottles of wine at Aldi so drinking isn't too expensive. two bottles of that can be gone in an hour tho so can still add up

Album Rating: 4.0

a friend just sent it, at a surprise at that - they traced it in border control, tracked it to her door and waited for her to accept it in the post and bust her up for it shortly after according to what I heard (this was before I joined and I never met her). shit be fraught/wine4lyf

Album Rating: 4.0

damn wtf so just for having it sent to you you can get locked up?



definitely sending some now

Album Rating: 4.0

yeah, this country does not fuck with drugs at all lmao. most people don't even recognise the smell of weed, which ig would make it easier to get away with if you're not importing, but...



also brb moving towns again

Album Rating: 5.0

If there’s one thing to address right off the bat its that I’m still an amateur writer, and don’t entirely have the drive/focus to change that. So any unconnected dots in my writing more stem from that than anything.

Next is that there was an obvious element of sarcasm in my writing: it’s quite literally a piece of music journalism. I know I am often dismissive of reviews (I’m glad my actual persona matches the tone of this review), but at the end of the day I do see some value in them, or I wouldn’t stay here, as nice as the camaraderie is (lol). I think that if music journalism has any single 'point', even more than persuading you to check out something you haven't heard, it's to add either depth or a counterpoint or both to an experience you're already at least somewhat in tune with. I agree.

You are right that other’s reviews come from their own experience, and that I didn’t really address that here. But very often you’ll find reviewers who themselves don’t understand this fact, and speak as if their experience IS the 100% unfiltered truth, and that to disagree with them is to misunderstand the artist.

And, even worse, you have people whose experience is almost entirely defined by a very close-knit group of people telling you that their word is gospel. I could use the example of like pop-punk on sputnik (lol), but I think the best example is Tool fans on YouTube. It’s all fibonacci this, third eye that, and if you disagree you are a dumbass. To them you can’t just enjoy the music, it HAS to be an enlightening experience. I’d say my biggest gripe has to do with this idea, small groups of people thinking that they know exactly how the general public should feel about just about anything because the skewed sample of people around them tells them that it is so.

Album Rating: 5.0

Last, I disagree that Sputnik is devoid of the Pitchfork Effect because it is volunteer-based. There’s a lot of cultural capitol, or for lack of a better word, clout that goes into the review process for many people. There’s the drive to become Staff, the drive to be featured, the drive to have people give a damn about what you have to say. It drives people to write in fancy ways that have more to do with the quality of their writing than the quality of what they’re writing about. But that’s kind of just the nature of language, so what can you do.



(which many would perhaps rubberstamp as reverse snobbery)

So I’m basically Robin Hood?

Album Rating: 4.0

Sorry sorry, got stomped by end of term antics and crazy hours of sleep



I’d say my biggest gripe has to do with this idea, small groups of people thinking that they know exactly how the general public should feel about just about anything because the skewed sample of people around them tells them that it is so.



Ok lol I feel you on this big time - would almost have preferred it if you'd heaped it on sput pop punk because, well, you know how much I already agree on that Tool take lmao. I guess all I'd add would be that you don't really owe anything to the general public or authorial intentions as a writer. You shouldn't be writing for the sake of determining universal opinion or for indulging echo chambers or for mouthpiecing the artist on terms that you think they'd agree with - it should just be a grounded assessment of what you believe, and I think it follows that that will often produce something that would look ridiculous if projected as public opinion.



Tbh I think one of the most powerful parts of crit is how it can actively disregard authorial intention and focus on how the album (or whatever) is open to being received, long as there's no concerted (mis)representation of What John Lennon Is Trying To Say Here or whatever. At the same time, I can definitely think of some writers here and elsewhere who whitewash nuance with hyperbole, turn "I hear"s into "there is"s, reiterate consensus for the sake of legitimising their own opinion even if this doesn't scan as something they actually believe, or use superficial contextual or lyrical analysis to make Big Points about meaning or interpretation, so I guess we agree there to some extent. I try to keep an "I" voice as open and explicit as poss without going overboard on it because I think judgements as personal as the ones that make for good reviews should be matched with a personal tone and style for the sake of writer-reader integrity, but this ain't foolproof and it's just one part of keeping up a sensitive expression.

Album Rating: 4.0

re. the Sputnik effect, I see where you're coming from but think that the site's decentralised approach has a pretty huge bearing on how those incentives and stakes translate compared to on P4k. Sure, some writers end up churning out hollow reads that feel like cheap imitations of stuff there, here or elsewhere, but I think the people who do best here pin down a style and voice that you wouldn't mistake for anyone else's.



It drives people to write in fancy ways that have more to do with the quality of their writing than the quality of what they’re writing about



Tbh I v firmly believe that there is critical writing that has more craft, depth or value than the music it's directed at, but that should ofc never be your goal as a writer. I think your point cuts both ways; sometimes you might be touching on interesting points by focusing on thoughts or feelings inspired by the album more than the musiq itself, but it's defs an imprecise science working out how to express this without making the actual playable 40ish minutes you're writing about redundant within your review. I think it's v important to challenge this from time to time - but it's a struggle to engage with this when it comes entirely in glib/dismissive terms



tl;dr ig the only journalism worth reading is so whackass and cracked that it could never be mistaken for public opinion