RATINGS SYSTEM
A quick guide to the ten-point rating scale used on this fine site.
| 10 | Greatest of all time, with high personal value & importance. Every perfect rating has a personal story embedded into it. |
| 9 | Brilliant, a career high for most artists and a landmark record. Music at its finest. |
| 8 | Great, all-around excellent album worthy of a lot of love. An artist operating on their strengths and creating a stand-out experience. |
| 7 | Good - the "standard" positive rating - albums I really enjoy, even if some things weigh them down or they don’t hit so hard as to reach the higher echelons. |
| 6 | A fine, alright record, even if it's flawed to some extent or it has problems standing out in the crowd. Pleasant enough to put on even if it’s nothing exciting. |
| 5 | A mediocre or sub-par album but still listenable to some extent, possibly because of one or two redeeming songs. Rarely does it beckon to go back to it though, usually for a reason. |
| 4 | Weak, with some kind of a decent effort or point there if you dig deep enough. |
| 3 | Poor, getting to the point of actively wanting to turn this off. |
| 2 | A genuinely bad album, with no redeemable points. |
| 1 | Terrible to the point of eliciting an emotional reaction, an "anti-10". Just like the perfect score, I don't hand these out often (and most albums I'd give these to aren't a part of my collection!). |
Say Flint, I'm not seeing many of the lower-end scores attached to your reviews? Do you just like everything?
Well, no - and there's a decent amount of albums that belong in the latter half within these pages (once I get around to reviewing them). The thing is, this site is based on my actual music collection and I generally tend to collect things that I like from artists whose music I enjoy. The obvious outcome is that I'm going to be relatively positive most of the time, and the vast majority of the lower ratings are dips in back catalogues that I've picked up while being an insufferable completionist. For what it's worth I don't believe in handing out ratings in equal amounts across a gaussian curve or maintaining any kind of balance between the good and the bad - everything gets rated what it deserves.
Do the wider artist categories affect any of this?
As a general principle, no: a Category A artist's 10/10 is the same worth as a Category E artist's. The categories I set up in the main artists index is primarily there to make the main ratings page more readable, and the individual album ratings are largely graded according to the same scale: there's a very clear reason why the categories are just abstract notions rather than "worth" extra points. Now, will I have a more of a lean towards a Category A artist than say a Category D artist and forgive them more easily for the same issues, meaning they get higher ratings as a result? Maybe, rarely but it can happen. I am open about my biases whenever they occur.