Thanks for the reply, and I don't mind a bit of feedback. I personally thought the number ratings would provide a quick "tl;dr" for someone who didn't want to read my entire review. (I know sometimes I just want quickly scan through when I'm looking at reviews.) But that's fine, I can see how that might seem amateurish or dated. I deleted the ratings and tried to make it flow it more cohesively paragraph to paragraph. I also went back through the whole review, fixed a typo or two, deleted a couple sentences that might have been unnecessary, and added a couple details.
The second rejection called for a more "holistic" approach, asking me to totally redo my description of the instruments and talk more about "Songwriting, atmosphere, production". Again, 1.) I feel like I'm following the explicitly stated rules pretty well. Sure, I could've talked about the atmosphere of the album and how it made me feel more, but that's further down the list of rules, and not really my focus with this album. I can see how someone would prefer that approach more, but that's not really my style. Because again 2.) I mostly wanted to talk about how the guitars are fantastic, while the vocals and drums and not.
As far as songwriting, sure I could've said more, but I feel like I touched on that in the guitar section: how there are heavy thrashy riffs, melodic sections, solos are well placed, etc. I wasn't just talking about the guitar sound and playing, but the overall core of the music. For production, I mentioned how it's an issue in the vocals and drums. The feedback also said to "use specific tracks to point to examples", which I did five times. Any more and I would risk it becoming "track-by-track"!
I'm glad you guys have a high standard, high standards are good, but I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. I'm trying to write good reviews and follow the stated rules. I'll keep the feedback in mind next time, but I don't really want to spend another hour+ rewriting a review I already spent to much time on.
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