the art of review

Tom, over at his New York London Paris Munich blog posts an interesting set of comments about music reviews, and whether or not they should be more practical. The concept of not reviewing bad records is one I can never decide about. Part of me enjoys reading (good) journalists ripping into a bad record, although I find it annoying when someone ostensibly talented and with a good reach (like Alexis Petridis) takes a full page to attack the new record by someone like Shaznay Lewis when he could be using his somewhat limited space more usefully to alert the reader to a truly great record (like, incidentally, The Junior Boys LP, Last Exit, which he gave a tiny review to, and which is one of the best records I've heard in years). Generally speaking, I think it's not worth taking lots of space to tell us something self-evident (new J-Lo album not that hot, etc). But small, pithy reviews I rather like. Over at The World is Full of Pisswits, Vik has found a great site which collects together bad reviews, although of films, not records.