Is There Anybody Out There?

Hey guys. It's me. You may remember me as the guy who used to fret over every little detail about his blog and occasionally, in between anxiety attacks, might post a music review or two. The reasons why I stopped are mainly personal, due to the direction my life was going, but I think that now, I might be ready to give the whole thing another shot.

I deleted all of the old reviews, but I have them all backed up, and I'll upload the few with which I'm still happy, eventually. As it is, I think I'm going to take this whole thing a little differently. I'm going to try not to worry about it so much, for one thing – you don't really need to know this, and unless it's relevant, I won't bring it up, but I suffer from rather severe depression and anxiety. Like, “been to a psych ward and on medication” severe. So, I have to try and not take this so seriously, or else I'll keep constantly second-guessing myself and get over-stressed for no real reason over what should just be a fun little hobby.

That's not to say that constructive criticism isn't welcome, nor is it to say that anybody who read this a couple years ago and left comments caused any mental or emotional turmoil for me. That would be ridiculous. I'm simply saying that me, personally, my levels of perfectionism mixed in with my own issues were causing me a great deal of stress when I was working on this before. So I'm gonna try to not force things so much, and I'm going to just do whatever I feel like doing, unless people reading have useful suggestions for ways to improve, which, again, are always welcome.

Now, for some basic notes on the blog itself – I'm going to use the by now infamous 15 point scale. Back in the day, when I started doing this, I declined using it because I felt it was ubiquitous and overexposed in the WRC. Now, however, hardly anybody uses it anymore, and as such, I don't feel bad doing so. A lot of people have told me that letter grades have mostly the same flexibility while being a little more intuitive, but, I dunno, maybe it's just the way my mind works, and maybe it's because I did get so used to thinking in terms of the 15 point scale, but I do find the 15 point scale makes the most sense to me.

I used to review albums in Chronological order, which is a system I still like for various reasons. That's how I have my own musical collection organized. It provides for a diverse listening experience and a diverse set of reviews for you, the reader, so we're not bogged down on just one artist for so long. Due to showing the progression of musical evolution, it's easier to show albums in context. It's not a common organizational method, so it's a bit unique. And, honestly, I just find it fun to do.

But there are some legitimate problems with it – for one thing, it will take forever to get to later bands, and also, it means that for a long time, there will be a plethora of bands which have been written about to death by the WRC. Simply occasionally covering a later band along with the chronological list wasn't particularly satisfactory to me. This is a problem I still haven't solved. On the highly unlikely chance that anybody is reading this, if you have any suggestions, by all means, let me know.

In the meantime, until I solve this conundrum, I'm going to review some artists that are less covered by the WRC. Some of my favorite artists are those that have been extensively covered by everybody ever, so that can't last forever, but for now, I think setting a foundation of somewhat more obscure bands is the best way to go. Keep in mind that, when I say “obscure”, I simply mean “less ubiquitous in reviewing circles.”

So, if you're reading this, thanks for stopping by. I'm going to give this thing an honest shot, as I did before, and we'll see what happens.