Why Don't I Give Songs a Score?

By Sam Wolstenholm

SOOOOOO I've had a few people tell me that it may be helpful to include ratings of the individual songs in my album reviews. I've considered this. The problem with assigning a _/10 to each song is that I believe I'd be making it all too mathematical. The score of an album isn't going to be the average score of all the songs. That's not how I approach it. A way I think I can address this concern is by including some graphics. A different sort of rating system. I'll keep the _/10 scoring for the album as a whole, but I think I can do something more visual when it comes to the songs. I'm going to include three types of GIFs.

Each review will have one dark horse (if you don't know what a dark horse is, I assign this to the song I think people will overlook):

If there's a song that I think is really shitty, you'll see this (not every review will have this, hopefully, but some will have multiple):

Finally, I'll use various positive GIFs to show special appreciation for up to 3 songs per project (could roughly consider this my top 3). This wouldn't include my dark horse. Here are some examples:

I've gone back and updated all my previous reviews to include these as well. I know this isn't exactly satisfying if you're wanting a numerical rating for each song, but I don't really think I can do that. Every song could be a 5/10 but the album could be a 7/10 depending on different factors. Likewise, 9 songs on a ten-track album could be 7/10, but if that tenth song is an instant 10/10 classic, the album could be bumped up to a 9/10. There are so many different perspectives to take when evaluating the quality of a project. It's so subjective. That's why it'd feel weird to me adding even more numbers to it than I already have. Using these GIFs will make more clear what I say in the individual track reviews, but that's as far as I can go for now.

Of course, you can always ask a question in the comments and I will always anwer truthfully. That means I'll give you a rough numerical rating of a specific song if you ask for it. I'll rank stuff if you ask for it. You have a voice in the making of this content, so make sure you're getting what you want out of it!