So it’s been *checks notes* a hot minute since we’ve done this but in case it’s your first day here or the first sober moment since those mushrooms turned on you this is where we vaguely cover “how to review an album”. That is to say in this segment we’ll be cross checking different staffers’ approaches to putting words together. Maybe you’re a budding reviewer, on the cusp of greatness, searching for that piece of the puzzle lost on the floor or maybe your mum just logged you on to the household’s singular trusty laptop and you don’t know what to do with your fifteen minute screen allowance before the older sibling demands the computer for…research? Either way, you’ve come to the right place.

First off. Who are you and how did you get here?

Hey, I’m Alex, AKA robertsona, and I’ve been using Sputnikmusic for about 14 years, with about a decade under my belt as Staff. I think I found Sputnikmusic in trying to supplement Pitchfork with other sources of music news and reviews, and evidently the idea of writing my own reviews and putting them out there for consumption was appealing: from May 2009, when I was 13 years old, to August 2013, when I turned 18, I wrote well over 100 reviews for the site. I currently live with fellow Sputnikmusic user ArsMoriendi in Manhattan, and I teach high school English around New York City.

Wait. You’re not Robert? I feel betrayed right now!

To integrate my full name into my username as a 13-year-old was an interesting move. For my first few months on the site, I was “djdorama”.

Of the current staff roster you are an older face in the crowd and yet, I don’t know which face to put on you. Is this low-key insulting? Because I don’t want you to feel that way but I want to know how you “feel”.

I’ve always had a really hard time putting names to faces to writing styles to taste matrices, so I’m not too offended. Getting on Discord really helped me amend some of the more embarrassing lacunae of knowledge in my Sput interactions–and that move to a direct chat platform is also essentially the reason I moved in with Ars. But I had a really hard time keeping users straight before that, so I wouldn’t blame anyone for making the same kinds of potential oversights I used to make constantly. Although there are some days where I feel like I comment so often on the review site that most users will know me like it or not…

Regardless, and like few others, you have seen change in style, in how the staff roster has morphed into today’s style of reviewing? Have you kept up? Does this modernisation have value within a reviewing scope?

I don’t read many reviews on the site, even though it’s usually a pleasure to do so–as an English teacher, I suppose I get a moderate but significant level of personal edification from reading someone else’s thoughts on art. I still think we have a nicely heterogeneous mix of writing styles represented on Staff–we’ve had periods where Jane Doe was the album of the decade and ones where Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour was the album of the year (and then The Hotelier somehow beat Flying Lotus for decade, and we found ourselves at square one again…), but I don’t think the Staff’s stylistic toolkit has shifted in parallel. I’d say the Staff has probably become appreciably more “intellectual” and “academic” in its approach, with a bigger vocabulary and more formal experimentation and even fewer gestures than ever toward that age-old track-by-track format. Charitably viewed, this is mostly just all of us doing our part to say more than that the riff rips, which latter is easy to do when you’re pumping out a review a day and need to keep up with clicks, engagements, views, likes, etc.

Sputnikmusic seems pretty separate from all that stuff–it’s nice to think that we have developed as writers on our own terms due in part to our collective detachment from social-media stuff (at least vis-a-vis our writing practices), and that that development has mostly been in the direction of specificity and unconventional thinking rather than digestible soundbites. We are also pretty separate from a lot of good things happening in the “outside” music criticism world, like the diversity initiatives that have finally introduced the perspectives of people who aren’t men and aren’t white into spaces that were by and large bereft of those voices for so many years of their existence. I would love to see this change within Sputnikmusic, too, but that’s a big cow to tip, perhaps especially in this particular discursive space. For now, I think we’re doing alright as a Staff in trying to keep our minds open and our words generous and mindful of different ways of valuing and listening to music.

Speaking of tipping cows, and very slightly off-topic: The user to contributor promotion cycle has been at least a little ambiguous. What should we look for to say…inside the next half decade in Sputnik’s “growing a reviewer scene”?

I think we should more than anything encourage everyone to write, maybe find means of really promoting the practice of doing so. I often find that’s what works with my high schoolers–just write, man. A word, a sentence. Get something down on the page. I know high schoolers aren’t analogous to Sputnikmusic users in every respect, even though a lot of them surely overlap, but I think people who think they can’t write for shit are often good after they try a few times. 

Once that’s “accomplished,” I think anyone who reviews relatively consistently and doesn’t make the site look unprofessional through their writing or review-site behaviors should be able to strive for that position. It probably also helps to cover the kind of music that constitutes a Sputnikmusic blind spot on the whole, but my understanding is that we’re pretty accepting and are happy to promote anyone who meets those first two benchmarks. Staff is a slightly more interesting question because of the external representation they receive, and the more splashless manner in which Staff are integrated into non-Sputnik people’s view of the website. I’m not sure I had a big goal to make Staff in 2013 or thereabouts–I just wrote a lot. (Though I did apply at some point, in theory.)

Let’s talk about prose. How do you build prose into your reviews?

I write really quickly, perhaps thanks to all the practice I collected as an amateur critic in my young teens. Reading the film criticism of Dan Sallitt helped me a lot with making my phrasing more seamless and my logic more airtight–keyword “more”. But I also was an English major in college and a great procrastinator, and eventually learned to write 10+-page papers in one sitting, often only a few hours at a time. This tendency toward procrastination is a huge conceptual snag for me in my life, and it seems rooted in a desire to be judged for work I know isn’t my best, so that I can in some sense dismiss those judgments as not germane to my sense of self.

All this is to say that I do kind of just sit at a laptop, hopefully having listened to the record at least twice and with it still playing out loud, and then type for 30 minutes max and then I’m all done, which mechanical quality I guess I have to attribute to muscle-memory for good phrases and more abstract qualities from writers I like a lot: the aforementioned Sallitt, as well as some Robert Christgau, Mark Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov, John Milton, Helene Johnson, Ann Douglas, Dora Zhang, Sophocles, Gladys Margaret Williams, Lucas Fagen, Erich Auerbach, etc., etc.

You did whip up most of this pretty quickly too…

To be more specific and less namedroppy, though, I guess my general process for generating prose is to deploy my high school nerd-camp professor’s advice for writing college application essays, which ran along the lines of, “If you are writing a college essay/response to a prompt/AP literature exam answer and you put down the first answer you think of, that’s the answer that 50% of your class will have thought of. The second answer, 25%. The third…” You get the point, and I think he was being provocative in a way that he thought would help a sixteen-year-old. But both people who like my writing and people who are sick of my pretensions would probably agree that I try to always have a take on an album that possesses just that little bit more nuance than you’d expect from your average album review. I then take that desire to be really smart and interesting and try to temper it with an eye toward my high school students–how can I rid myself of extraneous details and logical moves that obfuscate more than they clarify? This latter step is really hard, and I have trouble with it all the time.

Of your last eight reviews, only Sara Gray has exceeded the 100 comment mark. We all have this hit and miss ratio when it comes to the interaction between the reader. How do we drive more discussion in the comments? Endless shitposting? Copypasta?

I don’t think much about the hit-and-miss ratio: I review music because I need to, and these days that need is keyed almost entirely to music I think requires more exposure, which is an endeavor that of necessity isn’t going to take off immediately or maybe ever: imagine being that motherfucker 1970-2000 who thought Just Another Diamond Day was the biggest folk banger you’d ever heard. Nobody would listen! I’ll admit to finding a certain pleasure in attaching a solid piece of writing to an album nobody knows, as if the writing attests to the album’s existence and value. I think you’d often be surprised by the extent to which the artists themselves borrow this logic a bit, pinching themselves by reading reviews, so maybe I’m doing it for them, too.

I think maybe a more sustained attempt to expose through playlists, podcasts, and lists might help out with engagement. But there’s a certain level on which I’m reviewing Brooklyn guy Andrew’s band’s new hypnagogic pop LP, and all I can really do is send people “Aqua Gorilla” and hope they like it. It’d be a hard sell for me, too. Her name is Saya, by the way.

Maybe this has something to do with “how you review music”? Where is the engagement?

My criticism style is definitely long-winded and abstract at times, and there are words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and entire reviews I wouldn’t stand behind. But the style itself I’d hardly trade for anything–I really don’t want my reviews to sound like Theneedledrop’s, and I’ll bear toiling away in obscurity in order to secure the confidence that I’m doing something a little more daring and ultimately engaging when it comes to the analysis of the record in question.

Your favourite review found in the dusty catacombs of Sputnikmusic’s dusty servers?

Hmm. I like PumpBoffBag’s review of that Sampa the Great debut LP a lot. I’d like to start reading more reviews–not the “old favorites” that this question I think asks me to consider (although I do genuinely like that mynameischan Devil and God writeup), but my fellow users’ current work. Please always reach out to me if you have any questions or just want me to put a pair of eyes on something!

Current work is indeed very important. Other noticeable pieces worthy of a cheeky name-drop or salubrious expansion?

It’s probably because I really dislike the album–for all its Brooklynity–but I definitely thought the spite on Johnny’s review of Model/Actriz’s Dogsbody was well-rendered, starting with the classic index-cards intro. His conversational, postmodern style in general seems like an interesting contrast with mine–as if his quirks are more thoroughly embedded into the texture of his writing even if we both like to weird the reader out sometimes.

Sometimes when I read back through reviews of recent stuff, some of the rougher-edged material is still appealing. I like the review of Porches’ All Day Gentle Hold (slightly uneven, slightly underrated, just like his other stuff) I just read even though it neglects a possessive apostrophe next to the artist’s name in the very first sentence. Rowan’s Big Thief review from 2022 is also nicely measured and presents a reasonable perspective on an album that made many, including me, act unreasonable.

And separately, the review that first inspired you to write for Sputnik, become a contributor and eventually become Staff or did you walk down the wrong hallway, become tied to a chair – – eventually becoming the benchmark for new faces?

This was my initial answer to the question prior to this one, but it seems more appropriate in this space: Lewis Parry AKA plane’s review of Deerhunter’s Microcastle took a fractured approach that was really influential to young me–my review of Steve Reich’s Different Trains cops its entire structural hook. The solemn tone of the review is very on-point throughout and apposite to the record.

Quickly, three tips for drafting?

1. Take notes voraciously while you listen, with as little a mind as possible toward a conceptual underpinning for your review just yet. Try to let the album end when it ends, to listen with fresh ears. Take notes on what you hear and how much of it.
2. Google “[artist name] interviews”. I don’t do this enough. Some critics out there will surely fear their takes intermixing with the artist’s, were they to cast their eyes on an interview. I find it helps a lot with organizing my thoughts.
3. Compile the notes, using your evidence to find themes rather than using themes you figured out in advance to generate evidence that fits those themes. It really almost should be like data analysis, so that the things that kept popping up frequently deserve a mention, and sonic threads you found ear-catching but that didn’t really resonate with the rest of the album’s approach can be incorporated without attracting aesthetic-bias gravity.

Specifically, three tips for proofing?

1. My college professor taught me this one: every paragraph should flow naturally from the prior paragraph, and every paragraph should flow naturally from the first one. Reading the ending to one of my reviews and feeling confused as to how I got there vis-a-vis the beginning is a huge issue for me–possessing a discernible structure or at least “flow” is key at any given point in the review.
2. Signpost your argument. Sounds like a college-essay thing again, and it is, but it helps for the reader to understand precisely what logical moves are being made, so that they know how the sound of the guitar relates to the emotional narrative you’re saying the instrumental weave sets for the song you’re saying functions this way in an album that actually has this overall mood. OK, this seems like it sucks when I type it like that, and probably feels like the opposite of what you want to do, but trust me that it can help to challenge yourself almost as a mathematician would in writing a proof: did I skip a step here? Does this make sense to someone who isn’t already drafted into the ranks of thinking like me about this stuff?
3. Be precise. This relates to #2 but is less a structural issue than it is a moment-to-moment check you can place upon yourself. Don’t be like my ninth graders and say that a Shakespeare character dressing a certain way embodies a theme. Be more specific about what exactly is going on and define your terms. What is a theme; what, then, is the theme of this play; what is the causal structure between what a character in a play does and the theme of that play as it wears on; what particular relationship does this act, as it is depicted, possess with regard to the theme it’s said to embody? Then do it with music.

Lastly, three fail-safe steps for reviewing music on a broad stroke?

1. Try to see the good. I dunno if I would offer this up as moral advice. But it’s often helped me to be sympathetic and try to step into the internal logic of a record, to be mindful of imposing external judgments that misapprehend what the album or artist is trying to do. This isn’t to say that you have to like everything, but often even a highly critical piece resonates stronger for its having recognized the aesthetic terms established by the artwork.
2. Listen to weird stuff that nobody knows at least sometimes. I think giving your best shot at analyzing a record for which there exists no prior written groundwork can be extremely salutary for reviewers new and old. It keeps your mind sharp and refocuses your priorities (especially if you can’t even locate genre tags on Rateyourmusic). I’d sincerely recommend this New Formalist approach, stripping away the extramusical connotations as much as you can by occasionally-just-occasionally listening to some random bops from Moldova.
3. Do your research. Though I evidently relish the virtues of doing no research in little chunks of your daily listening, the actual writing is better–more fun to read, even–when you get the sense that the writer has done their homework, has opened a book, has seen a lot of movies and not just The Boss Baby. I’d spend a good chunk of your time on that first page of Google results, often for me including interviews, so that you can really wow the reader with a seamless integration of historical/biographical knowledge and info with a highly personalized approach to evaluating music, whether it hits or not, what its history might have to do with its “hittiness”, etc.

Parting words for new faces, scribes or people who only type using their respective pointer fingers?

Just keep writing. If you like my writing, know that people said mean things about it all the time, still do, and I just kept going because I wanted to. You can judge where I ended up yourself but know that haters were hating because haters will hate. Keep writing!

Words for everyone else?

Check out “Aqua Gorilla”.

Dewinged MarsKid AsleepInTheBack Tyman Jesper Johnny

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