dancing about architecture: the non-art and non-science of music reviews

On the rare occasions that anyone asks me anything about my writing, it’s usually about music reviews. The consensus seems to be that a good review (I don’t mean a positive one) should either be ‘listen to the music and say if it’s good or bad’, or ‘listen to the music and describe it so that other people can decide whether it’s their cup of tea, but keep your opinion out of it’. As it happens, I’ve given this subject a lot of thought, not only because I write a lot of reviews, but I also because I read a lot of reviews, and some of my favourite writers (Charles Shaar Murray is the classic example) manage to make me enjoy reading about music even when it’s music that I either already know I don’t like, or that I can be fairly certain from reading about it that I won’t like. Because reading a good article about music is first and foremost ‘reading a good article’.

Anyway, over the course of pondering music reviews I have come to several (possibly erroneous) conclusions:

* “star ratings” HAVE TO BE relative and all stars don’t have the same value. For instance, one might give a lesser album by a great artist 3 stars, but those are not the same 3 stars one would give a surprisingly okay album by a generally crappy artist.

* Musical taste is, as everyone knows, entirely subjective, but reviewing (for me at least) has to try be a balance between objective and subjective; just listening to something and saying what you think of it is also valid of course.

* Objective factors alone (see fun pie chart below) can never make an otherwise bad album good, but subjective factors can.

* ‘Classic’ albums make a nonsense of all other rules.

Let’s examine in more detail, with graphs! (are pie charts graphs?):

Objective factors:

factors that objectively might contribute to the quality of an album

Objective factors (see fun pie chart) are really only very important when the reviewer doesn’t like the music: when you love a song, whether or not the people performing it are technically talented musicians/pitch perfect singers etc is entirely irrelevant.

But, when an album or song (or movie, book etc) is dull or just blatantly abysmal, some comfort (or conversely, some outrage and annoyance) can be gained from the knowledge that at least the participants were good at the technical aspects of what they were doing, even if they are ultimately using those skills for evil.

Subjective Factors:

the true gauge of how highly you rate a piece of music; not a very helpful chart though

Although there are many subjective factors that may be relevant; nostalgia for the artist/period, personal associations, all of these really amount to either you like it or you don’t; simple but not necessarily straightforward.

The positive subjective feeling ‘I like it!’ can override all else, so that an album which is badly played, unoriginal, poorly recorded and awful even by the artist’s own standards can receive a favourable review (though the reviewer will hopefully want to point out those things)

Meanwhile the negative subjective feeling ‘I don’t like it’ can’t help but affect a review, but should hopefully be tempered by technical concerns if (an important point) the reviewer feels like being charitable. They may not.

Ideally, to me a review should be something like 50% objective / 50% subjective (as in the examples somewhere below) but in practice it rarely happens.

“Classic” status:

The reviewing of reissued classics can be awkward, as ‘classic’ status in a sense negates reviewing altogether; it is completely separate from all other concerns, therefore said classic status can affect ratings just because the album is iconic and everyone knows it. Reviews of new editions of acknowledged classics usual become either a review of what’s new (remastered sound, extra tracks etc) or a debunking of the classic status itself; which as far as I know has never toppled a classic album from its pedestal yet.

Classic album status is normally determined by popularity as much as any critical factors, but popularity itself shouldn’t play a part in the reviewer’s verdict; just because 30,000,000 people are cloth-eared faeces-consumers, it doesn’t mean the reviewer should respect their opinion, but they should probably acknowledge it, even if incredulously. Sometimes or often, classic status is attained for cultural, rather than (or as well as) musical reasons*, and it should be remembered that albums (is this still true in 2020? I don’t know) are as much a ‘cultural artefact’ (in the sense of being a mirror and/or record of their times) as cinema, TV, magazines or any other zeitgeist-capturing phenomenon.

* in their very different ways, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Thriller and The Spice Girls’ Spice were all as much ‘cultural phenomena’ as collections of songs

another pointless chart

SO ANYWAY; how does this all work? Some examples:

I once offended a Tina Turner fan with an ambivalent review of the 30th anniversary edition of Ms Turner’s 1984 opus Private Dancer.

As a breakdown (of ‘out of 10’s, for simplicity) it would look something like this:

TINA TURNER: PRIVATE DANCER (3OTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)

Objective factors
* musicianship – 9/10 – hard to fault the adaptability or technical skill of her band
* songwriting – 6/10 – in terms of catchy, verse-chorus-verse efficiency & memorableness these are perfectly good songs, if a bit cheesy & shallow & therefore a waste of Tina Turner
* production – 9/10 – no expense was spared in making the album sound good in its extremely shiny, 80s way
* originality – 0/10 – as an album designed to make TT into a successful 80s artist, it wasn’t really supposed to be original, so hard to actually fault it in that respect
* by the standards of the artist – 2/10 – in the 60s/70s Tina Turner made some great, emotionally forceful, musically adventurous and just great records. In 1984 she didn’t.

Overall: 26/50 = 5.2/10

Subjective Factors

* I don’t like it: 1/10 (but not 0, because Tina Turner is a legend and it would be wrong to deny that somehow)

Overall 5.2/10 + 1/10 = 6.2/20 = 3.1/10 = 1.55/5 (round up rather than down, out of respect for Tina) = 2 stars

and in fact I did give the album two stars, though I didn’t actually do any of the calculations above; but it’s pleasing to find out that the instinctive two stars is justified by fake science.

by way of contrast, a favourite that seems to be an acquired taste at best:

VENUSIAN DEATH CELL: HONEY GIRL (2014)

Objective factors
* musicianship – 1/10 – David Vora’s guitar playing is not very good, plus the guitar is out of tune anyway, and his drumming is oddly rhythm-free
* songwriting – 2/10 – the songs on Honey Girl are not really songs, they may be improvised, they don’t have actual tunes as such
* production – 0/10 – David pressed ‘record’ on his tape recorder
* originality – 10/10 – Vora doesn’t sound like anyone else, his songs are mostly not about things other people sing about
* by the standards of the artist – 9/10 – I like all of Venusian Death Cell’s albums, they are mostly kind of interchangeable, but Honey Girl is one of the better ones (chosen here over the equally great Abandonned Race only because of the uncanny similarities between the cover art of Honey Girl and Private Dancer).

Overall: 22/50 = 4.4/10

Subjective Factors

* I like it: 9/10 (but not 10, because if encouraged too much David Vora might give up and rest on his laurels. Though if he did that I’d like to “curate” a box set of his works)

Overall 4.4/10 + 9/10 = 13.4/20 = 6.7/10 = 3.35/5 (round up rather than down, out of sheer fandom) = 4 stars

And in fact I did give Honey Girl four stars, but I’ve yet to hear of anyone else who likes it. Which is of course fuel for the reviewer’s elitist snobbery; win/win

Star Ratings

 

 

 

I’ve used scoring systems above, but the writers I like best rarely use scores or ‘star ratings’. I don’t think anybody (artists least of all) really likes star ratings or scores because they immediately cause problems; if, for instance, I give the Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds four stars (and the critical consensus says you have to; also, I do love it), then what do I give Wild Honey or Sunflower, two Beach Boys albums that are probably demonstrably ‘less good’, but which I still like more? But at the same time, I suppose scores are handy, especially for people who want to know if something is worth buying but don’t want an essay about it – and who trust the reviewer. The best ‘score’ system I’ve ever seen is in the early 2000s (but may still be going?) fanzine Kentucky Fried Afterbirth, in which the genius who writes the whole thing, Grey,  gives albums ratings out of ten ‘cups of tea’ for how much they are or aren’t his cup of tea; This may be the fairest way of grading a subjective art form that there can possibly be.

Critical Consensus

I mentioned the critical consensus above, and there are times when it seems that music critics seem to all think the same thing, which is how come there’s so much crossover between books like 1000 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (I always feel like there’s an implied threat in those titles) and The Top 100 Albums of the Sixties etc. I’m not sure exactly how this works, because like most people I know who love music, my favourite albums and songs aren’t always (or even usually) the most highly regarded ones. My favourite Beatles album isn’t the ‘best’ one (Revolver, seems to be the consensus now); Songs in the Key of Life is the Stevie Wonder album, but it’s probably my third or fourth favourite Stevie Wonder album; I agree that Bruce Dickinson is a metal icon but I kind of prefer Iron Maiden with Paul Di’anno (granted PD wouldn’t be as good as Bruce at things like Rime of the Ancient Mariner but it’s less often mentioned that Bruce is definitely not as good at singing Wrathchild etc as Paul was.) Much as I genuinely love The Velvet Underground and Nico, I genuinely love the critically un-acclaimed Loaded just as much; there are so many examples of this that the idea of an actual critical consensus that means anything seems like nonsense.

I’m content to like it even if you don’t

I’ve been writing music reviews for many years now, but my own involvement with ‘the consensus’ is rare and the only solid example I can think of is a negative one. I thought – and I still think – that Land, the fourth album by Faroese progressive metal band Týr, is the best thing they’ve ever done. I gave it a good review, not realising that the critical tide was turning against the band, and, for whatever reason (fun to speculate but lack of space is as likely as anything), my positive review never appeared in print. It wouldn’t have made any real difference to the band or to the album’s reception in general, but it did make me feel differently about albums that are notoriously bad (or good). Who is deciding these things? I’m a music critic and I’m not. And although I – like, I think everyone – take reviews with a pinch of salt anyway (someone else liking something is a strange criteria for getting it, when you think about it), I have to admit if I hadn’t had to listen to Land (which I still listen to every now & then, over a decade later), I wouldn’t have been in a hurry to check out the album after reading again and again that it was dull and boring.

Throughout this whole article the elephant in the room is that, at this point, the whole system of reviewing is out of date. You can almost always just listen to pretty much anything for free and decided yourself whether you like it, rather than acting on someone else’s opinion of it. But in a way that makes the writing more important; again, like most people, I often check things out and stop listening at the intro, or half way through the first song if I just don’t like it – except when I’m reviewing. Reviewers have to listen to the whole thing, they have to think about it and say something relevant or contextual or entertaining.* And if the reviewer is a good writer (Lester Bangs is the most famous example, though I prefer Jon Savage or the aforementioned CSM and various nowadays people), their thoughts will entertain you even if the music ultimately doesn’t.

 

*worth a footnote as an exception which proves the rule is a notorious Charles Shaar Murray one-word review for the Lee Hazlewood album Poet, Fool or Bum: “Bum.”

Ride On A Golden Wave: Uriah Heep’s …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble

Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble (Vertigo/Mercury, 1970; Bronze shortly thereafter)

This year (2016), BMG begins an extensive reissue campaign of releases by one of the original Spinal Tap-influencing ‘rock dinosaur’ bands, the mighty Uriah Heep. Along with an anthology, the first of these releases is, logically enough, the band’s 1970 debut – one of my favourite albums of all time – …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble. This album is probably not cool. Judging by the mostly negative reviews it got in 1970 (‘If this group makes it I’ll commit suicide’ and ‘it’s too loud, too repetitive, too predictable’ are representative quotes) it never was cool, but 46 years later it can stand proudly alongside any of the hard rock, blues rock, progressive rock or rock-rock albums of its era.

And it was an era of rock; bear in mind that that particular year also spawned Deep Purple In Rock, Black Sabbath AND Paranoid, Led Zeppelin III and many more and, while the mighty Heep are perceived to be a relatively underground cousin of Deep Purple & co, they too ponced around the US in Lear jets and limos in a way that few new rock bands do nowadays. Judged on those 1970 albums alone, the band were clearly up there with the best. Slightly less heavy (but who wasn’t?) than Black Sabbath, more jazzy and poetic than Deep Purple, more riff-centric and bluesy than (1970-era) Led Zeppelin,  …Very ‘Eavy… is monolithic but nimble, straightforward but, except in its most bludgeoning moments, not at all simplistic.

Unlike most decades, the 60s is often felt, culturally, to have a clear and decisive ending; from the perspective of nowadays, the Stones at Altamont and the Manson Family in Death Valley ended the peace & love/flower power era that was already shaken by the revolutionary events and protests of 1968. But the pre-Uriah Heep story, that of a band called Spice, (essentially Heep sans organist Ken Hensley), talent-spotted while playing in ‘The Blues Loft’ in High Wycombe, could not be more redolent of the hippy era. To me, the best work of Uriah Heep always has a hazy aroma late 60s underground optimism and …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble is a kind of time capsule of a world almost as distant and quaint now as the Victorian Age. This was a time when – as the great Charles Shaar Murray wrote (in a Cream magazine T-Rex article in 1972, just as the world moved into another cultural phase) – “Any gentle freak who believed that Nostradamus and King Arthur were alive and well in a UFO hovering somewhere over Glastonbury Tor, or who read Tolkien and Moorcock over his brown rice and apple juice, just had to own the Tyrannosaurus Rex albums...” It was these kind of freaks, one assumes, who in their less gentle moments, wanted to rock out to Spice. In High Wycombe. Incidentally, it may be this very hippy-hangover aura that prevented Uriah Heep from being as influential on the metal scene as their contemporaries, Black Sabbath (whose musical background in blues rock was very similar). Indeed, I can personally testify that the whole flared-trousers-and-moustaches vibe of the Heep (as well as the slightly bland rock they were putting out at the time) was enough to prevent some 80s metal kids from checking out their older work.

spice

Anyway; Spice became a pretty well known band on the progressive rock circuit in the dying years of the 60s. In fact, their music as preserved on the first few LPs is very much ‘progressive’ in the late 60s blues rock sense (in which sense Led Zeppelin were also progressive), but not in the sense that ‘prog’ came to mean as the 70s wore on. Mick Box, founder, guitarist and, to this day the real heart of Uriah Heep, began as a jazz player and it was perhaps this more than anything, that coloured the heavy blues rock that Spice played; parallel to the British Blues boom but not really part of it, the band used elements of the blues, but they were never constrained by its structures.

The Band

Mick Box: guitar

mick

(highly underrated as player, composer & all-round riffmeister)

 

 

 

 

 

David Byron: vocals

DByron

(a versatile, very English-sounding rock voice, equally at home with swaggering, earthy blues-rock vocalising and delicate fantasy

 

 

 

 

 

Ken Hensley: organ, guitar, vocals etc.

kenhen

(Without Hensley Uriah Heep would have been far more like a standard late 60s blues-rock band)

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Newton: bass, vocals

newton

(in the classic 70s tradition the bass is loud, clear & occasionally funky on this album; co-wrote lots of the songs.)

 

 

 

 

 

Alex Napier – drums (on half of the album)

alnapier

(great, agile and subtle drummer, not as thunderous as some contemporaries, but for my money up there with the best; retired after leaving the band I believe)

 

 

 

 

 

Nigel “Ollie” Olsson: also drums, plays on a few songs

olsson

(another great drummer; went on to play with Elton John after his stint in the Heep)

 

 

 

 

 

THE ALBUM

1. Gypsy (Mick Box/David Byron)
The perfect opening track; after the busy little intro the simple, bludgeoning guitar/organ riff provides an excellent backing for David Byron’s authoritative vocal, establishing the Heep as a band of (for the time extremely) heavy sound and somewhat whimsical, romantic preoccupations; hippies in fact. Excellent organ and guitar soloing and harmony backing vocals by pretty much everyone make this a superb manifesto for the band’s approach. 70s heavy rock par excellence

2. Walking In Your Shadow (Paul Newton/David Byron)

An excellent funky drum intro which should be (has been?) sampled leads into a dynamic blues-rock song with another perfect vocal by David Byron. The song is a relatively understated version of the kind of pleased-with-itself blues rock swagger that Whitesnake were to excel in later in the decade, and it has an excellent Mick Box solo too.

3. Come Away Melinda (Hellerman/Minkoff)

A delicate and drama-filled version of the much-covered melancholy anti-war folk/protest song. Byron’s clear enunciation and expressive voice make the most of the (possibly slightly twee and pretentious) post-apocalyptic lyrics. Lovely mellotron-flute intro and lovely acoustic guitar; the key word is ‘lovely’. The great vocal is made even better by imaginative use of stereo.

4. Lucy Blues (Mick Box/David Byron)

A somewhat quizzical and sad blues-rock song, Lucy Blues is, despite occasional claims at the time that they were Led Zep clones,  the closest Uriah Heep comes to Led Zeppelin on this album; not all that close. And with all respect to the iconic Robert Plant, David Byron managed the same kind of expressiveness without the melodramatic whimpering and screaming. As the original sleevenote remarks; ‘hardly unpredictable but rather pleasant’. Nice piano work adds to the barroom blues feel, far less epic than the usual Heep sound. Byron’s English accent gives the song a strange and unique flavour, as it tends to do on all of the more blues-based material – one of the features that makes early Uriah Heep so distinctive. Meanwhile, Ken Hensley proves himself master of the classic blues Hammond organ solo too.

5. Dreammare (Paul Newton)

Side two commences with one of the heavier songs on the album. Dreammare has an ominous organ intro, a strangely funky, reverby riff and a suitably feverish quality, enhanced by the speaker-to-speaker shimmer on the vocals. A nicely bad-tempered, squalling guitar solo too. This is perhaps the only song where the claims of sheer noisy unpleasantness could be deemed fair enough; for non-rock fans anyway.

6. Real Turned On (Mick Box/David Byron/Paul Newton)

Proto-Whitesnake swagger again (but even more so), Real Turned On is a cocky mid-tempo blues-rock tune with an angular riff, several good solos, tons of slide guitar by Ken Hensley and a good naturedly sleazy David Byron trying to lure a young woman with wine and so forth. Unreconstructed 60s freewheeling sexual (and arguably, but arguably not, sexist) revolution rock, it ends, oddly, with screeds of apocalyptic feedback.

7. I’ll Keep On Trying (Mick Box/David Byron)

Archetypically 70s flared-jeans hard rock, with organs, screaming guitar and an impassioned David Byron vocal. The tune skips between sinister-toned, portentious organ and wailing vocals and nimble-fingered fiddlyness during which every band member gets to show off, before settling into a heavy blues riff. There are tranquil interludes and dramatic, siren-like guitar and even a Zappa-esque wah-wah solo. If you don’t like this, you probably don’t like Uriah Heep; fair enough.

8. Wake Up (Set Your Sights) (Mick Box/David Byron)

The final track on the album is also the most ‘progressive’, jazzy one, which manages to encapsulate all of the facets of early Heepdom in six minutes. The intro has David Byron intoning ‘aaahhh’s over a bass and organ scales before a dramatic, grandiose verse about justice prevailing, before the music becomes a kind of hoppity, percussive jazz with some excellent bass playing and very understated guitars. As the song builds (with some enjoyably silly vocalising; ‘justice, justice, just-iiiice‘ etc) it breaks not into rock but another jazzy verse/chorus and then a lovely soft pastoral interlude before fading out. Byron’s vocal is highly theatrical and generally one of the best he ever recorded and it’s just an excellent, dynamic end to a superb album that people don’t like as much as I do; their loss.

daheepAs if all this wasn’t enough, the album is housed in one of the great rock sleeves of the era: a fallen warrior (David Byron in fact) covered in cobwebs, the darkness surrounding him only broken by the (superbly-fonted) logo and title. The gatefold features a photo of the band onstage.

heepin

The album was released in the US in a different and slightly inferior form (missing Lucy Blues, and featuring instead the great Bird of Prey from the band’s second album, Salisbury). The US album is simply called Uriah Heep and its cover – a kind of dragon/wyrm thing – is not one of the great rock sleeves of the era.

usheep

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Although …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble is one of those rare perfectly formed albums that can only be marred by adding bonus tracks to, it is also one of those albums I have to own on multiple formats, and the 1996 CD release adds bonus tracks, thus:

Gypsy (single edit)
What is says; a shorter version, omitting the organ intro & so forth. Pretty great, though unnecessary

Come Away Melinda
An early version recorded by Spice before they changed their name to Uriah Heep. Interesting, not hugely different from the album version really, but  Byron’s vocal has less feeling and it’s generally not quite as good.

Born in a Trunk
A rocking Spice tune, this features the kind of dynamics that early Heep excelled in, plus another strangely English David Byron vocal and some great funky drum breaks.

BMG’s latest version is in all regards superior to the 1996 version: wisely retaining the whole of the original album (but with beautifully remastered sound) as disc one of two, it adds an entire (and to be fair, slightly inferior) version of the album on disc two. These are unreleased (earlier or alternate takes) of most of the songs, plus the US mix of Bird of Prey and a nice Spice track called Magic Lantern.

Although the earlier versions are, naturally, mostly not quite as good as the finished ones, they are nearly there and, while Spice without Hensley can never equal Uriah Heep, that late 60s atmosphere, an indefinable (and you would think incompatible) mixture of unpretentious ‘let’s just get up and play’ attitude and love of airy, fantastical romance is present in its most concentrated form.