Slater922 wrote:
I'm Slater922, and I'm one of the more experienced reviewers on this site
lol tap the fuckin' brakes kiddo, you've only got ten more reviews than he does.
For some real advice, I'm gonna knock out a bunch of it right out of the gate by quoting a post I made a while back about one of your reviews that was brought up in the main discussion thread:
BastardHead wrote:
...it's really not a good look to go cranking out reviews on the same day you hear something for the first time,
especially when it's for an extremely high or low score. I place less value in scoring than most of the regulars but if you're going to give something a minimum or maximum score after one listen then nine times out of ten you either don't really know a whole lot about the genre or your convictions are weak as hell.
And he's a decent enough writer, better than some of the noobs we get, but he has a
ton of room to improve. Look at this bit:
That review wrote:
Although I don't tend to like drum programming since it is as lifeless as Atheist's Jupiter, it was actually convincing enough for me to believe that an actual person did that, thus completely defying my expectations. I honestly don't understand why brutal death metal bands tend to use drum programs instead of an actual drummer (perhaps because no person can play the complicated beats of a drum program), but in this album, it was convincing enough for me to believe that an actual person did that, so I definitely wouldn't complain. It sounds as animalistic as the guitars and the vocals, just as I would expect from BDM drums (person or program). Overall, although I'm not a fan of drum programs, the programming on this album was convincing enough for me to believe that an actual person did that.
This paragraph is absolute garbage. Beyond simply trying to shoehorn in a reference to an album he reviewed a few days ago accidentally creating a really bizarre implication that Atheist's drums couldn't be played by a human (that's not what he means but the sentence is so sloppy that he winds up implying it), he uses the phrase "it was actually convincing enough for me to believe that an actual person did that" three times in four sentences. Holy shit that shouldn't pass even a lazy proofread. Instead of building on his point or giving examples in either direction or something, he just says the same thing several times in a row with remarkably similar wording and at the end of the day I know nothing about the drum performance except it was actually convincing enough for him to believe that an actual person did it.
I didn't quote the first bit of that paragraph but he starts it with one of my personal pet peeves: offhandedly mentioning that you can't hear the bass (which he also does in the conclusion, because he's terrible about repeating himself). This is a telltale sign of somebody just starting out who feels like they
have to comment on every single instrument even if there's nothing to say or (more likely) they just don't really understand what each instrument is doing. I think it was Napero who said something along the lines of "If a reviewer mentions not being able to hear the bass, 99% of the time they just don't know what a bass sounds like", and that's something I've found to be true. Bass follows the guitar most of the time in metal but trust me, you can hear it almost all the time. It can easily get lost in the mix but it has a completely different timbre than that of a guitar and all you have to do is just... pay attention? Why so many people miss this is beyond me, even more mystifying are cases like this where the bass is likely just following the guitar so people default to the bass being inaudible when really it's just... ya know, playing root notes. Pro tip: if the bass isn't doing anything interesting, just don't bring it up! You absolutely
do not have to out yourself as somebody who doesn't know what to listen for by saying it's inaudible.
tl;dr - AC is a noob and that's totally okay and I encourage him to keep growing, but he has a lot of room to improve and when I say he's gonna look back in a few years and cringe at his early stuff, this kind of stuff is exactly what I'm talking about.
The main points to take away from that are:
-You repeat yourself way too often and with such hyperspecificity that you'll use the same ten word phrase several sentences in a row. You need to either find more than one way to make the point you want to make, or just make it once and cut out the superfluous fluff. Hell you even did this in your OP here
-You don't need to comment on every single instrument if you don't have anything to say about each one. It's a common newbie trope to make an offhand mention of the bass being inaudible or uninteresting and 99% of the time it comes off like you're just ticking a box on a checklist instead of actually engaging with what it's doing. Old school track-by-track reviews where each one gets its own two sentence paragraph are explicitly banned at this point but these more flowing instrument-by-instrument ones are basically just the natural evolution of that old crutch. You should do more to zoom out and look at the piece as a whole.
-I only briefly touched on it in the quoted section but others have brought it up as well, your habit of directly referencing previous albums you've reviewed is extremely clunky and kinda reveals that your pool of knowledge/reference is incredibly shallow. Namedropping Atheist in a BDM/slam review, bringing up Agoraphobic Nosebleed in a Glamtera review, things like that just tell more experienced readers that the albums you've reviewed are literally the only metal albums you've ever heard. You'll gather more relevant points of reference as you naturally explore and listen to more metal so I assume that this is a habit that will iron itself out over time, but it's still something you should be cognizant of. (TrooperEd used to do this all the time but for a different reason. His narrative of metal in the 90s had clear good guys (trad/power metal) and bad guys (grunge/groove/nu metal) and he found reasons to shoehorn in unrelated bands to bash them all the time (most infamously comparing Blind Guardian to Roots-era Sepultura for an easy dunk) and it's equally jarring and useless when he did it.)
Those pointers are specifically for you based on what I've seen in your reviews. I don't like giving more general advice because everybody is different and approaches reviewing in their own way, but if there's any one bit I would give, it's basically just reiterating what Emp said: just keep writing. Everybody is shaky when they start, everybody falls into formulas sometimes, everybody has the capacity to break out and find their own voice and just naturally get better.