JAKE CLELAND

REFLECTING ON REVIEWING YOUR FAVOURITE CLASSIC ALBUMS

Here’s the links to 52 of your favourite album reviews for the next five minutes.

So that was fun, wasn’t it? When I started soliciting recommendations I’d only been writing album reviews for a few months. Initially I didn’t set out to write 52 album reviews and I didn’t want to set the expectation that that’s what I was doing, because then I was free to do things like write fanfiction about Bryan Ferry and talk about desert island records, but I knew it’d be a good excuse to figure out how to be a better writer and in that sense, I think it was a success. 52 Albums was crucial in sorting out what I wanted in writing about music - not only what to focus on but how to write about it. As I knocked off each album, generally I felt like I’d written one less awkward line, one less uncomfortable phrase, until I figured out the way to deal with them when they came up.

Sometimes it was about me. Sometimes it was about music. Sometimes it was about girls. Sometimes it was because of girls. Sometimes it was written with help from girls. I took on indie kids, pissed off poptimists, dealt with the cultural cringe, and stayed up way past my bedtime. I still don’t really like Pavement. I still really like David Berman.

I learned a lot. A lot. To slither around in some embarrassingly sincere phrasing for just one sec, I feel incomprehensibly enriched. Often I’ll find myself thinking some thing, band trivia or something, and I’ll realise I only knew it because I did this. Other things are less tangible. It’s not quite as simple as practice making perfect but 52 Albums gave me plenty of opportunities to think about how to do something I like doing better and that’s invaluable. Thanks everyone who read along and especially to the folks who recommended albums, whether they got reviewed or not. Like I promised at the start, you are all now inexorably a part of my life. I love you to the max. We done it.

  1. jakec posted this