Personal Stuff

• Judas Priest - Painkiller
• Deep Purple - Made in Japan
• Motörhead - All the Aces
• Mayhem - Live in Leipzig
• Burzum - Filosofem

Schjönnings Policy of Reviewing:

As a reader I often get confused by the tools utilized or the approach used by any given reviewer. Here, as a reviewer, I’ll try to describe my method of reviewing. I hope this will make my writings on this wonderful web-zine clearer to those of you that disagree with me. This is not exactly a manifesto, but rather a set of guidelines I try to follow when figuring out what to write and how high a rating to award.

1:

I am a subjective bastard!

When I review an album, what you, as a reader gets, is my personal view, based on my personal taste and my experience as a metal fan and scholar. Art – and I count metal music as a branch within this vast category – and the meaning of art is, I believe, individual. As I wrote in a reply to a band that complained about my style: “the power of elucidation is in the hands of the receiver (reader, listener, viewer, etc.) and not something the original creator has anything to say about”. In other words: When the album leaves the shop, the meaning and quality of the album is determined by the individual listener. In this case: Me.

2:

I don’t like ratings.

Although PoM operates with a scale of 100, which grants a high degree of exactness to the rating, I personally despise the thought that an album can be reduced to a mathematical figure. I fully accept the wishes of my dear editor, to have such a system though, and I do rate every album that comes through my hands (and ears). However: I encourage readers to read through the reviews – especially in order to ascertain WHY a certain album got a certain rating. In my opinion the ratings lure readers away from the text, and I think that is sad.

3:

I do not have a favorite style of metal.

Opposed to most metalheads I do not favor a specific style or sub-genre within the substantial field of heavy metal. I have numerous favored bands within each category. Observant readers will discover that I tend to write about a lot of black and death metal, and the explanation of that is also the story of why I got to write for PoM. I was taken into service because some of my honored colleagues does not like the extreme metal genres, and felt that it was inappropriate or them to rate it. I for one can see the logic in that, and I’m glad that I got to serve.

For the sake of truthfulness – and in case anyone that knows me read this – I have to admit that I really hate drone metal. Stuff like Sun O))) and Khanate will never enter my record collection, not even if I get it for free to review. There! My conscience is clean.

4:

I’m a miner.

I always dig around for whatever makes the record stand out. I’ve never seen the point in the painstaking efforts some reviewers make, to describe an entire musical work of art in a web-based media (read: it’s short). You will not get any “over-all” pictures from me. I’m a miner, digging through the common rocks to find what lies beneath. Whether I strike an ore of gold or ends up in a pit of shit is up to the band in question – but I search for whatever makes the music “special”. A fantastic lead singer, original use of synthesizers, or catastrophically bad mixing – practically everything can make the difference. Of course, sometimes all I find is common rock, which tends to result in low ratings and long rants. And now I have abused my mining-metaphor sufficiently.

5:

I rate artwork.

Some of the reviewers on PoM rate the artwork of the albums, and I’m one of them. Though it never influences my reviews or my ratings of the music, I’m sure many agrees with me, that a well-done, neatly balanced mood-setting piece of art, is an important part of the album experience.

Artwork is the collective visual expression of the front-cover, the disc itself, the eventual booklet, etc. Every illustrious piece of art pertaining to the album. Inlaid posters and multimedia (music videos, desktop backgrounds, etc.) gives bonus points, if they are good.

This is awfully unfair to some bands, since their labels make special promos to send to reviewers, in which only a small part of the original artwork is represented. I feel sorry for these bands, but now you know why I give your artwork low grades.

It is a growing fancy among labels to send me the promos in a purely digital format. These “packages” contains music, press material, and artwork, but often the artwork is grubby and/or arranged in a different way than on the actual albums. Thus every downloaded album receives an artwork rating of “N/A”.

Simple as that! I hope I’ve managed to explain my way of reviewing in a fairly understandable manner.