This would have appalled me when I was about 19 and knew everything. I would tell people that they couldn't possibly have an opinion on a film unless they'd seen it all. However, as you say, cynicism sets in; and you need some kind of yardstick, otherwise you'd buy and see everything. Personally, I stopped watching Quentin Tarantino films after loathing Pulp Fiction's empty style and Jackie Brown's unbelievable tedium. Now, he may have changed. His style may have matured. I don't think so. I'm confident that a two part martial arts film with the traditional Tarantino dialogue is something that I can live without. Blinkered? Pig-headed? Sorry, that'll be yes to both of those. Personally, I wouldn't have the balls to write a review of an album I'd never heard, but I'm not a music journalist. If I was, I'm sure it would be the next logical step. Only two days ago I heard someone brand a new band's output with the epithet "infectious pop". It was nothing of the kind, by the way. But yes, I'm sure "Stonesey swagger" will be dusted off and given good use in reviewing the new Black Crowes album.

Maxim reviews records? Whoda thunk?

I once reviewed a Boo Radleys gig for a small Lanarkshire fanzine but spent almost the entire time in the bar. The next day I wrote a lot of stuff about how wonderful it all was: jaunty 'Wake Up Boo', rousing 'Lazarus' etc. The old 'sonic cathedrals' might have ended up in there somewhere also.

According to a pal of mine who'd been at the gig they were rubbish. I still feel a twinge of regret at duping the handful of pop kids in Motherwell and Larkhall who would have read my pseudo-Melody Maker prose.

can I please review the new Coldplay album?

Rousing choruses, fragile vocals, infectious melodies, chiming guitars...

....but a naughty boy, who should know better, a "regular correspondent", admits eleswhere on these pages that he rubbished The Piano without seeing it. Tut and tut again.
Many at least saw it before rubbishing it. I'm going to watch it again tonight. (Kitov effect, indeed!)

I've seen it twice, read the novelisation and written an essay on the bloody thing. And I sure as hell wish I'd never seen it.

A few years ago I was writing the book reviews for a local listings mag and one day the editor came in to my shop to say hello. What I thought he said was, 'Have you GOT the new Thomas Harris?'. What he actually said was, 'Have you READ the new Thomas Harris?' (The book in question was the long awaited Hannibal.) I replied, 'Of course!'
So, long story short, I found myself having to write an 800 word review for publication by that Friday. I didn't have time to read the book AND write the review, so I just did the latter. Oddly enough, when I got around to reading Hannibal about a year later and looked up my review, I realised that I wouldn't have written a word differently if I had had the advantage of reading the book before writing it.

And I guess this is as good a place as any.

How many times do reviewers listen to an album before doing their review ?

I'm guessing that recent reviews of 50 Cent and The Eagles were based on one listen and one only (and even that was a struggle) but I tend to find that it's not till at least the third or fourth listen that I really start forming an opinion one way or the other.

You can assess REM's new album on YouTube from their 'live rehearsal' concerts, but even without doing that you know that 'return to form', 'Document', '80s', 'Rickenbacker', 'moving away from mid-tempo', vocal harmonies', 'Peter Buck's influence', 'Byrds' are likely to be in most reviews.

Back when they reformed first time out I went off and had a really enjoyable day out with Skunk Anansie and Iggy Pop as support and finally the Pistols. The general consensus with our group of 20 or so was, ok it was a circus but, they were great and as a band they were tight. They played, I'd say everything but the bottm line was they rocked.

The reviews....They were SH*T in a word. I found out later that most of the hacks were in hospitality on the razzle and gave what they presumed happend on stage. Most reviews were completely at varience to the gig we saw.

So it doesn't suprise me anyway. Its par for the course and one of the reasons I started reading Word.

Now about that Ringo Starr review.......

I am alone in really liking this band? I've been eagerly awaiting their 'comeback' album.

'It's shit'.
There. Done.

This is the point at which I descend to Paul Welleresque levels of curmudgeonly Puritanism. The Maxim debacle has been reported as a dispute between the band and the editorial staff, when the real victims are the readers who buy the magazine, have a finite amount of time and money and, God forbid, may want to know if the new Black Crowes album is any good. Testing the goodwill of the people who pay your wages is a dangerous gambit, especially in the precarious world of print journalism.

I want to read reviews which are a product of someone with greater powers of expression than myself, having listened to some music and then made an effort to articulate their feelings on it. A case in point is John McCready's less than glowing write-up of the new Goldfrapp album in the current issue of Word, which reads like an honest attempt at grappling with the band's change in direction and left me with a good sense of what the album might be like.

Typically according to the reviews every new Bowie album is the best once since ‘Scary Monsters'. It never is ( this should be on my 'Rock Cliches' thread).

'A Bigger Bang' seemed to get the Black Crowes treatment too.
I swerved the last Stones album for a while due to the lukewarm writeups - Turns out, it really is the best thing since 'Some Girls' (a bit long perhaps), although this was rarely mentioned in the reviews.

I think this is a really good point. Most of the best records were made pretty quickly. If it's a good song I really don't understand why it should take any more than a day or so at most to get it down.

...that Bowie thing really bugs me. Even David himself said he may as well release his albums with the sticker 'his best since Scary Monsters'- people see that, glaze their eyes and think 'I've heard that before' and don't bother listening to them. Which is a shame, as I think he's been on a roll since 'Buddha Of Suburbia' at the least.

I did a thread on a similar thing recently; that 'return to form' myopia within the music press and the records don't really reflect it when you hear them. 'A Bigger Bang' is the worst example; I think I was taken in by it at the time but last time I played it I found it hard work. There's scarcely any memorable songs on it, in my opinion. I just wonder whether this was an 'order from above', so to speak, that it was a return to form, as like the other stuff they put out for the last 20-odd years, it has little staying power with me personally after the first few plays.

I was a bit put off that Eagles album after reading the review in Word. I disregarded some of the other reviews I read which made some sniffy comments about the audacity they had to still continue as if punk had never happened (another weird trait in the UK music press- to slam bands for just surviving the vagaries of fashion) but David's review just radiated disappointment. I must confess, the idea of a double CD always puts me off a bit too...

On the subject of my hatred for that 'year zero' punk stuff, though, I do find it amusing that The Sex Pistols' comeback tour drew some comically bad reviews. What goes around comes around...

Based on these comments, can I suggest that The Word only reviews records that have been out for a couple of months? So many campaigns these days are "front loaded" (horrible marketing phrase), largely at the behest of desperate PR's who are under pressure from the record company to get a good week 1 chart position, and often with journos being allowed one or two listens in an office at the record company, lest the thing leaks onto the net. Do I want to know what Stuart Maconie thinks of the new Elbow album (which isn't out until mid March!) now? I'd rather know what he thinks when he's lived with it for six months. Someone more erudite than myself will know the answer to this; who was the historian who when asked "what was the impact of the Franco-Prussian war?" replied "It's too soon to say". Can we have a bit more objectivity please?

...but perhaps because of Word not having that star-rating system, I don't find it to be as bad as some. I remember when that Radiohead album came out, there was a five star review in The Guardian which must have been written a few hours after it was unleashed. This may well have been a case of an album being reviewed without the musical contents being cared for too deeply. A lot of the fuss around it in the early reviews I read was based around the internet scheme they used.

A most enjoyable thing is when the press backtrack on their initial euphoria around an album. The best example of this I can think of is Oasis' 'Be Here Now' which got a lot of acclaim when it came out but now is treated with disdain, leading one to question why it got the great reviews anyway. Similar thing happened with Coldplay's 'X and Y'.

A friend of mine once wrote a review of a Gabrielle concert from the pub over the road from the venue, pausing only to phone the guy he'd given his tickets to to make sure she hadn't fallen offstage during the encore. There was a letter in the paper the next week congratulating him on his accurate and sympathetic write up. Fewer reviews, but better written is the way forward. Wasn't that in the Word manifesto sometime around episode one?

Am I the only one not interested at all in reviews anymore? I have never bought, or not bought, an album that I wasn't/was going to buy on the strength of a couple of hundred words. Has anyone? I'm with Skirky on this; I'd like to see much more considered pieces, written with time and some perspective, and then only on records/films/books about which it is worth saying something, positive or negative.

On the subject of reviews and reviewers did Jude actually listen to the Joanna Newsom cd or are they 2 Joanna Newsoms???

Perhaps most of us are already familiar with this site. I find it useful since I can't hear everything before buying and anyway hearing something once is not enough to decide mostly. You can see a collection of reviews from all kinds of publications and websites there for free for many new CDs. Some of the reviewers must have played the whole CD a few times I should think. And it's free. Kind of gives a balanced view - you get a good idea of who's getting a bit carried away with themselves too. Still got to take it with a pinch of salt of course. They don't seem to use The Word though - lack of star ratings? Not that it matters since I get it anyway of course.

www.metacritic.com

partly because it was the "film Select" and partly because the editorial staff wanted to continue to receive the free records they'd been accustomed to while on Select (nowt wrong with that).

Such was the tight security around the release of Oasis's 'Be Here Now' - and this before the advent of filesharing - that NEON couldn't secure an advance tape of the album from Creation Records. Gold-dust such as this would only go to the newspapers and dedicated rock magazines, who themselves had to sign documents acknowledging that to even let anyone else hear the record at all would cause Oasis "irreparable damage". Desperate to ensure that the Oasis bubble didn't burst and keen not to queer the pitch vis-a-vis future interviews, the rock mags allowed only safe hands to review the record and the result was the swathe of 5/5s and 10/10s that we're all still sniggering about.

NEON, on the other hand, made an educated guess without hearing a note of the record, ran a 120-word review dismissing 'Be Here Now' as the unlistenable result of cocaine and arrogance... and ended up having published pretty much the only accurate review of the album anywhere.

The moral is that no, you don't have to hear the record to review it properly - and sometimes listening to it is a positive drawback.

(NB I can't remember who reviewed 'Be Here Now' for NEON but I don't think it was me).

There's a big debate at the moment about "churnalism" - the practise of journalists being forced - by owners slashing resources while increasing pagination and supplements - to churn out more copy than they could reasonably be expected to have a comprehensive grasp of.
Only yesterday I recommended Goldfrapp's new album to the people of Cambridge as a thing of "vaguely unsettling pastoral beauty", despite only having got through the first two tracks on my (short) journey to work. Then, in the next breath, I advised them to give Jason Statham's new film The Bank Job a wide berth. Of course I haven't SEEN it but... hey, it's a Jason Statham film about a bank job. You just know it's two hours of your life you won't get back, don't you?
I'm not saying this sort of carry on is right - just that it's a commercial reality when you're filling 100+ pages a week with a team of four people.
In summary, then: Capitalism = wrong.

I'll give Cambridge a miss then. Make a stand, man! Yes, yes, you'll get the sack, but at least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you're right, says a man who has cut his nose off so many times that his face is beyond spiting. The joy of a pyrrhic victory.
(Um, can a realist write something now.)

say, this whole thread (having read it instead of logging into my PC and doing some work) depresses me. I don't want to annoy anyone, but the majority of entries from the Word employees/associates come across as somewhat jaded and, yes, cynical. That this is hardly surprising given the years you've all put into your love of music is understandable, but this blogger reads Word because you all decided to make a different magazine with different values to the rest of the dross in W H Smith, and here we all are, 5 years on, listening to you openly admit you could make up a review of any album without reading it. None of us are stupid; we know that.

Instead of potentially diluting our trust in your opinions, how about doing what the magazine has done so successfully in other areas; come up with something new? How about (gulp) not doing album reviews? How about choosing ten artists with albums about to be released or released in the last three months, and giving us a page on each. Sure, talk about the songs and tell us if you like them if you want, but talk about where and how they were recorded, what the circumstances were, do a quick Q&A with the producer/sound recorder/woman who lives next door who's been complaining about the muted trumpet loop repeating to fade at 2AM?

Come on guys, I don't want cynicism and the, let's be honest, quite awful assumptions Mr. Hepworth put in his posting (and, yes, I know he did it to engage debate, I can't imagine he actually thinks like that...).

We're all music lovers on this site; we have our own likes and dislikes and don't, if we were being honest with ourselves, need 150 words from Harrison, Lewry et al to convince us if it's yay or nay down at HMV; we've got 30 second snippets on i-Tunes or a pair of headphones at the music store or countless excerpts on the band's website if we have to hear before we buy.

I've spent my entire music-buying career picking albums out because they look intriguing and/or word of mouth and/or I like the cover (there, I've said it). If it's a burden to listen to an album twice and write two paragraphs about it, don't. Either innovate (it's what you're good at) or give the job to someone else.

...from to time I approach reviewing an album with something I really want to say. This is because the record has awoken something within me and generally occurs when the record has been a part of my life for a while. Right now I could quite write any amount about the later works of the Blind Boys Of Alabama or Norma Watersen's first solo album or Orchestra Baobab. However, nobody particularly wants to read that right now and not even a magazine with as forgiving a template as this one is going to find room for it.

Traditional record reviewing rests on the assumption that when so-and-so decides to release an album you will have something to say about it. But you probably won't. The likelihood is that you will have no strong feelings about it one way or another and your aquaintance with it will be slight enough (even three plays is a lot of time) that you are inclined to either be non-commital or, if you're old, hard-bitten and emotionally numb as a consequence of untold hours of your life spent dutifully listening to the seventh album by the Black Crowes or its equivalent, downright dismissive. So, if you want an opinion right now - and that's what readers, PRs, editors and other hacks tend to demand - this is it. It is, like my opinion about everything else, provisional and because most products disappear entirely I will never be called upon to flesh it out. I could scan the papers this weekend and find yards of opinion about the latest records or films, most of which will say the same thing and none of which will amount to anything original or stimulating. I only read reviews when they're written by people I like or trust or can really write or have something fresh to say.

However, and here we can look on the bright side, I am constantly being directed to great music by other music lovers. In the past few weeks alone I've gone and bought records because people on the Word site have suggested that they're great. There's Rachel Unthank for a start. Whoever suggested that, thanks very much. That's not to say that I haven't been pointed towards it before but at that time I was thinking about something else. That's life. If you turn this into a duty you will kill it.

Which brings me to my second reason for optimism. Hardly anything disappears nowadays. When you finally come round to Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives or the third Led Zeppelin album it will be there. So relax. The music business - and the publishing business that marches in step with it - likes to pretend there's some kind of race on here. There isn't.

(This rather prolonged post was written while listening to Stevie Wonder's "Talking Book". I bought this in October 1972 on the basis of a number of reviews that agreed it was a quantum leap. Since then he has made another twelve albums, most of which aren't as good. That's life.)

If memory serves, the "musicassette" was constructed to withstand approximately ten playings because research indicated that the vast majority of pop releases were only played NINE times in their entire lives.

If this is true, then a reviewer who listens to an album once or twice is giving the record more or less the same attention as the person who buys it.

Here is the great truth of record releases and the reviewing of same: do you approach every new release as if it's a potential "Talking Book" or do you think it's more likely to be "Conversation Peace" (1995)?

Shelby Lynne's Just A Little Lovin' as a result of (a) the title track incuded on this month's CD, (b) the review in this month's magazine, and (c) the fact that you guys think it's good enough to give away to your recent subscribers. It's the refreshing lack of cynicism, coupled with your enthusiasm for genuine quality and the ability to articulate this intelligently (coupled with occasional moments of endearing childish behaviour - see Jude Rogers' Word Face thread) that keeps me coming back for more. If there is any cynicism in Word, then it's the good kind.

"I only read reviews when they're written by people I like or trust or can really write or have something fresh to say".

Me too. Frankly the last thing I want in a review is a subjective, balanced and reasonable opinion. I want something to stimulate my interest, provoke a reaction - and I have frequently bought records on the basis of terrible reviews simply because I know that if writer 'x' hates the band there's a pretty good chance I'll like them.

I subscribe to the London Review of Books - mainly to appear intellectual on the tube and attract women (doesn't work), but also because most of the reviews spend very little time talking about whether the book is any good or not. Instead they use the theme of the book to talk more generally about the subject and allow the writer to create a piece of writing that stands up in its own right.

And I still buy many of the books they discuss.

Clearly a magazine like The Word doesn't have that kind of scope but I still want to see the personality of the writer coming out in the review. David Quantick's recent Morrissey review is a classic example of this - you didn't have to agree with it to appreciate what was a brilliantly conceived deconstruction of the great man's solo career.

Non gaming magazines like Total Film, for example, are forever reviewing games that aren't even finished yet. The attitude seems to be that if it isn't the main focus of the magazine, it doesn't much matter, which is presumably the thinking here.

All journalists are liars. When I worked on a free paper in Hull in the 1980s I was tasked with writing a weekly "ghosted" column for Hull City's then manager Colin Appleton. He had so little to say for himself that I used to regularly forget to call him and knock up the 350 words off the top of me head. No one noticed. No one cared.

With most types of reviews - books, films, TV shows, plays, operas, gigs - the reader will have pretty much the same experience as the journalist: both read/watch/attend it and then move on. But album reviews aren't like that. They're like car reviews, where the journalist takes the shiny new product out for a quick spin, reads the specs/liner notes, and then sounds off with confident authority. But the car or album buyer will over time learn things that the reviewer can't possibly know. Will the kids get carsick in it on the M6 up to Alton Towers? Will I get thoroughly sick of that jangly guitar sound? Will the gearbox crumble to dust the week after the warranty runs out? Will it be Ellenically nailed to the shelf after only a few plays? Will those allegedly ergonomic seats give me raging sciatica on any journey longer than a nip down to Tesco's? Will playing it make women think I'm a suave sophisticate? Who can possibly know?

We live with albums and cars for months and probably years, and any first impression is bound to at best fall hopelessly short and at worst be woefully misleading.

In other words, album reviewers - all of them, to a man - are Jeremy Clarkson.