I came up with the idea for this site a few years ago when I realized that I was being turned off by mainstream album releases.  At the time, the reason was because, during the dub-step era of mainstream radio, all the songs pretty much sounded alike and I was aching for something different.  It irked me to no end that I would plunk down my hard earned money on an album and every song on it would sound the same or only the singles were good.  My funds are limited and, most times, I’d be choosing between more than one project only to wish I had gone another direction.

I tried to minimize that mistake by looking for album reviews online.  That turned out to be a bigger mistake.  Yes; all art is subjective and you will always have people who love something and others that hate it, but that wasn’t the problem.  Some reviewers were too caught up in being snarky or funny to really give me an idea of what I was in for.  I could sometimes tell that a reviewer didn’t actually listen to the entire album before giving a rating.  There were some suspicious reviews that sounded like the artist or their management might have paid for them.  There were the reviewers that were so far up an artist’s ass in the hopes of getting an interview or a co-sign that they are biased all to hell.  There were reviewers that, I could tell, would give an album full of monkey farts a good review if the beats were hot.  Worst of all, there were the stan reviews that simply proclaimed, “Slay,” or “G.O.A.T,” and declare all other artist’s wigs snatched and careers burned.

I thought I was getting old.  After all, this music was popular for a reason.  Maybe I was entering that time in my life where I started looking at my childhood and lamenting about how it was when real music dominated the radio.  Except, that wasn’t true.  I liked a lot of mainstream tracks.  I dig me some ratchetness from time to time.  A good fuck song is a necessity in the right situations.  And, occasionally, I’m feeling myself so much that I think I’m better than everyone else on the planet.  My problem was that this seemed to be all there was in music.  Everyone wanted to be like everyone else (either through admiration or label pressure).  Some people were only in it for the money and, once they got those endorsements and loyal fanbases, they didn’t care what they put out.  YouTube made people who could do a good cover but not their own original material household names.  It also made really shitty songs popular because it can’t distinguish between someone who likes a track and someone who laughs at it.

So I decided to create my own criteria for reviews; something that I felt gave balance to important aspects of music.  I wanted something that kept me honest so that my personal biases towards the artist would be minimized when I went in-depth.  It had to be something that made me give concrete reasons why I felt the way I did about the album.  Ultimately, there ended up being five points that were important to me:

Production:  Production absolutely can make or break an album but it’s usually not the entirety.  When I get to the point that I realize that I would rather have an instrumental version of a track than the one that features the artist, something has gone off the rails.  It bothered me that so many singers and rappers got called geniuses for subpar songs with amazing beats that they didn’t make.

Lyrics:  Sometime, too often in my opinion, bad lyrics are forgiven because the rest of the album sounds good.  And before anyone can say, “Well, sometimes a song is just fun,” there is room for that.  Surprisingly enough, fun songs can still have solid lyrics.

Vocals:  Don’t yell at me all the damn time.  Don’t mumble so I can’t understand what you’re saying.  A singer doesn’t have to sound like Leontyne Price or Pavarotti to have a good voice.  What matters is how they use the instrument they have.

Cohesion:  I have never really liked a collection of random singles that wasn’t a best of album.  Sometimes artists just put out album tracks that make them sound good or they think will get them the most radio play.  The problem with that is it can make an album sound schizophrenic.  Bouncing from one production style or theme to another without any rhyme or reason works on the radio, not so much an album.  Most people, whether they realize it or not, want an album to tell some kind of story.  Mixtapes are somewhat forgiven for this oversight because they are as much about promotion as they are artistry; official, pay releases are not.

Listenability:  I think everyone has bought that album that they thought was just the greatest thing to every be released only to find it sitting on a shelf a few years later, covered in dust. (Yes, I’m talking about physical albums.  I guess the digital equivalent would be at the bottom of your Least Played playlist.)  I have mixtapes and albums that are good but they seem to just keep going and, while I don’t have short attention span, I tend to stop listening after about track 18 (14 if there are no interludes).  There’s also that album where everything sounds alike (Ace of Base, anyone?) to the point where you can’t tell where one song stops and the others begins.

After finding some like-minded individuals, the rest is history.

I found that sometime, based on the criteria I’ve created, popular albums got bad reviews.  I would get asked why I was hating on the artist or told that I was jealous of them (Somewhere in the background, I think I would hear “Your fave could never…” but that could have been in my head.).  My answer to that is criticism isn’t hate.  There is room for improvement in most things and no artist, no matter how popular or famous, gets it right 100% of the time.  I have also found that songs that I like don’t meet my own criteria because they are my guilty pleasure tracks.  I know they’re bad and will tell other people that they’re bad; they just hit my sweet spot for some reason.  That why our motto is, “We reserve the right to call it shit and still like it.”

I don’t know where this site is going.  It could fold in a year, become something with a major following, or something in-between.  What I do know is that, as long as I’m a part of it, I want to be honest about what I post.  I don’t want to be that person that gets caught up in ego and thinks of themselves as a gatekeeper to popular culture.  I don’t ever want to be liked by an artist and give them a pass on something I would flame anyone else for.  I don’t want to think that my say is the only one.  I only want to give what I believe is good music some attention.  And if you’re discovering something new while you’re here, I’ve done my job.