TS: RYM vs. Metacritic

lol those are all incredible

Yeah one of my first thoughts was “please don’t let me be on this feed”, but I don’t think I posted any true fuckwittery during my brief affair with RYM long ago

off the current topic but i enjoy being an asshole in the album comment boxes rym added a few years ago

yeah i have tons of shitty rym meme reviews from when i was old enough that i should have known better. i'm very grateful because some mods are going through and "unpublishing" all of them so unless you're my friend there you won't know what a bozo i was

nowadays of course i'm much better and write essays analyzing old genesis bootlegs from a trans perspective

rym comment boxes are one step above youtube comments and should go away but i occasionally post the shit that would've gone in my meme reviews there

my real vice is the message boards, which is 90% teenage canon-builders talking about which radiohead record is best and 10% people recommending serbian punk records nobody outside of serbia has ever heard of, i love this board but it alone can't feed my jones

hah yeah I've had a number of my reviews 'unpublished', including a lot of my best ones

I understand why the comment boxes are there, it's kind of nice that every album gets its own discussion thread now, and it keeps a lot of the shit out of the reviews. wish they were a bit more interactive though

nowadays of course i'm much better and write essays analyzing old genesis bootlegs from a trans perspective

yeah see this is why I love RYM actually

i've had some of my most _popular_ reviews unpublished. initially i was a little put out by it, but in the long run it does make the site better, because back when they would host any old shit the stuff that got "liked" most were the dumb joke reviews rather than anything that had any kind of actual thought or effort put into it. not only is "publishing any old shit" a really bad idea for an internet site in 2019, but establishing some sort of editorial control goes a long way towards making the site better

nowadays the stuff that gets "liked" the most are long lists of random records three people have heard, and i'm ok with that, except insofar as we tend to "like" the lists without actually listening to any of the records

the other thing i find really interesting, because it's as far as i can tell deliberately obscure, is that they do have some fairly advanced anti-brigading features in their ranking algorithms. it's complicated, but in practical terms it seems like basically only ratings between 2.5 and 4 are counted towards the overall score of a record

that twitter feed accepted my Hulk Hogan suggestion and found...so much more

The guitar riffs here are some of the coolest I've heard. I spent a whole summer smoking pot in my parents garage learning to play this album on the guitar and I would be a shitty person if I had not done that. You'd probably agree that you are lame compared to me, while reading this. I'd agree, and then add that Possessed should thank me for writing this review. You're welcome!

this five star review of possessed's seven churches is easily the best thing i've ever read on rym and one of the greatest pieces of music writing of all time

pic.twitter.com/0GMbUMqkkW

— Best of RateYourMusic (@Rateyrmusic) May 19, 2019

that LOL in the end kills me

Fine melodic rock album. Well done, Alias guys. I am an AOR lover and a grunge hater. Unfortunately, no one can change a history, I mean a lot of great bands were blown away in 90s by the ugly form of music as grunge is. Well, it happened with the band of question. Alias debut offering the almost perfect AOR material with the strong Curci's vocals as the distinctive feature. To be quite honest, tracks of second half of the release are not so great as the first part, so I can give them about 3,75 stars.

letmetrythisname 09 Aug 2017 02:37 GMT

Mambo No. 0.5

https://i.imgur.com/Kk1QV2x.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/4611xsk.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/CoSKkAQ.jpg

I’m sure people have listened to the stuff they rate on Rate Your Music

a horrible website

RYM's ratings and forums are dominated by metal fans and pompous The Wire readers. Bit I still like the lists thing, the ones made by single users not generated from ratings.

And filtering down to single genres, even the ratings lists are useful. For instance they have helped me disover some nice 2000s synthpop gems. Johan Bäckström, for instance.

And not just metal fans, the worst kind: progressive metal fans.

But yes the genre charts are absolutely fantastic for discovering new (old) stuff, infinitely better than any Spotify AI suggestion algorithm.

https://theshfl.com

ha the first recommendation I got was from a Lex review

so proud that rym is finally beginning to take female artists seriously:

https://i.imgur.com/rpKyLDw.jpg

(from the comment box for the Doja Cat/SZA collab)

https://i.imgur.com/niLqGMY.jpg

Twitter brain

Yeah, def. If there's a prime example of an artist that could only exist under capitalism, it's obviously "the boss."

(In a neighboring timeline, there's an awful Yakov Smirnoff bit about a soviet answer to Springsteen called "the worker".)

enjoyed this exchange i just stumbled upon

https://i.imgur.com/UtAi8BO.png

GOD DAMMIT WHAT WAS THE ALBUM NOW I HAVE TO KNOW

I hate Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes and all that as much as anyone, but at the same time I don't know any other sites that collate links to reviews like that, so I use them both ten times a day.

even I don't know what album that is and I wrote the posts lmao

ohhhh it's that Silverchair side-project, obvs :D

(the song in question is Somewhere Down The Barrel)

rym absolutely adores the new bruno mars album so i'm not sure what planet i'm on

#2 for the year?? damn I almost wanna check that out.

it's a solid 70s pastiche, not at all a bad album but not really anything special either, so it's just baffling the way they've latched onto it this much. like rym is still not that interested in soul or r&b more generally so why this of all things lol. does .paak's involvement add sufficient cred to the project or something idk

"Random Access Memories" was also a high-profile pastiche and wildly popular, this doesn't surprise me at all.

RYM is by nature of its yearly charts something of a consensus engine and it is populated by, shall we say, those of an impressionable age. It tends to fetishise that which its impressionable users unconsciously deem makes themselves more cool and current - coronations are preordained (watch OUT for next year's Black Country, New Road album!) but why,say, this and Little Simz uber alles I don't actually know. Maybe these albums are particularly clear in what they're doing - ambiguity tends to vex consensus

RAM was a gigantically hyped comeback album from a beloved act that hadn't put anything out in a while & had pretty wide critical buy-in (much more than this one), but i'm not sure it was like, beloved to this degree by RYM. even if it was it's not a great comparison point.

mars' schtick for the last decade has been well-crafted-but-shallow pastiches of pop from decades gone by & there's not some huge improvement in quality here, so why have they suddenly bought into this album? it's ranked at something like #16 all time in soul albums which is obviously absurd & will surely go down, but still lol.

the little simz album being overrated there (it's solid but not a masterpiece like they rate it as) is much less of a surprise though, she was already an established favourite there & RYM is fairly sympathetic to lushly-produced conscious hip-hop overall, it's very in the community's wheelhouse.

Definitely there's a sense that artists have arcs, and if they release a killer breakthrough (Simz' Grey Area, Weyes Blood's FRSTE) then it's likely that the next album will come out to much hype, and if that album is more grandly-realised (as both of those artists' follow-ups were) then it'll do very well indeed

That's the story with Injury Reserve, black midi...most of the top ten in fact. But then...yeah, why Bruno Mars lol

Lol I had the same thought as ufo today as I saw its rating on rym. It's a solid album for sure but very surprised rym would rate it so high. But some albums start high and then tend downward as a wider base check them out, no?

yea it doesn't really compare to Daft Punk because even HAA and the Tron soundtrack were defended pretty vigorously by people who knew they sucked and spent half the reviews apologizing, it was kind of predictable that the next halfway decent Daft Punk album was gonna be lionized. RYM doesn't like Bruno Mars at all. Maybe it just is that good

oh wait I just saw the album was released only 6 days ago, yeah that rating's gonna come down. seems to happen a lot on RYM where something gets a lot of early bandwagon hype which encourages a lot of people to check out something they wouldn't be into otherwise and surprise a lot of them won't like it. its kinda shitty but that's how RYM works

it's wacky it's this high after a week though

ugh why do i care rym sucks

human after all >>>>> rym

RYM is people, I mean that's just how popularity works.

I guess it works the same way how "Back To Basics" is by far the highest rated Xtina album.

thanks for the revive, ufo. i thought i was the only one who felt like that re:the new bruno thing. it's fine, but like 3.5 stars on the absolute best day.

i still haven't developed the patience required for rym. i gave it a big try this past summer after some prompting here, but i think it's just not meant for people like me.

anyway, brad otm:

ugh why do i care rym sucks

wrt Mars, as mentioned upthread this isn't a Bruno Mars album it's Bruno AND Anderson Paak, who I think has a lot more uh "cred" or whatever you want to call it, I'd bet money that's a big part in how it's being received

Part of it could also be that the weirdos that live in the rym comment boxes just aren't familiar with the source material that is being pastiched here? Too busy listening to Bull of Heaven to be bothered.

Part of it could also be that the weirdos that live in the rym comment boxes just aren't familiar with the source material that is being pastiched here

lol idk how true this is, but that's similar to what i'm pondering. i've tried with anderson paak as well and have had a similar reaction: this is decent, but i don't think i like it as much as the rest of you seem to.

that being said, i really wanted to like it because i do feel like bruno and anderson are genuinely talented dudes. but i've found them underwhelming on record so far.

I love Malibu but that's the only album I've heard of Paak's that I would rate highly