I like CadenZ's reviews overall, especially their enthusiasm, but there are some real cringy moments in most of them.

Thanks for the feedback. Almost all reviews I'm submitting were originally written for Global Domination some years back, and on that site we went full-on crazy at times. No filters, whatsoever.

What I'm trying to do now is to reconfigure them after M-A's guidelines, if they do get rejected. Sometimes it's pretty hard to know what the problem is, when the only reason for rejection is "read the guidelines". I understand, of course, that mods don't have all the time in the world to comment, so I'll just carry on as best I can.

As for the "cringy", care to elaborate? I'd be glad to know what could be done better, so I can up my game. My first guess would be the below-the-belt humour, so beloved back in the GD days...

For my part, I will make rejections more clear to help you, as I greatly value your efforts on this site. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Some of your jokes are brilliant - I do similar in my articles. It's hard to recall a particular cringe moment, but should one come up - I'll give you a little mentoring if you don't object.

I actually brought up this BringMeMyScissors Om review in the oven fodder thread, as it takes until the very last sentence of the eighth paragraph to have anything to do with music at all, let alone the specific album in question, and then it takes up until the 25th paragraph to actually start describing the album in question. So that leaves about 6 paragraphs worth of an album review in a 30 paragraph work, and eight paragraphs of that 30 paragraph work about nothing even tangentially related to music.

In the oven fodder thread I said I thought the review should be deleted because it contained so much extraneous nonsense. Never got a response.

Third language. I wish I knew three languages as well as you do. This board has been pretty crazy to be on. The multi-lingual skills are strong.

As a general rule, the latter. Ballads are fine in principle, they're songs like any other and metal bands have written several good ones, but for my taste, stuff like the title track on Paradise Lost or The Bard's Song on Somewhere Far Beyond are the exception while usually you get shitty go-nowhere nonsense like Pray completely grinding the momentum on a huge, powerful, energetic album like Somewhere Out in Space to a halt.

I actually brought up this BringMeMyScissors Om review in the oven fodder thread, as it takes until the very last sentence of the eighth paragraph to have anything to do with music at all, let alone the specific album in question, and then it takes up until the 25th paragraph to actually start describing the album in question. So that leaves about 6 paragraphs worth of an album review in a 30 paragraph work, and eight paragraphs of that 30 paragraph work about nothing even tangentially related to music.

In the oven fodder thread I said I thought the review should be deleted because it contained so much extraneous nonsense. Never got a response.

You didn't get a response because those reviews are incredible and not going anywhere.

It's a little sad if creativity of that kind can't fit under the site guidelines anymore, if that's the case.

Wow, that's amazing, I think I might just have found my brother in ballads. Symphony X's 'Paradise Lost' is a fucking excellent ballad and really noy worthy of the name because it does a lot musically that I wouldn't expect a ballad to do. 'Pray' got trashed in my own review on Gamma Ray, although I think that album could have used a different kind of lighter song in the same position since it's pretty brutal for PM. On the other hand, I always have a query about Blind Guardian ballads - is it only Lord of the Rings fans who like them? 'Cos that's got to be the key demographic unless I'm missing something.

Man it doesn't sound like MetalCuresHeadaches is any fun at parties.

Great to see Hellripper finally getting some more reviews! That being said, SweetLeaf, you're crazy thinking Coagulating Darkness needed multiple listens because it's bland. That's some album of the year quality there.

Cheers Don (slayerrrrrrrrrrrrrrr) and Mjollnir!

Edit: Re-reading, that was my own fault. That was one of my occasional "write a review before I'm sure how to put it and submit it" reviews. If you give my most recent one (Power Trip) a read once it's accepted, that record is very much worth checking out.

By the time Celtic Frost got around to making this album, the Swedish wrecking crew...

:lol:

Bayern wrote a good review for Black Sabbath's Seventh Star. Personally I wouldn't rate it as high, but it's a good read nonetheless.

So, I'm currently working on a review for Obsecration's Oceanum Oblivione and I'm having trouble describing what it musically sounds like since I'm not sure what the band got influenced by while writing this stuff. What would you people recommend me to do in this case?

In fact, this album is so generic that a friend of mine likened it's contents to Behemoth, which is a boring band themselves after their black metal era.

The only other album that might be worse is Heretic (I am not including Illud Divinum Insanus here because I don't consider it a Morbid Angel release anyways.

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The earlier tracks made it tough to get into due to the overuse of long screechy soloing overtop of extremely fast rhythms, making it tough to digest. Adding in the drum blasting made it hit a critical point, overflowing all over the place.

Why my review is being assessed for such a long time? It's like 9 days today since I submitted my rev. It's the longest awaiting time I've ever encountered here.