When it comes to reviewing metal albums, timing is important. Although I haven't strove to be the first to have my opinion out there, my preference is to get it out as soon as possible before people stop caring about the album enough to read reviews about it.
I don't read reviews all that often myself.
I've been thinking about my own process of reviewing albums and the music that I've listened to in 2014. When I started the blog last year the foundation was intended to be metal reviews. But I was doing work here and elsewhere, and by the time 2013 ended, the spark had pretty much died out.
That explains why I reviewed four things in January and didn't do much writing about metal until recently. It's a part of the story, at least.
Since February, I had misplaced my urge to write, mostly because the music I was listening to just wasn't inspiring me. As a result, view counts in February and March tumbled.
Now that I've found the spark to write again, I find that I'm without a lot to write about, unless I decide to get on a schedule for putting out metal reviews. And this is where the problem that I've been mulling over for the last few days comes into play.
To be honest, I don't know how I feel about most of what I've heard.
I don't feel comfortable committing to a review that states unequivocally "I like [album]" or "I dislike [album]". The purpose of Nothing Has Changed after all, is to attempt quality writing. I may not always succeed, but damn it if I don't try. And if I'm writing mediocre reviews of mediocre albums...well, that's just not acceptable to me. So in the interim I've concentrated mostly on sports and manga, with the occasional interlude about metal.
I want to be able to say something definitive about an album that I review. That requires me to have a certain level of familiarity with it. Unfortunately, acquiring familiarity with each album that I've been listening to for the last couple of months has become difficult. Not impossible, by any means, but difficult enough that it has impaired my productivity.
The reason I'm not able to say much of anything definitively is the utter mediocrity that 2014 has brought us. When I heard many of the albums that appear on my Best Metal Albums of 2013 list, not only was I inspired, but I knew whether or not I liked them in just a few listens.
Metal in 2014 is not nearly as cut-and-dry. There are a lot of releases that have yet to hit me in that way, but the few that have are likely to show up at the end of the year. One problem with that, though, is that so many of them have been covered nigh-obsessively by other metal writers on the internet.
While I like to get my name out there as much as the next guy, I don't care to look like a bandwagon hopper. And if I were to review Thantifaxath or Yautja or Alraune, I get the feeling that I'd look like I'm jumping on the hype train.
I'm not into hype. And while I appreciate being a part of the consensus on certain albums, it's usually the case that people are in agreement because of some nebulous factor that I don't usually see or understand, because I'm coming at these albums from my own idiosyncratic perspective (much discussed in other entries).
So while I would like to be more productive as it relates to reviewing albums I'm listening to, I will continue to refrain from doing so until I'm comfortable with offering a definitive view that I won't have to go back and edit later.
I won't be ahead of the curve, by any means. But I'm fine with that.
