dark heights. ghosts, death

i haven't written on this thing in ages.

it's not like i don't want to - i do, i do. i have this thing that i want to talk about, which is the frustrating state of music reviews. and it's like a block or a mountain that i have to climb over (break through, fly round) perfectly before i can set it down. i don't work like that, ideas are rarely even formed when they are actually down on the paper or in the mind, but later on their aquire some kind of truth. so i think i just need to get rid of it (blow up the mountain, take the bypass, travel by water), so i can move on (backwards, through, inside).

the score system has become an institution, where it need not be - but this is very hard for us to comprehend. it has obviously grown out of insecurities in reviewers, insecurities that are for once justified - if i write this sentence, will they think it's a plus point or a negative one? by the end of this review, will they want to buy it or burn it?

adjectives are thrown about, especially in music reviews, at an alarming rate. you can get through a review without combating an album at all, just by throwing subjective words around. sure, every word is subjective - but some are more than others. washing, sprawling, enveloping - even words like experimental and progressive don't really have a solid meaning anymore (if they ever did).

however, i'm not saying that this is a bad thing. in fact, i'm not saying it's a bad thing or a good thing, because a review should be wholly and remarkably interpretive and intuitive. i'm not saying that a review should be objective - this is impossible. but you should not try and convert people, even if you are giving them your undiluted opinion. statistics, or scores, do this. they manipulate and evangelate pure, naked writing. people read 7.6 and judge from that rather than with that in mind. here, sites like pitchfork half seem to be knowingly taking the piss, giving decimal places to their point system. pitchfork, just with the score rating, can judge an album in...wait a minute...82 different ways. or, maybe, around 100 different ways. (i'm not sure which is closer.) on top of this, a score rating of 0.0 or 10.0 has even more connotations, above the simple signifier as just a numerical score. we need to allow space for 'sprawling' to mean all-over-the-place or droney, and we need all-over-the-place or droney to be wholly subjective again. stop double-loading words.

or maybe, a cigar is just a cigar.

low - coattails

(one line is enough.)