The mathematics of reviewing II: taking the I out of criticism

The rise of the internet has changed criticism forever. The online world detonated the media landscape once dominated by the likes of the NME, Melody Maker and Rolling Stone, scattering its millions of pieces to settle in unoccupied areas of cyberspace. While magazines and newspaper supplements continue to exert some influence on more traditional readers, our attention has now been split among the thousands of websites and blogs that vie to capture our eyeballs for a few moments before they flit off to find another moment of entertainment in our infinite playground.

In many ways this change is a positive one. Access to new music, movie trailers or gameplay footage is now a mere mouse-click away. Gone are the days of suffering through two hours of inane drivel and recycled bullshit on the radio before getting to the one song premiere that was promised. If we've just read an online review of an album or film that sounds interesting, it has never been easier to instantly check out trailers, interviews or songs for ourselves, usually without even having to switch sites. Through sites like Pitchfork, Drowned in Sound, Ain't It Cool News, IGN and streaming services like SoundCloud and Spotify, the world is at our fingertips.

One of the only drawbacks to democratising arts writing is the effect it tends to have on reviews and comments online. Although there are many sites that run really excellent reviews within their fields, the inevitable byproduct of creating a never-ending space where anyone can pick up a loudspeaker is an awful lot of white noise. Garbled, barely comprehensible, egocentric white noise.

Of course, in an environment that's essentially made up of millions of people screaming into the abyss, the natural tendency is to focus on the self. This can have strange and insulating repercussions for our sense of perspective. What separates good reviews from the never-ending waterfall of consciousness is the ability to think outside of the self, to some extent make the self invisible.

I'm not talking about removing "I"s and "me"s and all that stuff we were trained out of when writing essays in school or university. I think one of the things that makes a great review is understanding that an album, movie or game exists to transmit the vision of whoever created it, and it should be judged based on the degree to which it succeeds in carrying out that vision. A piece of art doesn't exist solely to interact positively with its audience, and good reviewers should understand that an album or film not eliciting a personal response doesn't necessarily mean that it didn't succeed at what it set out to do (although it often does).

Stepping outside of one's own perspective to measure the successes and failures of a film, for example, immediately marks a review out from the frothing rabble of fanboys that plagues the net. Bryan Singer's 2006 movie Superman Returns is an example of a film that has been horrendously mistreated online, despite the generally glowing reception it received on its release.

Fanboys decided that it didn't have enough action to sate the cartoon fantasies playing in their heads and railed like petulant princesses against the fact that it didn't cater to their own visions for the character. Despite not being perfect (the secret child ending overcomplicated the film's message and Kate Bosworth was an inadequate Lois Lane), Superman Returns was hugely successful at translating the classic, innate qualities of America's homespun messiah. It's particularly depressing that the fanboy tantrums managed to soil popular perception of this film to the point where Zack Snyder's upcoming reboot is considered not only necessary, but an opportunity to get the character back to his roots, something Returns had already done spectacularly well.

This is something I always try to keep in mind when reading or writing reviews (with limited success, to be sure). To take this argument to its extreme, there's no point complaining that an album by Fleet Foxes doesn't have enough jungle beats or that an Odd Future mixtape wouldn't be suitable for a dinner party. These are the concerns of the listener, not the album. For a review to justify its name and be more definitive than simple comment, the reviewer has to shake off prejudices and bugbears to make a judgement based on something more universal than just opinion.

The mathematics of reviewing

The title of this post is pretty misleading. Reviewing isn't maths, after all, and boiling a review down to a simple formula is anathema to reading something new and surprising (although it seems to work pretty well for the Daily Mail website, which operates on a strict formula of liberal baiting + contrived outrage x gross hypocrisy - basic human compassion = mad web traffic).

Of course I'm not going to argue for some inane system for reviewing; each one has to be written in its own way. But writing (and reading) a lot of reviews makes you think about what exactly it is that you like or dislike about an album or a film, about the process you naturally go through before you sit down to try and express your conclusions. Exactly why are you willing to forgive those crappy lyrics on that album you just bought? Exactly why do you love that beautiful film that has no plot or dialogue?

Reviews are my favourite things, both to read and to write. As a deep down obsessive, I'd generally rather spend my time deliberating about chord changes and camera angles than trying to vicariously be friends with the people behind them. So I tend to give a lot of thought to qualifying what it is that makes a great album great, or what makes a guilty pleasure guilty, or what makes a film that seems so brilliant on paper such a chore when you're sitting through it.

The best I've come up with so far is a variation of the classic "style/substance" idea that we've read in so many reviews. I always thought the "style over substance" phrase was a little dismissive of the "style" part, given that it's the style that makes an immediate impact on the listener and appeals to the oft-underrated gut. I'm going to explain my idea in relation to music, but I think it applies just as much to film (not so much to games, which I'll touch on in a bit).

It's helpful for me to split an album into two broad, subjective scales - the satisfying scale and the interesting scale. Satisfaction replaces "style" in the aforementioned metaphor as representative of that instant gut reaction that you can't reason with - in essence, it's that feeling we all got from listening to The Darkness' first album and now feel a little ashamed of. The interesting scale is the "substance" that comes after; all the opinions on pacing, lyrics and the musicians' choices that form after bedding down with a record for a while. All the stuff that gets channeled through a thought process rather than a cocky toe tap, in other words.

I think an album generally needs to captivate me on both counts to feel like a lasting classic. An album that you'll love in the moment for its immediate impact, but revisit month after month to plumb its depths. I love all three of Arcade Fire's LPs because they fill my brittle bones with the urge to stomp around like a mad baby rhino, but in the long-run they offer me three very different worlds to explore, from Funeral's inner-city carnival through Neon Bible's great foreboding plains to the restrained desperation of The Suburbs.

An album can be excellent just by nailing one of these two criteria. Biffy Clyro's 2009 album Only Revolutions had me caterwauling up and down the walls of my flat, but the songs didn't quite match those on Blackened Sky or Vertigo of Bliss for atmosphere and strange rhythms. This doesn't detract from my enjoyment of Revolution's bombast, but it gives the album a natural shelf-life that the very best records transcend.

On the other side of the coin, an album can connect with your intellect and build a fascinating space for your ears without ever really grabbing you. I can recognise the poetry and character of Bob Dylan's music, but it has only ever impressed me. It never ambushed me, pushed me up against a wall and had its way with me. When people patiently, sighing all the way, try to explain to me why Dylan's songs are so powerful and timeless, I can understand and agree. But my gut remains stubbornly unstimulated. Give me Springsteen any day of the week. When that guy revs his engines, he leaves tire-marks all over my heart.

This satisfying/interesting balance tends to help me when thinking about films and movies, but falls down a bit when it comes to videogames. Partly as a result of the games industry's relative youth, combined with the prevalence of interactivity over passivity, games can often be considered masterpieces for simply delivering truckloads of sensory pleasure. Genuinely interesting concepts are a bonus, but at the moment they're optional. What developers really have to nail is providing game mechanics that are satisfying to interact with. Games like Bioshock and Braid might be pushing the medium to new heights, but their exploration of the human condition doesn't make them any more fun to play than Tetris or Pac-Man, even after all these years.

So this isn't my "system" for reviewing. There is no system. It's just a broad categorisation of the feelings I get from listening to an album or watching a film that helps me formalise where those feelings come from when I want to express myself about it in the clearest way possible. In order to express myself with clarity, I find that I need to delve a little into why I've reacted to an album in the way I have.

So are there any albums or films that max you out for satisfaction but feel a little empty after the first few spins? Or those that you can appreciate on a cerebral level but leave you yearning to be swept off your feet? Let's compare notes in the comments below. Also feel free to let me know if I'm talking a load of bollocks. I find it hard to tell sometimes.