Reviewing or critiquing music is pretty fraught. You get a week, maybe a few weeks to critically appraise some new record (book, movie, etc) and there’s a sense that you’ve made your definitive statement – it’s embarassing when you see scorchers come back via press releases years down the track – but it’s true, reviewers do change their minds, or at least I do.
When I look back at the kind of music I love, like really love, it’s almost always records I either missed or actively hated on first listen. Records that sounded like noise (MBV, Boo Radleys) or repetitive nothingness (Moodymann), bizarrely arythmic (Autechre, Aphex) or just boring (Sea & Cake). So when I get a CD or 12″ in the mail and turn out a review that week, I end up feeling a bit compromised.
Of course that doesn’t go for everything. Most records I hear, I form an immediate (reliable) critical response to. It’s not tough to pick generic productions, songs, sounds and I guess that’s why I do it. But it’s generally at the ends of the spectrum where a critical opinion takes a bit longer to form.
When the sugar rush of records you fall in love with straight away turns sour or the ones you hated or just didn’t get end up showing extra depth… what do you do? Should we be having discussion threads following reviews to track the way our feelings evolve as the album gets older?
In any case, Scott Tobias wrote a great piece about this for AV Club.
