Alright, I'm sort of a new member to the community, and I personally love to write reviews about music, but I have a couple quick questions (if anyone really has an exact answer to them):

1) Is the style of going through an album track-by-track acceptable even though it says it is only discouraged?

2) Is there a certain number of songs on an album it would be valid for? Like if an album has let's say 3 or 4 tracks, what would be the number of tracks you need to stay under to review every track in a line or two?

Thanks in advance

Well it depends, if you review the new Iron Maiden and review all the songs one by one, that's clearly going to get rejected by if you review a 2 songs split and you review each song, it would be fine. It's highly preferable to give a larger picture when you review something, simply use the songs as examples of what you mean instead of writing a recipe-link essay. There's no need to describe everything anyway, it's boring if you do.

My recommendation: don't do it.

Yeah, basically checklists in general suck because they're boring and don't give much of a big-picture look most of the time. This goes for both track-by-track reviews and "let's talk about each instrument separately" reviews. I'm guilty of the latter myself and while it's not as awful as stilted track-by-tracks, it still makes for really dry, dull reading.

One thing that helps is reviewing things that you are not familiar with. Stepping out of one's musical comfort zone isn't always easy, but you'll feel more pumped to review something that's new to you, rather than something that you hear all the time. I only review releases when I want to as well. If you write something about an album that doesn't scream "review me," you are not going to have a fun time.

I'll usually opt for a structure something along the lines of a short intro which leads to a description of the overall sound and its qualities. Then round off with a few of the low points, and then lead to a sort of conclusion and outro.

Don't be a track-by-track reviewer, dude.

Seconding this. With very few exceptions (almost always short albums) track-by-tracks make for worthless reads and almost always indicate that the writer doesn't know how to review.

Besides, you wouldn't review a movie scene by scene, why would you do the same for an album? The goal should be to give an overall impression drawing inspiration from particular songs (or scenes, in the case of movies) whenever necessary.

You could use certain songs as examples to highlight particularly standout components of a band if you're going over their general sound and pick a few other tracks that were the best of the bunch to illustrate why the group works so well as a whole.