NW Noise Reviews
A Note on Reviews at NW Noise [pretentious]
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We have a section here at NW Noise for music reviews. Go ahead, look around in that dusty bin, there aren’t many reviews posted. I don’t particularly like reading reviews, and writing them feels like I’m being told what to do. Do others enjoy reading reviews? Of the Pitchfork variety, or reviews that involve 1-10 scales or lame stars-distribution?
For example, if we may, the rag the NY Mag recently reviewed MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular*. It’s a two sentence affair (brief, and with all-earnest they throw around music-genres as if darts). At the tail-end of the review there are numbers and a couple words that are just fucking made up; we know this because they end in -ability: Singalongability, come on! A word with SEVEN syllables must only be uttered in a lecture…by Chomsky.
We want to rectify our malignant attitude towards reviews; so we’re asking for another 2nd date with you, reviews. Our inspiration for how we’ll approach reviews will be drawn from Oscar Wilde (hence the pretentious label).
Criticism: “It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. It does not confine itself…to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.”
Woaaaahh…dense, but really simple – we’ll show you. The NY Mag review is trying to put to rest the artistic variety of MGMT’s music by saying it’s just the end-point of all the music of Williamsburg micro-genres over the past eight years. There, see, they think they’ve nicely wrapped up the band for us – pheww, we can all face another day.
For NW Noise, a review should state the point-of-view of the person reviewing and listening to the music. The last period in the last sentence of our reviews should leave the reader at the start of how they feel about the music.
*ôˈrakyələr – adjective – of or relating to an oracle; spekˈtakyələr – adjective – beautiful in a dramatic and eye-catching way.
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