Thanks Slater, I'm still a bit groggy, but I'm on the mend and should be able to contribute for the rest of the week. I'm actually brand new to Myrkur's music, I knew about her going back several years but just never got around to listening to any of her stuff, which is ironic given how much it reminds me of both Fen and Agalloch, both bands I had the honor to open for back in 2012 when I was still with Frost Giant. I definitely plan on giving the rest of her discography a perusal once the challenge has concluded.

Daily Tally for Nov 29 2023
Total Reviews: 52 / 152
Total Virgin Reviews: 45 / 138
Percentage (VIRGINS/TOTAL): 86.5% / 90.8%

Participant List for Nov 29 2023
Participants (TODAY/TOTAL): 16 / 27

Today's Totals per Individual:


Running Totals per Individual:


Compared to the third day of the last challenge, we are up 9 reviews and with the same number of participants.

Congrats to gasmask_colostomy and TheReactor for being today's leaders with 9 reviews!

Looks like gas is already trying to make the decisive sprint towards (yet another ) win. Things look extremely unpredictable for the podium, let's see if someone's got enough to close this gap to the first place as well!

Just fyi my Friday and Saturday do not leave me a lot of time for writing anything, so if anyone's looking for a convenient window to catch up...

Have to say I've written some stuff that really pleased me though, it feels so good to finally catch up on certain albums that there was no time to listen to when they actually came out.

Agree, valuing quality (of albums and hopefully of reviews as well) above quantity, for once, feels nice.

Breaking news: TheBurningOfSodom to steal SECOND lined-up album from me during the challenge. Good old Gross Reality, a lot more chill and laid back than the obliterating Bio-Cancer. I'll try and give both of them a review as well, before the time runs out.

Lmao, sorry mate, I'm definitely not used to having someone keeping an eye on the same albums as me I've been keeping them warm since their guitarist (I think) posted in the Request-a-Review thread.

In any case, judging from these two, I guess I'm likely to have another one or two of yours in the making...

P.s. looking forward to read your thoughts on both!

I think it must be the time to get a lottery ticket Burning, you've also picked Terminalist off my list! That's a great album that I still hope to write about. Not to mention that Hells has done March To Die and Felix has even chipped in with War Curse, which was one of my maybes. Also interesting to see that me and Felix come out very similar with our views on Korpituli.

Wow! That's truly one of the bands I'm happier to see more reviews for. Nice one as usual, made me think I might have been slightly too harsh on my rating... but I'm confident these guys can do even better.

Daily Tally for Nov 30 2023
Total Reviews: 51 / 203
Total Virgin Reviews: 48 / 186
Percentage (VIRGINS/TOTAL): 94.1% / 91.6%

Participant List for Nov 30 2023
Participants (TODAY/TOTAL): 19 / 27

Today's Totals per Individual:


Running Totals per Individual:


Compared to the fourth day of the last challenge, we are up 6 reviews and 3 participants.

Congrats to Felix 1666 for being today's leader with 10 reviews!

Felix tries to secure himself a place on the podium by working at alternate days, but everything still feels uncertain as we're heading into the weekend, despite gas' solid lead at the top.

So far we aren't doing so bad, for an end-of-year challenge. Of course my humble goal is only, as usual, to make it into the "participated all 7 days" list, but if I can do a bit more... Wife and kid should be away on Sunday, so who knows?

Also, nice to see some new blood actively participating, and old farts too

Daily Tally for Dec 01 2023
Total Reviews: 51 / 254
Total Virgin Reviews: 44 / 230
Percentage (VIRGINS/TOTAL): 86.3% / 90.6%

Participant List for Dec 01 2023
Participants (TODAY/TOTAL): 20 / 31

Today's Totals per Individual:


Running Totals per Individual:


Compared to the fifth day of the last challenge, we are up 5 reviews and down 1 participant.

Congrats to TheReactor for being today's leader with 10 reviews!

And new blood it is indeed, with TheReactor not giving up yet, and saintvalentine maybe entering the fray a few days late. gas increases his lead all things considered, but there are still two days...

Daily Tally for Dec 02 2023
Total Reviews: 55 / 309
Total Virgin Reviews: 52 / 282
Percentage (VIRGINS/TOTAL): 94.5% / 91.3%

Participant List for Dec 02 2023
Participants (TODAY/TOTAL): 21 / 39

Today's Totals per Individual:


Running Totals per Individual:


Compared to the sixth day of the last challenge, we are up 19 reviews and 4 participants.

Congrats to Felix 1666 for being today's leader with 10 reviews!

Into the last day with the same old situation – gas with a constant 10+ lead on a group of people where few stand out, except Felix and TheReactor who seem to have had something more than the others. Let's see if the last 24 hours manage to turn the whole thing around...

Also, we have totaled the exact same number of reviews of the last challenge, with a day's worth of reviews yet to be counted

Interesting to see reviews on both Aggressor and Tankist. I was lucky enough to find records from both in a store while vacationing in Tallinn.

Awesome! That new Tankist is peculiar for sure, I didn't expect it to be still 'vacant' from last summer. Also thought about doing Aggressor, but I don't think I'm as well-versed in that particular death metal niche. Great job by Lane on that!

I apologize if my input for this season's review challenge was lacking, especially compared to last time. The stress of school and work definitely held me back. Regardless, I was still able to finally give some rather reviewless albums some recognition they deserve, and that's what matters the most to me at the end of the day.

That will be my last one for this challenge, don't want to rush one in the last 15 minutes really. It's been a nice week and I look forward to seeing the totals, quite a lot of writers with 10 reviews or more, which is good participation.

Burning, just note when you do the final count that I accepted a few that were obviously drafts from the last several days, so you might want to do a quick check back to see if they can be included in today's total.

Okay, with only 10 minutes left in this challenge I think I'm going to call it a night. I just managed to hit my desired target of 30 reviews, and unless Felix has something he's going to dump in right before the buzzer, he and I ended up tying for 3rd. Unfortunately I ended up getting sick after the first day of the challenge and ended up completely missing the 2nd day and wasn't really able to get into a steady groove until Friday. I may go all out next challenge given the massive pile of promos that I've accumulated over the past couple years, as well as Joel and the crew at Sonic Perspectives throwing new stuff my way every 5 seconds. lol

However things end up rolling out, great job all around. I think I may end up doing the Secret Satan every challenge from now on, raspberrysoda ended up introducing me to Mind Over Four's music (I'd heard of them previously, but never took the plunge), and I'm curious to see if something similar might happen next time.

As long as they were drafts from this week (which, as long as I've checked them all, applies), I think I'm just gonna lump them with the last day's total, to simplify things.

Also, on that topic, that review you accepted just past midnight... *sighs* (I'm counting it nonetheless, nobody better say a word.)


This should always be the spirit behind it, no need to apologize obviously! I don't think one needs more stress in their life, even more so from a hobby.

Daily Tally for Dec 03 2023
Total Reviews: 50 / 359
Total Virgin Reviews: 43 / 325
Percentage (VIRGINS/TOTAL): 86.0% / 90.5%

Participant List for Dec 03 2023
Participants (TODAY/TOTAL): 14 / 40

Today's Totals per Individual:


Running Totals per Individual:


Compared to the seventh day of the last challenge, we have written the same number of reviews, with 1 participant less.

Congrats to hells_unicorn and TheReactor for being today's leaders with 9 reviews!

TOTAL VIRGINS: 325

On average, 91% of all reviews from the week were virgins! This is higher than the last challenge, which was at 90%.

We were up 43 reviews and 8 participants from the last challenge.

There were a total of 288 bands reviewed, including 320 unique albums.

The 12th Diamhea Memorial Review Challenge marked a rebound from the last one, and fell perfectly in line with the last winter results of 322, 374, and 352 virgins, respectively.

Participant List GRAND TOTALS


And here you have it! Gas earns deservedly his 10th win, as his first place never was in question throughout the week. Kudos to the first appearances of TheReactor and Felix on the podium, alongside the ever-present Hells, all of them having built a truly massive gap with the remaining participants. Guess I just have an affinity for tied placements, don't you think?

To sum up, congratulations gasmask_colostomy on 1st place, TheReactor on 2nd place, and Felix 1666 and hells_unicorn on 3rd place!

This was gasmask_colostomy's 14th time placing, TheReactor's 1st time, Felix 1666's 1st time, and hells_unicorn's 22nd time.

Individuals who participated for all 7 days:
Demon Fang
gasmask_colostomy
robotiq
Sean16
Slater922
TheBurningOfSodom
TheReactor

Individuals who participated for 6 days:
Film
hells_unicorn
Lane

Individuals who participated for 5 days:
Forever Underground
MorbidAtheist666
Shreds of Sanity

(More stats incoming...)

The Hall of Fame has been updated. See you at the next challenge in spring 2024!

Some ulterior stats, just for fun:

Most reviewed bands:

4 reviews:
Witheria

3 reviews:
Freedom Hawk
Mind over Four
Nocturnal Art
Those Who Bring the Torture
Trna
Zimorog

Most reviewed releases:

2 reviews:
High Spirits - Safe on the Other Side
Korpituli - As Infinite Shadows of the Nightsky
Malicious - Merciless Storm
Neverlight Horizon - Walxaz
Terminalist - The Crisis as Condition

Leaderboard by country:
United States = 108
China = 53
Germany = 35
Italy = 16
Spain = 12
United Kingdom = 12
Finland = 11
France = 9
Netherlands = 9
Chile = 8
Hungary = 6
Norway = 6
Australia = 5
Austria = 4
Russia = 4
Canada = 3
Malaysia = 2
(unspecified) = 22

Leaderboard by continent:
Europe = 124
North America = 111
Asia/Oceania = 60
South America = 8
(unspecified) = 22

Europe wins this first round! It's truly been a collective effort, my companions

Congratulations to all participants! And special congratulations to Gasmask, TheReactor, Felix and Hells_Unicorn's!

This has been my first attempt to participate seriously in the challenge and I have to admit that the first day I knew I wasn't going to be a podium contender when my brain ended up absolutely fried by only writing 5 reviews. And this has only made me respect even more all those who dare to participate and even more those who achieve such high numbers.

Which leads me to ask those of you who usually have such high numbers. How do you do it? I understand that practice is something that helps, but for example, do you already have thought about the releases you are going to review before the challenge starts so you have an idea beforehand of what to write about? Because I've just been looking at releases I've listened to a few times (even if it was years ago) and when I found one that didn't have a review I ended up going for it. And I've noticed the difficulty of having to come up with something like that out of the blue. I always try to hide my lack of being descriptive about music by taking advantage of the fact that usually when I review a release I have an idea or concept to accompany the review. And that's something I've done here but I had to do it a bit more on the fly and I think that slowed down my process quite a bit. Anyway, I look forward to the spring 2024 challenge!

.

Yeah surely practice plays a huge part on that. Personally I just re-play the album I'm about to review and hope for inspiration to come up with something clever. It usually works, but when that doesn't happen, I make sure to bring up enough solid talking points about the music to make up for it. I guess I've finally found somewhat of a consistent style that works well for me, just like I think it's also true for everyone else way more prolific than me.

Can definitely co-sign this. Hearing it again does certainly recall elements that you'll want to discuss in the review, at any rate.

A big part of how I do it is just the fact that I write constantly. When I first started reviewing albums here I had nothing in my background as a writer other than a C average in high school English and a C+ average between the 2 core academic credits I took in English Lit. for my undergraduate studies to fulfill the requirement for my music degree. Needless to say, I had about as many reviews rejected as I had accepted, and I was at it for a little over a year before the reviews started to flow and I never really stopped.

Also, I tend to follow a formula when I write, so apart from a few adjustments to accommodate the actual musical content, I'm following a predetermined structure when I write, and I've done it so much at this point that I improvise 4-5 paragraph reviews using this structure. Sometimes I'll start to feel myself burning out due to the repetition of paragraph and sentence structure so I'll try to mix a few things up occasionally, but by and large, I hear an album and I immediately start stringing sentences together to form a moderate length writeup that usually spans 700-900 words. Part of why I don't do the same numbers now that I did back in the late 2000s is due to a lack of free time and my default review structure being heavier on description.

I had set myself a goal of two reviews a day, but I ran out of steam at the the end. It had been a while since I had written any reviews and I do take quite a while to write them. Some of the albums I chose I wasn't familiair enough with to write a quick review as they required multiple listens.

I did find myself struggling to come up with good descriptions of what the music sounded like after having written a few. I found my vocabulary a bit lacking to get as in depth as I wanted to and was afraid to repeat myself too much. Combined with having a concert to attend and meeting friends in the weekend I decided to let that two reviews a day goal go and just enjoy myself.

I didn't even get to the album that made me decide to enter, cause I couldn't really find the right words to describe what made it so special. I am pretty happy with the reviews I wrote and it was a reminder that I enjoy writing. It also gave me a reason to really sit down and listen to an album, which I do far too little of lately.

I tried to get at least 10 reviews out, but some flu coming up and my energy was drained on Saturday on. Well, there's a goal for me then for the spring challenge.

So many bands I haven't heard reviewed in this challenge. I need to check out several...

Cheers!

Ah well, at least I tried, but probably not hard enough. I need to write more for practise for sure.

This question usually comes up in some form or other after the challenge. I've been thinking about it, and in addition to what Hells and Burning said, I think the thing that really helps is to have a plan. That plan can take many forms, but the most basic one is just to know what albums you can use for the challenge, and to know this in advance. The first few challenges I took part in, I found I couldn't write more than 4-5 reviews a day, because I spent too much time looking for virgin albums and then listening to them. I'm quite a quick writer, so that part wasn't a problem, but I had to listen to the whole thing at least a couple of times to know what to write. Even just listing the albums you think you'll write about will save you a lot of time. Obviously listening to them a bit before the challenge will make things easier too.

Basically, what I ended up doing was keeping a full-time record of any albums I bought or listened to that were virgins. It's just a Word document that looks like a list in some parts, and then I'll highlight the ones I've listened to enough to review immediately. Then I know which ones can be a "quick review" and which ones need more listening time. (As of now i.e. after this recent challenge, I think I have about 350 albums noted in that list, plus some bands I've never listened to that I know have virgins albums. I don't own everything on the list, some are just albums I've streamed.) However, as you can tell I'm a bit obsessed with the review challenge, so there was a period where I would actually aim to buy or listen to only virgin albums. That means I always have a lot of material saved for the challenges. Also, writing a few notes for the albums you plan to review really helps to save time, especially if it's things that often take time to think of, like a good comparison or some little details that you don't want to spend ages finding while you write. The last time I used notes for most of my reviews was probably the big challenge in June 2022, after that I haven't really bothered with so many, and you can see that it's quite difficult to write 50 in this way. I reckon I had some brief notes for around 15 of the reviews this time.

So, yeah, there's planning a little and there's planning a lot. Not to mention that any time someone has written like 10+ reviews per day, you can be sure they didn't do anything else, except maybe some necessary work. If you're on the clock for 8 hours with a strict boss or something, I don't think it would work.

You may add kids, too...

Joke aside, I must have broken my personal record this time. Next edition I'll hit 10 Still it's a pity I'm the only participant from France here, gotta recruit in some way.

A perfectly nice Winter challenge. Congrats to everyone!

Great work everyone, I'm glad we managed to surpass the latest challenge, even if with minimal input from myself. Cheers!

I'm currently re-alphabatising my collection and simply by checking the more obscure albums I've already got 20 names in a Word document now. Guess I'll be back next challenge...

I don't participate every challenge, so I had plenty of releases I could review. I both set aside the albums on my cd/vinyl shelf that have not been reviewed on MA and if I find a band/release online that has no reviews on MA, I bookmark it. I take notes in a notebook when listening to many of those albums, mainly what I like or dislike and what I find unique. When it's time for the challenge I elaborate on the notes into a full review while listening to each album again to acquire more inspiration. It also helps that I had a flexible work schedule the week of the review challenge and I was constantly writing essays when in college.

Another thing that I personally find motivating is reviewing albums I enjoy listening to, even if the release has flaws.
So mainly preperation, inspiration(actually wanting to do this), and proper scheduling.

P.S. I only was able to do 5 my first challenge, it can feel overwhelming your first couple reviews but then you get used to it.

The inspiration is definitely an important element too, if you don't feel motivated to write about an album then it will really be hard to put words together quickly. So enjoying the album is pretty important, or at least finding it interesting to analyze helps.

As for me, I find that if I've totally made up my mind about an album before writing, I won't always be so interested in actually writing the review. The feeling of discovery is exciting, but obviously takes a bit more time. That's also the reason why I mix up genres a lot when writing for the challenge, so that I'm experiencing quite a diverse and interesting listening range. That said, some sub-genres don't work that well if you need to write fast. I have a limit on how many funeral doom or atmospheric albums I can write about in a given time.

Btw, well done to The Reactor for making such a major showing with only a few reviews previously written for the site. That's a tough challenge, and you were the one most likely to make me sweat during the week! I want to check out some of the melodic death bands you covered, always looking for that stuff off the beaten track.

I can attest to how listening and reviewing albums from different genres can help keep things interesting while writing several in a day/night. I usually try to review an album that's well under an hour unless I have a really good idea on what I want to write about and heard the album many times. I'm also interested in checking out some of your reviews, you seem well spoken and descriptive, definatly going to check out Tales of Medusa. I also was thinking about reviewing Belushi Speedball but didn't get to it, nice to see you did. And I love me some obscure meloblack/death.

If you are looking for the best of Tales Of Medusa, of course go to the albums. But even the demos and rehearsals are pretty cool and interesting, especially if you like the underground epic metal vibe. It just feels really natural. As for Belushi, I have the whole discography, but haven't listened to all of it in detail, so I just started on the early EPs. Those short releases are a good way to break up the monotony of writing lengthy descriptions of full-lengths I think. When I first started the review challenges, I would often pick shorter albums too, but now I don't mind so much as long as I've listened to it a few times already. However, maybe I won't listen to an entire 70 minute album while writing in that case.