Written by:	musclassia
Published:	12.12.2023

19/02/2019: this was the day on which I was approached to be an official writer for Metal Storm, which ultimately turned out to be the most pivotal moment in my involvement with the website.

At that point, I was hardly a new user; my account was nearly 8 years old with just over 1000 comments to its name, and had already published 17 reviews, a Getting Into article about Amorphis, and a concert review of Hellfest 2018 co-written with Darkside Momo. Still, the fact that I have subsequently posted or contributed to an additional 5000+ forum comments, 157 articles and 561 reviews in the following 5 years demonstrates a dramatic upturn in terms of my engagement with the site. In those 5 years, my writing style, the depth of my searches for new music, and my appreciation for music as a writer and musician, have all evolved considerably. Therefore, as I approach the date of this milestone, I’ve increasingly found myself looking back on this period, to the extent that I’ve ended up writing this retrospective meta-article about my writing, in true ‘pretentious asshole artist’ style. I'm not the first MS contributor to write on the MS reviewing experience, but as self-aggrandizing as my own attempt here is, I hope it may nevertheless make for some interesting reading in this fallow period of the metal release calendar.

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Table Of Contents

2014-2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

Reflections And Re-Evaluations

Looking To The Future

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When submitting reviews on Metal Storm, users are provided with rules and guidelines to assist in crafting their submissions (which, as our primary proofreader, I’ve discovered that plenty of users outright ignore in favour of submitting 2-3 sentences of stream-of-consciousness); some key guidance mentions that an optimal review length is 250-500 words, and follows the rules of conventional writing (introduction, opinion, supporting argument, conclusion).

Brevity in writing has always been a major challenge for me (I had to request a 50% increase of the word limit for my PhD thesis, and still barely managed to get beneath said limit), but while my reviews have long shown flagrant disregard for this suggested length, I did initially attempt to conform to the guidelines; on only four occasions did I scrape beneath 500 words (and in each instance, it was by 30 words or fewer), but I did generally attempt to conform to a 4-paragraph format within touching distance of this target. However, even at this early stage, I was already demonstrating my eagerness to write in greater depth, my fairly extensive review of Between The Buried And Me’s Coma Ecliptic swiftly being dwarfed by a 1000-word review of Triangle by Schammasch.

My first two reviews sat pretty near the extremities of what one could write about: my first effort covered Circles, a newly released EP by the very underground When Icarus Falls, and was followed by a retrospective review of a classic, Down’s Nola. If I were to advise anyone looking to try their hand at album reviews, I think either a popular album that they are intimately familiar with or an overlooked release that is unlikely to draw much comment are both good options to start with; the former allows oneself to focus on writing, as knowledge of the release is already heavily ingrained, while the latter means that you are unlikely to catch much flak from fans of the band disagreeing with your opinion.

More critical reviews, I would suggest to perhaps leave for later and hone one’s craft a bit first, although I didn’t wait much longer before taking on the decidedly mixed bag that was Machine Head’s Bloodstone & Diamonds as my fourth attempt. As will become a recurring theme in this article, negative criticism is inherently more likely to receive opposition, so removing one potential target of reactive criticism (the quality of the reviewer’s writing) goes some way to mitigating the nature of these responses. Still, my writing during these early years still skewed heavily towards positive opinions, with 7 out of 17 reviews afforded a rating of 8.5 or greater, contrasted with only one more orange score (awarded to the sloppy Choosing Mental Illness As A Virtue from Phil Anselmo) to join that Machine Head review.

Although there’s only a relatively small sample size to look over, there were some clear changes in my review style across my guest reviewer era. On my second and third reviews (both of Down releases), I ended with a selection of ‘highlight tracks’, a habit I thankfully abandoned swiftly afterwards. More notably, in attempting to fit to a self-imposed ‘4-paragraph’ intro/opinions/conclusion structure, I was liable to write some rather bloated paragraphs; that Machine Head review, for example, contains 2 consecutive paragraphs around the 250-word mark (supposedly a full review in and of itself, according to the guidelines). The proofreader of my Coma Ecliptic review did me a solid in breaking some mammoth paragraphs into multiple shorter and more digestible chunks; while some hefty paragraphs appear in a couple of my 2019 reviews, in general I found myself composing my writings in a more digestible format.

One other thing of note regarding this early activity is, well, the lack of activity; there’s times these days where I get close to writing 17 reviews in a single month, so only reaching that number in 5 years is a bit of a shift. A major reason for this, and also a major reason as to why I picked up the pace as a contributor, was how long the delays between submission and publication would be; when checking my message history on the site to fill out this early year section, I noticed multiple messages I sent enquiring about submitting a review/article and not getting corrections back from a proofreader for over a month.

Thankfully, times have changed for both me (who no longer needs to follow any rules on submitting nor wait for any proofreading) and guest reviewers (who very rarely have to wait more than a week to have their writing looked over), but I have to admit that the 4-week wait after release was enough for my interest in covering many albums to dissipate, even without the subsequent delays. Therefore, my advancement to contributor status caused an immediate shift in my willingness to write reviews, as can be seen by looking at the next year’s activity.







The jump in activity was immediate, but not extreme; 30 reviews is a substantial amount (only Radu, Omne Metallum, AndyMetalFreak and F3ynman2000 have published over 30 reviews in 2023, aside from myself), but a far cry from my current levels. The activity very much came in bursts; I could have three articles on three consecutive days, and then nearly 2 months between my Dreadnought and Teramaze reviews. I’d like to say I was busy living life hard in 2019, but in truth I probably had somewhat similar levels of downtime then as I do now, just spent on different activities.

My first front page review was for a 4-Way Split; with 3 user votes, it wasn’t exactly a high-profile album to introduce myself with, but while I was still aiming for the 500-word mark (missing it narrowly with 513 words), I was already willing to veer away from the 4-paragraph structure. I was still opening reviews with substantial paragraphs, as I had yet to really factor in the ‘cut’ feature; looking back, I got a message from Radu shortly afterwards: “Slight word of advice: make your review intros a bit shorter”.

Review openings are a tricky subject, one that I will come back to later, but given the limited space for opening sprawl on the review ticker at the top of the main page, it’s best to shy away from 130-word opening paragraphs such as appeared in my review of The Moth Gatherer’s Esoteric Oppression. From this point onward, my introductions across 2019 fluctuated between single-sentence taglines and multi-sentence blocks of text that just about fit inside the ticker word limit.

A quick look at the average score in the heading of this section shows that my reviews were, on the whole, very positive across the year; an average of 7.98 means that, on average, I was reviewing albums I thought were ‘very good’. Some were better than that; the highest score I’ve given to a new release remains the 9.3 I awarded Cult Of Luna’s A Dawn To Fear in September 2019, one of the numbers I remain most in agreement with all these years later. Still, I have always had the belief that it is necessary to place negative reviews alongside positive reviews; if all scores are great, the only indicator that an album is bad is if it has no review at all, and it renders scores almost meaningless (a problem IGN notoriously has).

To this end, I did try to write some less positive reviews; I think I possibly tried too hard with Atonement by Killswitch Engage, one of only 2 albums I gave a sub-7 score to, and one that on balance was perhaps harsh and borne out of a self-imposed necessity to produce some orange scores. The other sub-7 rating was far more earned; the only good thing that came from Fallujah’s Undying Light was the opportunity to practice writing scathing critiques.

Thankfully, the public disdain for Undying Light was strong enough that I faced no pushback on this opinion; in contrast, a fairly positive assessment of Distance Over Time by Dream Theater led to the first argument with a passionate fan defending the band/album in the comments section: a peril of covering popular bands that I would encounter again in the future. Also, for the first time, I opted against giving a score at all to three records: one for being a too-short EP, one for inspiring ambivalence in me, and one I don’t know why. On the topic of scoreless reviews, they certainly have their merits, but in general, I do like being able to represent the overriding sentiment I have towards an album with some kind of singular indicator, which is why I persist with scores to this day.

On the whole, I consider 2019 to have been a good first year of reviewing, but very much a preamble for what was to come; however, I continued to embrace my natural inclination towards writing long reviews. One last notable thing that happened in 2019 was the launch of Wait A Minute! That’s Not Metal!; I contributed to this series from the second edition, albeit only covering 1 album, but from that point I have (I believe) submitted at least one write-up to every edition, and was already submitting multiple entries per month by the end of the year. These articles really have done an awful lot to expand my horizons musically, and I thank Radu for pushing me initially to be involved by sending suggestions, even if these days I am finding the vast majority of records I cover from my own music searches.







2020 was a very ordinary year, so naturally my reviewing followed the same pattern as 2019... psych. In truth, my submission rate, while higher than the previous year, was not dramatically so in the first 3 months of 2020, with me publishing 11 reviews between January 1 and the start of Covid lockdowns in the UK on 23 March. In contrast, I had published a further 6 reviews in the remaining days until the end of March. By the time restrictions relaxed at the beginning of July, I had a further 19 reviews under my belt, and had also been advanced from contributor to elite status.

One of the things that stands out to me looking back at the early 2020 reviews are how many of them were published significantly before their release date; this was the beginning of me being provided with promo copies for albums, and I hadn’t yet grasped the concept that, just because I got a promo several months in advance, I shouldn’t immediately write and publish the review, hence why April releases such as Eupnea by Pure Reason Revolution and Elder’s Omens were reviewed in late February and early March, respectively.

I was alerted to the error of my ways when my review of Rise Radiant had to be removed and republished later down the line due to me uploading it before the date requested by the label (which, in my defence, I had not been informed of). However, probably my greatest aberration in terms of gaps was an unintentional one; Haken’s Virus was still scheduled for a springtime release when I published my review, but it ended up being delayed (ironically by a virus) to late July, almost 3 months after my article went online.

I had several more N/A scores afforded to albums in 2020; two of these were EPs (and for one of which I noted I could break the 500-word mark when covering what was effectively a single song), but the other three were interesting cases. Cycle Of Suffering by Sylosis is likely still the album I’ve listened to the most number of times before reviewing, but I found myself struggling to find an objective view in my fanboy state and opted against scoring it (a situation I did not find myself in when it came to that band’s next release). The other two included a demo with a fascinating backstory and the only live album I’ve covered.

My average rating went down 0.15 from the previous year; part of this was me trying to be more measured in the scores I awarded albums, something that remains an ongoing conundrum through to the present day for me. One major influence on the average score was me awarding several more sub-7 scores this year, although looking back, all 6 of them were for albums I was aiming to review ahead of their releases.

Selecting albums to give a negative review of is a continual challenge; particularly these days, when there’s so much music I’m sifting through, it feels wasteful to dedicate time to listening to an album I know I dislike several times just to review it, and it can also feel mean-spirited to pick out an album for the purposes of talking badly about it. I do try to push myself to pick out albums to bring some balance to the slew of 7+ scores that consistently occupy our front page, but it is always easiest when it’s a band you know coming along and disappointing you, like Nero Di Marte’s bizarre misstep with Immoto, or Lamb Of God going through the motions on their self-titled stab at recycling.

I also continued to flaunt the recommended word limit with impunity, fitting a gargantuan 1240 words into my review of Palimpsest by Protest The Hero. A review that filled the criteria of being both long and negative was the one for Nightwish’s Human. :II: Nature., which attracted not only the most attention of any of my reviews, but among the most of any content published on this site; the Nightwish fans came out in their droves to turn the comments section into a warzone.

There’s one comment that emerged in that thread that I’d like to bring particular attention to:




This user was factually right; I gave the album 4 listens before reviewing it, not 10 to 15. But also, this is a ridiculous standpoint; the number of how many listens is necessary to appreciate an album has risen steadily over the years, as fans claim that reviewers haven’t given a record enough attention before giving it a less-than-perfect assessment. However, in truth, there is no minimum number of listens you need to give an album to have a clear opinion on it.

My stance is: you need to listen to an album as many times as it takes to develop a solid opinion that doesn’t change on subsequent listens, and which you can justify in your writing. There are numerous albums that I’ve listened to over 10 times before reviewing, but most often that’s been because I’ve had it on a repeating loop while working, and therefore not fully focusing on it. I think you can establish a reliable view on a record with 3 or 4 fairly attentive listens, and any subsequent spins are purely to iron out the details of your argument; maybe some particularly complex avant-garde efforts require more, but certainly not the mainstream bands that this response normally gets thrown around about.

The last thing of real note when it comes to 2020 is the beginning of my involvement with Clandestine Cuts; since covering Autolith’s Caustic Light for the March 2020 edition (a band that still hasn’t released a full debut, much to my chagrin), I have contributed to every edition since, and in doing so discovered some outstanding acts, chief among them Melancholia, Euphrosyne and Laere. I can only encourage anyone who does not yet follow Clandestine Cuts to start giving it the attention it so richly deserves, and not just because I have a release from my own project covered in the latest edition.







2021 in the UK began with a lockdown that extended almost all the way to the midway point of the year, so perhaps unsurprisingly, my review count only increased from the year prior. In contrast, my number of scoreless reviews declined, with only the Vanishing Point compilation from Dirge going scoreless. In many other ways, though, 2021 was just a continuation of 2020, even as I expanded on the number of genres I tried to cover (I wrote about albums that were ultimately nominees in 20 of the 26 Metal Storm Awards categories).

By this point, my writing style was firmly cemented, and while certain pieces I look back on particularly fondly as examples of my writing ability (especially my coverage of Bearer Of Many Names by Eremit), I feel like there was a solid level of consistency at this point. I also had my now-customary 1 review a year that got fans worked up, in this case the (overall very positive) article on the self-titled Helloween album that triggered a rather impassioned defence from one user of what they claimed to be “one of the best [albums] in the history of Heavy Metal”.

The average score for this year was also nearly identical to that of 2020 (7.83 vs 7.81); I was continuing to seek out suitable albums for negative reviews (including picking up on what has subsequently turned out to be easy fodder in the New Years’ Day Mechina releases), but the natural inclination to write about albums I was enthusiastic about and wanted to share with the world firmly remained. In fact, I went back and did my first retrospective review since 2015, writing a love letter to the monumental Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It by Rolo Tomassi. I have done a couple more retrospective reviews since, but sadly they remain a low priority as I struggle to find time to cover all the contemporary releases I wish to discuss.

Notable events in 2021 included my first interview, which fittingly was with the closest thing I have to a musical idol in Cult Of Luna’s Johannes Persson, as well as my first concert review as an official contributor, although many more were to follow on that front. The 2020 Metal Storm Awards in 2021 also saw my enthusiasm towards the awards escalate, in no small part due to having a very positive series of interactions with Lucid Planet; they responded excitedly to their nomination, pushing the awards on their social media to such an extent that they clean swept 3 categories with Lucid Planet II, which to date is the only ‘new release’ I’ve reviewed in the year after its release. If there was any album that merited such a delayed review, it’s Lucid Planet II, a record I will likely cherish for decades to come.

Probably the biggest thing that happened to me in 2021, however, was the release of the debut album from my band Vulgaris, which I didn’t review, but several other members of the writing team did, for which I am very grateful. I do, however, consider this to be something of a ‘crossing the rubicon’ event; a common response to negative criticism is ‘let’s see you do better’, which is normally irrelevant, since you don’t have to know how to make a piece of art to be able to tell whether it's better or worse than other similar art, but I’m now in the position where I do have my own music out there to be held against my criticism of others. Additionally, there’s always the danger of burning bridges with other bands by writing negative reviews that could come back to haunt me in the future; this is an ongoing consideration in the back of my head, although at present, Vulgaris are small enough that it’s not yet a major issue.

One last thing worth highlighting for 2021 is my discovery of Heavy Blog Is Heavy; maybe this is me promoting a rival, but the truth of the matter is that their weekly round-ups, in conjunction with the new releases page on Metal Storm, are by far the two main tools I use when discovering new music, and it would be remiss of me to not give the site the credit it deserves. Some of my most positive reviews in 2021, including for Terminus and Dormant Ordeal, were for albums I found through Heavy Blog Is Heavy, so I give them kudos for that.







With lockdowns over, if anything you would have expected my output to slow down, but it basically skyrocketed; I published nearly 50% more reviews in 2022 than the previous year. Probably the two biggest influences on this were me moving from a shared flat situation to living by myself, and switching to a work-from-home job that afforded (and still affords) me the opportunity to power through a lot of new releases during the day, picking out the ones that stand out as worthy of further attention. My efforts were apparently appreciated, as I was advanced again to staff status in the spring of 2022.

Of the 4 scoreless reviews this year, probably the most notable is that for Visio In Somniis by Tableau Mort; this was the first review I wrote for a band that I had played a gig with as part of Vulgaris. Those concerns I mentioned in the previous section about my writing affecting relations with bands in the scene are only heightened when it comes to bands I’ve already been in contact with; however, at the same time, I find myself eager to give what exposure I can to the bands that I enjoy who swim in the same underground waters that we do. Still, for both this review and the one I recently published of the Tumanduumband debut, I was inclined to pass on giving a score, since that seems like the most likely thing to cause a bone of contention if my writing is not taken kindly.

The average score for the year dropped a whopping 0.1 from the previous two years; I did find myself even more actively trying to seek out suitable candidates for negative critiques, taking a chance on an album in the promo pile from an unknown sludge band, MNRVA, with the hope that it would be imperfect but listenable, which turned out to be the case. Far and away the worst album I covered, however, was The Final War by Leviathan Project.

With an album so blatantly amateurish as this, I find myself in two minds; it’s incredibly easy to point out what’s wrong with such a record, but it almost feels like punching down, as, unlike the professionally produced turd from experienced musicians that was Progressions by Imonolith, there’s clearly a resource issue on top of a talent issue with albums like The Final War. Additionally, such releases often come from solo projects, who are even more likely to act protectively of their work if attacked by negative criticism, and while I didn’t receive any response from Leviathan Project, this issue did rear its head in a big way in 2023.

One point mentioned earlier in this article that re-emerged in 2022 was review openings; it was pointed out by one staff member that the vast majority of reviews being published at the time opened with brief taglines, and a look back at my reviews from early-mid 2022 does show that most of them opened with a single short sentence before a ‘proper’ introduction in the next paragraph. This was something that I did strive to vary throughout the remainder of 2022, and going into 2023, the majority of my reviews aim to open with something closer to a paragraph; however, the limitations of the review ticker do mean that I try to keep to a maximum of around 80 words in this opening to ensure it all fits on the front page.

With reviewing for 5 years, the likelihood increases for many bands (although not the likes of Metallica or Iron Maiden) that you will encounter the opportunity to review multiple releases from the same band. At present, I have covered 4 albums each from Teramaze, King Buffalo and Elder, which I believe is the joint-most for any artist; all three of those fourth reviews were in 2022. I like all 3 bands (Elder particularly), and returning to a band I’ve previously covered does afford the opportunity to either rectify something overlooked in my own writing, or to see whether a band has addressed anything I perceived to be an issue in their previous releases. On that front, I was very pleased when Innate Passage came out, with the vocal issues flagged by myself and many others on Omens clearly having been actively focused upon by Elder this time around.

I don’t have much more to add about 2022; the range of genres that my reviews encompassed continued to span most of the genre categories in the Metal Storm Awards, and did take me to hitherto unexplored countries as far as my metal listening was concerned, including Ecuador, India (courtesy of some direct emails I got, as I apparently ended up on a list of reviewers worth contacting at some point prior to 2022), and Vietnam. I also got to cover some of the first debuts from bands I’d written about for Clandestine Cuts, including Lungtoucher, Backbone, Eye Of Doom, and Murmur. That’s about it for 2022 though.







Against all odds, my review count in 2023 increased on that in 2022; the year is not yet done, but I’ve already written over 30 more than I did in 2022. I think this year really represents what is going to be a peak in both the amount of albums I’ve written about and the amount of albums I listen to; I suspect there is going to be a plateauing at best, if not a decrease, in 2024, due to potential shifts in life priorities. For now, though, it’s been fun to continue to write about as many albums worthy of attention as I can.

I entered this year with something of a personal goal to try and fit in as many mixed/negative reviews as I could, and I have peaked on that front, with 23 sub-7 scores across the year (resulting in my lowest average score yet of 7.64); however, my momentum on this front has declined as the year’s progressed. Some of this has been due to several of my most obvious candidates for negative reviews, including Evile’s The Unknown, Skindred’s Smile and Fatalism by Polaris, all being claimed by Omne Metallum (who somehow conspired to give 7+ scores to all 3 albums, causing irreversible damage to the Metal Storm brand).

However, perhaps the decline in doing negative reviews was also partially influenced by two cases of what I was alluding to when discussing Leviathan Project in the previous section: Najand and Hercules. Both of these are solo projects, and both have an obvious sense of amateurism to the production and the writing. I gave a quite brutal score of 3.5 to Najand’s Battle For Emancipation; I tried to be quite sympathetic in my review, but nevertheless the artist behind Najand discovered the review and launched a staunch defense of the album, including a ‘review of my review’.

While this musician did try to initially play this off as being in good jest, eventually, they did make their true feelings known: “You ruined the album on the first week it was launched”. Honestly, while I entirely stand by what I wrote in the review, and what I wrote in my subsequent responses to Najand in the comments section, I derive no pleasure from this. It’s one thing for a website to negatively review an album that’s been submitted for review as a promo, but I did take on this album just because it was the slow early January release period and it stood out in the new releases as being especially inept; he probably likely never expected it to get any meaningful coverage, and it does feel like picking on someone to place this amount of attention on a release like this.

Given that a similar situation occurred later with my review of Waiting For The King, I do find myself further having to contemplate the pros and cons of trying to select albums for negative reviews, particularly since the latter review resulted in something of a dogpile on Hercules and the project leader’s friends that made accounts on Metal Storm to defend the album and band, which I take no pleasure in having triggered.

Najand and Hercules were the standout events in 2023; beyond them, I feel like I am very much in a groove as a writer at this point. Probably the thing I feel I’m doing most differently this year is trying to calibrate my ratings based on those that I’ve given to other albums, as I continue to try and show some moderation in my ratings; however, when the ‘good’ window is effectively 7.0-8.4, there is a fairly narrow range in which to express fluctuations in quality for above-average releases. In some ways, the difference between a 7.4 and a 7.6 is incredibly arbitrary, but on the other hand, with such a limited range of numbers to pick from before you end up in the top-tier (8.5+) or below-good (<7) brackets, that 0.2 gap does still try to indicate a meaningful difference in quality. It’s issues like this that strengthen the case for abandoning scores altogether, although that’s a step I’m not yet thinking of taking.







In true musclassia fashion, I’ve already rambled on for over 5000 words, yet still have more thoughts coming to my head, so before I wrap up, I’ve got one more section to muse over a few overarching thoughts I have about reviewing for Metal Storm, and then I want to take a quick look back at a few albums where my opinions have markedly changed in the years since their release.

Writing Style




I’ve already mentioned how I evolved from the 4-paragraph structure I stuck to early on to more long-form writing in later years, but looking back, I think that initial structure is a good option for newcomers; by now, I am very confident in my ability to structure my points in a way that flows well regardless of length, and which includes all points worth mentioning without rambling about irrelevant information. However, learning to compact one’s opinions into that 500-word target, and arrange one’s feelings about a record in that middle portion of it, is a good way to learn how to prioritize what information is most critical to include.

Our guidelines state that ‘song-by-song’ reviews are not allowed; however, there are some reviews, particularly for albums with fewer tracks, where it’s almost unavoidable to discuss all songs. Outside of that, there’s clearly a balance to be struck between discussing individual songs in detail and summarizing general sentiments towards an album. There’s a variety of approaches among our writers; I lean very much towards the former, while Radu frequently writes reviews without mentioning any songs at all, and Omne states more generalized feelings towards tracks. There’s pros and cons to each approach, but I can’t see myself ever going towards Radu’s approach; I feel like I can’t fully sell what an album is offering, or truly evaluate the merits and weaknesses of a musician’s efforts, without going into this level of depth.

There are certain challenges that come with each review; one aspect I find myself stumped by semi-frequently is finding the right bands to make comparisons to. Possibly there’s a downside to the volume of my music consumption, and it’s that I internalize sounds that come back to me when listening to a new album, but I can’t always easily trace those sounds back to a specific band, and in the end I’m left trying to refer to something I can’t name.

The hardest part in general, however, is the introduction of each review, at least in my opinion. There’s some releases where it’s easy to find an angle, whether it’s a comeback release or one coming after some kind of drama, but often there’s little interesting to kick off with, particularly if the band being reviewed has minimal online information about them. One can just aim for a dry summary of the band’s history (line-up, formation date, number of releases), but done enough times this becomes quite mundane, so I often find myself striving, not always successfully, for any other kind of platform to launch from. Recent albums I particularly struggled to find the right words to begin describing were A Body That Could Pass Through Stones And Trees by The Salt Pale Collective and You Win Again Gravity’s Into The Dancing Blue, with even interviews that I found with band members not uncovering much fertile ground.

Negative Reviews




A recurring trend in this article has been the ongoing battle to incorporate negative criticism into my reviewing habits. As stated earlier, I’m a firm believer that negative reviews are essential to give meaning to positive reviews, otherwise you end up with IGN syndrome. However, it’s clear to me why amateur metal websites overwhelmingly lean towards positive reviews. Journalists who are actually employed to do reviews will have to cover what they’re asked to (due to it being their job), and in removing that element of choice, there’s a far greater likelihood of being required to discuss an album you dislike. As amateur writers, we only have so much time into which we can fit review writing, so it should come as no surprise that most of that time is afforded to albums we wish to provide exposure to for positive reasons.

Angry Metal Guy are pretty much an exception on this front, but there’s 3 reasons I can see that underpin this: 1) from reading the website, I get the impression that they only review albums they receive promos for, which places an immediate limit on what albums are available for discussion; 2) they have far more active writers than us; and 3) their brand is built around being strict with their assessments. In contrast, due to having fewer writers to compete with and a full field of records to choose from, it should be unsurprising that I am regularly picking albums that I like to cover.

The act of selecting an album to review specifically in order to criticize it is challenging; there’s dozens of albums each week that I listen to 1 minute of when checking out new releases and recognize that it’s not for me. My average review and album ratings would be far lower if I was indiscriminately listening to all new releases (but there’s no time for that) or listening to a randomly selected assortment of new releases each week, but naturally, when screening new releases, I’m curating my upcoming week’s listening to include albums that appear likely to appeal to me based on the brief snippets of them that I listen to.

With that in mind, how do I choose which albums, from those that don’t initially appeal, do I want to listen to several times in order to bash it, and is this actually a good thing to be doing? As seen with the Najand and Hercules reviews, negative criticism can hurt the artist subjected to it, and actively seeking out music to negatively comment upon is arguably a dubious way to go about things. As a result, it’s probably not surprising that the majority of negative reviews I’ve written are for bands that I’ve at least at one point felt positively towards, such as Fallujah, Nightwish and Nero Di Marte; if you pre-emptively lock yourself in to review an album for interest’s sake and it ends up disappointing, it feels less mean-spirited to voice those negative sentiments rather than actively seeking out an album for this purpose.

When I Was Wrong

Across over 500 reviews, I’ve given a lot of scores, and the large majority of them I generally stand by; there’s no albums I gave a low 7 or lower to that I ended up adoring, and there’s no album I gave a green score to that I now hate. However, there have been some fluctuations in my opinions over time, and there’s a few that are slightly more marked than others. As I’m doing this retrospective article, I think this is a good opportunity to look back at some albums I have arguably underrated or overrated.

Underrated Reviews

I’ve already mentioned Killswitch Engage’s Atonement as an example of an album I was perhaps unduly harsh on relative to my actual opinion in an effort to try and prove myself as someone who doesn’t just sing the praises of every release. I’ve not had many more examples of albums I’ve done this for, but these are a few albums that stand out to me as ones I’ve come to appreciate more than my initial writings would indicate:

Elder – Omens and Trivium – In The Court Of The Dragon: I’m grouping these together, as they both got the same score on release (8.3), and both have comfortably risen into my top 5 releases from each year. For Omens, the (fully justified) issues I had with the vocals ultimately overshadowed just how stellar a lot of the instrumental work on this album is, and with time, the vocals have been less and less of an issue. For Trivium, I think I just wasn’t prepared for a NWOAHM band to come out with an album that genuinely great for the style, but as far as mainstream metal goes, I really can’t see any band doing much better than what Trivium managed on In The Court Of The Dragon.

Monosphere – The Puppeteer: I was riding a proper djent high in 2021 thanks to the likes of Heliocentric, Karmanjakah and Cyderian Son. I think at the time I was trying to avoid overemphasizing these feelings, but The Puppeteer has ultimately turned out to have an awful lot more staying power than a lot of albums I’ve given 8+ scores to.

Nocturna – Daughters Of The Night and Ad Infinitum – Chapter II: Legacy: Both symphonic metal, and both albums that later releases have ultimately shown to be stronger than I initially appreciated. For Nocturna, the issues with them being heavily derivative of Nightwish still remain, but the sheer strength and staying power of a number of songs on the album have made me think perhaps that concern didn’t deserve to be so heavily factored in, particularly as I subsequently gave another symphonic metal album a higher score despite feeling no particular inclination to revisit it afterwards. In Ad Infinitum’s sake, I was disappointed by the shift towards a poppier sound, but there are some really solid songs on this one, and it’s one of several albums where its score relative to its successor doesn’t really reflect my feelings towards each album, as I would certainly consider Legacy a stronger album than Downfall.

Overrated Reviews

It’s easy to get swept up in your feelings towards a band you care a lot about, and I have been guilty of that on a couple of occasions:

Cult Of Luna – The Raging River and The Ocean – Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic / Cenozoic: One of these is clearly more pronounced than the other, but since they’re both big names in post-metal, I’m grouping them. That review of The Raging River is probably my most egregious case of fan hype affecting me, particularly as I’d only interviewed Persson shortly beforehand. Yes, the first and last songs are great, but as a full album, it’s nowhere near an 8.8. Phanerozoic II is less strong a case of this, but that album really is frontloaded to an unhealthy degree quality-wise, and it does drag down the overall experience.

Green Carnation – Leaves Of Yesteryear and Riverside – ID.Entity: Two prog bands making comebacks that I got a bit too enthusiastic for. Leaves Of Yesteryear is hardly a full album, and as good as the title track and the re-recorded song from the debut are, the other two new songs are a bit mid, and the Black Sabbath cover offers nothing. With Riverside, I underappreciated just how annoying I find “The Place Where I Belong”, which is hard to overlook when it’s 13 minutes long.

Haken – Virus and Haken – Fauna: I’ve given both of these high 7 scores, and in a lot of ways I do think that they’re good albums; however, I think I understated just how irritating I could find both of them at times, perhaps just out of caution due to Haken being so revered in prog circles. Haken’s old keyboardist Diego Tejeida’s new band TEMIC released their debut this year, and at this point I would be far more inclined to bestow the 7.8 on that album rather than on Fauna.

The 9.0 Conundrum




The last thing I want to mention before I finally wind down this overlong article is the presumed ‘cream of the crop’. Aside from the 9.3 I gave A Dawn To Fear and the 9.5 retrospective scores to Down and Rolo Tomassi, my highest score has been a 9.0, which I’ve afforded to 11 albums: Schammasch, Psychonaut (twice), Wills Dissolve, Enslaved, Dvne, Lucid Planet, Between The Buried and Me, Persefone, Disillusion and Sermon. However, not all 9.0s are equal; there’s tiers between these albums that are arguably as wide as a half-point’s score when I look back at them. Particularly standing out to me is Psychonaut; I’ve scored both albums equally, but truthfully, I rate Unfold The God Man a bit higher than Violate Consensus Reality.

For a couple of these albums, I’ve handicapped myself by refusing to go higher than 9.0; Dvne – Etemen Ænka and Lucid Planet – II are clearly the 2 standout albums of the decade thus far for me, and both scores should really have been higher if I wasn’t treating the 9+ region as such rarefied air. I also feel like I’ve slightly handicapped myself with these ratings, since I’m now in the mindset that an album needs to be better than these two in order to go above the 9.0 threshold. On the flip side, the Enslaved and Disillusion albums in particular haven’t had quite the same enduring appeal; I would still give both albums highly positive reviews, but perhaps a tad lower.

Top 10 Favourite Albums I’ve Reviewed Since Becoming An Official Contributor:

01. Cult Of Luna – A Dawn To Fear
02. Lucid Planet – Lucid Planet II
03. Dvne – Etemen Ænka
04. Psychonaut – Unfold The God Man
05. Elder – Omens
06. Trivium – In The Court Of The Dragon
07. Kardashev – Liminal Rite
08. Abigail Williams – Walk Beyond The Dark
09. Wayfarer – A Romance With Violence
10. Between The Buried And Me – Colors II

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As I mentioned in the 2023 section, I think this year will turn out to be the zenith of my writing activity; I can’t see a way in which I could do more, and if I ever move job, I anticipate that my ability to keep on top of all new releases will drop down substantially. However, I certainly still want to keep getting the word out about the best new releases, and given the liberty I have in the albums I can choose, I believe Metal Storm will remain the best place to do it in.

Probably the biggest potential obstacle to navigate will be balancing reviewing music and being in a band; Vulgaris has an album release pending for early 2024, and it’s one that we are optimistic will be a sizeable step forward. It’s impossible to predict anything, but there is always the possibility that this takes us to a slightly higher level of the metal totem pole: enough to get some small festival slots and minor tours, and even potentially label involvement, if we’re very lucky. There’s certainly some hopeful thinking on that front, but it’s not entirely unrealistic, and in that situation, I might have to start factoring in some possible conflicts of interest when it comes to labels that bands are signed to, and bands that I may end up encountering down the line. This is likely to even more sharply affect my ability to write negative reviews, which as already discussed is a major challenge.

Still, that’s an issue for tomorrow; for now, I’m eager to continue covering the wealth of the metal underground to the best of my ability, and I hope you Metal Storm users will continue to follow me on this journey of discovery.