A New Approach for Album Reviews

I used to sit and listen to albums fairly thoroughly, listening to each track and giving it a star rating in iTunes. These star ratings would drive playlists that went onto my iPod in those days, where only four and five star songs would make it onto my rotation. Further, the five star songs would be allowed more plays than the four stars. It was a good system that basically created my own personal radio stations.

Maybe it was the streaming era that changed things, but I’ve stopped listening to albums the same way for the most part. When I do listen to albums all the way through, I still favorite songs when I like them, but I’m not as granular as I used to be.

This really shows with my album reviews over the last few years. If you’re lucky, you might get a full paragraph out of me. But, I even find my reviews quite vague. I feel like good music deserves more of my attention, so I’m going to try a new approach.

Going forward, I’m giving my thoughts on each track for most albums. The exceptions would be those over bloated albums with something like 30 tracks (seriously, Playboi Carti, WTF!). In the case of the later, I’ll shoutout the highlights. I just want to be a little more in-depth.

I have no clue what I’ll review first, but, I’m sure it’ll be this coming weekend. But, I’ll go track by track, looking at the intricacies of what I hear, and even getting into nerd shit like the samples used and whatnot. Some of this is from reading books like those from Questlove and the book Dilla Time by Dan Charnas, which dig into the guts of music. I love nerdery like this and want to contribute how I know how. This should be fun.