I stopped giving reviews to bands who asked me or bands that have too much time on their hands to actually care..cause after I gave my honest opinion on one review (which wasn't even harsh but very objective thou), the band took offense and said "so lets hear your band and see how good you guys are", I ignored the reply at first but then pm them back and told them " did you want a review or just a kiss in the ass"? Hey, I'm no Simon Cowell by any means but if you want my honest opinion be ready to hear the good, the bad and the ugly.

A forum private message titled "Hey shithead":

I think that might be a response to my Woods of Desolation review, but the guy never specified.

People actually get pissed if you give them bad reviews? Easy solution for the band: make music that doesnt suck shit bagels.

There's been a couple - poorly worded outrage in the comments box at my blog when I pissed on the latest records by bands like Demon Burgers and Nile - the latter probably deserves copy-pasting:


Heh heh. The attack on my appearance is my favourite part. And the fact I can write whatever I want, provided I'm old enough in his eyes. Very considerate.

Then there was the guy from the band Zushakon, from Singapore, who flew into a butthurt rage in the comments because I praised the performance of not only Impiety (who he apparently loves) but also Draconis Infernum (who he apparently hates) in a gig review. He ended up writing a long angsty letter there defending himself and his band and I ended up wiping the comment box altogether, it got so puerile.

But the most intriguing of all is Aborym. My co-writer at our blog/zine wrote a review praising With No Human Intervention to the skies, scoring it 100% (in a great review you can read on MA) and mentioned within it, fairly I think, that the general quality of Aborym releases would decline after. The guy from Aborym got very pouty on his Facebook and wrote a massive essay about it, and of course dozens of his followers joined in to mindlessly fellate him over how "brilliant" albums like Generator are. The thing was, there were comments from these people, Aborym member included, along the lines of "if you don't like it, you shouldn't review it!!!!1"

and in a second e-mail (I always like to engage such folks in a discussion)


The whole rambling is a bit longer.

The worst I ever got was when I wrote a review for a band that one of my own projects opened for last year. The album I reviewed is damn good but I thought it was too short and wondered if they couldn't get a longer album due to their constant touring. They replied that the minimum length of an album can be a half hour long and seemed a little snippy about it, but their frontman was genuinely nice to me when I saw them again a couple months ago.

So I reviewed Fragmented Atrocities by the band Abdicate that resides in Rochester. I was hanging with my friend and their singer came over. My friend showed him the review I did. He didn't know I did it. It was really weird to see a band member read my review in front of me. He didn't get angry or upset cause I was being honest and I still liked it. It was... an odd situation. I also put like 3 songs of the album for download on the blog I do so I hope he doesn't mind!

Not sure if this qualifies, but there was a forum regular a couple of years ago who had several bands on the archives. He had just come back from a long hiatus from the forum and was "creating" a lot of new music and posting links and whatnot throughout the forum. I think he got a couple of reviews.

Someone pointed out that one of his songs sounded a bit "familiar" and so I did some digging and quickly discovered that the vast majority of "his" music was literally just other band's songs slowed down in Audacity and marketed as drone, haha. He tried to backslide and say that they were "covers" but they were clearly the original tracks slowed down and nothing more, so most (all?) of his projects got yanked from the site. The dude then proceeded to post tons of hilarious raging rants (I'm talking multi-page walls of text with all sorts of hilarious insults and whatnot) about me on his Myspace and on this forum.

Good times.

Awesome. Did you ever alert the original bands' about the forgeries?

One of the tracks was a Mgla song. I couldn't find any contact info for M or the band, so I sent an email to Northern Heritage with some links to the Myspace. They replied to thank me for the notification but I didn't investigate further (nor would it have been any of my business, really). I would've notified further bands/labels but by that point a lot of the stuff was getting yanked off Myspace and had already been removed from M-A so I didn't press the issue.

This . . . and toughen up. Seems so cliche - no one should have to even say it. If they can't weather the storm in the beginning how do they intend on actually make their band last?

There's also nothing wrong with taking a critical look at your own work and trying to figure out what to improve. If one decides they've achieved their desired sound then they just need to learn how to eat the soup.

By adulthood everyone should have learned that you can't please everybody - even a whore is hated.