Courtesy of p4k.

In the middle of March Modest Mouse released their newest album, Strangers To Ourselves, after a long break. The hype mounted up something immense and the album quickly became beyond anticipated. When it broke so did some expectations. Pitchfork gave it a mediocre 6.4 and Spin Magazine slammed it with 5.

Initially the press annoyed me. With a bit of distance and the hype dissipating, I stopped being so bothered. Truth be told, I was meant to love Strangers To Ourselves. The album comes packed with the up-tempo and wild kind of songs that I have always loved. The lyrics have gotten simpler and more straightforward, but I have never focused on lyrics in music. Strangers To Ourselves, with all its odd instrumental flairs and variance coupled with so much dizzying up-tempo and crowded composition, is my kind of jam.

So maybe it wasn‰’t up the alleys of some other writers and they wrote it down some notches. I could not begrudge that, but it mollified any sort of the meaning the review could have to me. In the end I would probably agree with it if the sounds had hit my ear a bit differently. The separation between love and hate, ambivalence and interest in a song is, in the end, absurd. It falls down to how a certain sound strikes the drum of an ear. What‰’s the use of a review anyways, if that single strike holds all the actual sway?

Other kinds of art have clearer objective standards of good and. Some distinctions in writing might seem arbitrary or come under attack from all sorts of weird authors, but writing still has some simple quality control rules. Writers should show instead of tell as leaving a message in symbols is generally better than beating someone over the brow with it. That means a reviewer can both laud Tolstoy for showing so much human emotion in War And Peace and chastise him for spending sixty pages telling the reader why he thinks the Hegelian Dialectic rules history.

Music does not have nearly as easy objective benchmarks. That means reviewers often descend into assigning odd adjectives or analogies without any real explanation. In the end that odd adjective has one root, one explanation: the sound struck the reviewer’s eardrum just the way they described. Maybe you felt it too, maybe you didn‰’t. Maybe you need to write an angry comment now, maybe you need to reply to somebody else‰’s.

To make matters worse, when a reviewer gets really critical they have to heavily justify their animosity. What hit your eardrum so hard that it made you this mad? The justification often ends up a slippery-sloped argument about some invisible metaphysics in the music. The album shows no spirit, the material is immature, the composition isn‰’t clean, and so on. Those critiques could even hit the nail on the head, but in the end they stem from an indescribable sensation of sound extended to very difficult to describe standards people hold media to.

Much of these problems stem from the fact that music listening is often sublime. Music is so sublime that theologians have compared that eureka moment of falling in love with a song to the moment that religious faith knocks you off your feet. In religion you simply feel God, AvalokiteÝvara, Brahman ‰ÛÒ or you don‰’t. In music you simply understand the thing to love in the song, the band, their whole genre ‰ÛÒ or you don‰’t.

The new age solution to the oddness of religion often works pretty well. Don‰’t go out of your way to critique someone else‰’s beliefs. Respect what they hold sacred. Maybe the same should go for music. Don‰’t preach, unless you do it in front of the choir, and if you really want to proselytize do it very respectfully. When you review, don‰’t shit on the sound, even if you hate it. Give it respect as something sublime you simply don‰’t understand.

Is that a fair comparison? Music and religion have their similarities, sure, but no one ever went to war over a scathing review of a Nirvana album. Much less is at stake in a music review. Besides, critique could help a band grow closer to a sound they like. Leaving room for only positive notes means taking away some quality control. Even making it so metalheads review metal and rap fans review rap might mean less mingling between big groups, and less shared understanding than before.

We could just cut music reviews out altogether. The critique could matter, but most of the time it probably won‰’t. I can tell you for a fact that Pitchfork‰’s scathing review of Frances The Mute did little to change the view of The Mars Volta‰’s fans. The band likely did not take the review into account when making their next album, Amputechture. Music is so subjective that it‰’s easy to ignore harsh words and indulge sweet ones.

Still, there‰’s a strange comfort in having these hyper harsh and super sweet reviews around. Even if they don‰’t change much, even if they only preach to choirs, I would never want reviews gone. At very least there‰’s something very fun about digging into a new review, like opening up those dollar store mystery packages as a kid. You may have no use for what you get, or it could be one of those sticky green hands you can show off to a friend!

On a deeper level there is this slight chance that a review could really do some good. There is a low, but so important, probability that if it came with just enough tact it could spark arguments among fans. That if it came with just enough finesse, a completely strange soul could hear the exact same sound the reviewer did, and find all new words to match it. To me that chance, however small, carries a meaning worth keeping.