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The Joys of Scoring

Written by Pacdan

Yes, it’s a funny title. It wasn’t intentional, but I’ll go with it. The short version: should an album have to be absolutely jaw dropping to earn a score of 10/10, or just excellent throughout - but maybe not as good as my absolute favorite albums? And did I give Nightwish’s Dark Passion Play too high of a score, given that there seem to be many albums that fall above that level of quality (I gave it a 9.5) but really don’t seem to necessarily deserve a ten. There’s enough good but not great track per OMG tracks that I might have gone half a point high on that one, though I’m still standing by my review.

Happy now, wall of text complainers? It’s not like I expect you to read that much, that often - geez. Clicky the link for the full version, meaning long paragraphs amounting to the same basic point. But you also get to see a preview of the score for my next review if you read it…ooh. Except I think the one person who cares about album in question already has.

Well, obviously one of the things anyone who’s doing reviewing anything must deal with is how to score it. My first review, Dark Passion Play by Nightwish, gave the album a 9.5 out of 10. This started the usage of a base 10 review system which I have been using since, and I probably would have ended up using this system anyways even if I’d had more time to think about it. I’ve always considered going in half-points to ten to be a very practical way to do reviews. In all reality it’s using 20 as a perfect score, but putting it in terms of 10 looks much nicer. Until recently, the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly had been using the same system. Unfortunately, they recently switched to an irritating letter grading system which doesn’t give nearly as much information - but is less likely to piss of their advertisers since giving a game a C- doesn’t look nearly as bad at first glance as giving it a five. This is complete BS for the readers, the old system was much easier to figure out and less confusing. I don’t have to deal with pleasing advertisers (yet) and hopefully when I am the ads will be generic enough that I won’t be getting in trouble with them for giving bad reviews. I’ve never liked an out of five rating system because to me it just doesn’t provide as much variability as scoring out of ten (or rather, twenty). The problem with having that extra discretion is that it can become very hard to pinpoint exactly where something should be scored. If you can either give four or five stars, you can just say if it’s good it gets a four - if it’s great it gets a five. Out of twenty, you could give a four star either a 7.5, 8, 8.5, or 9. That five star could either be a 9, 9.5, or a 10. Giving an album five stars carries a lot less weight than giving it a ten and, while no one’s going to complain about too many albums getting five stars, if you give too many albums a ten out of ten - that rank really starts to lose it’s value. The question is, is a rating of ten reserved for those albums that go above and beyond, the few that are not only enjoyable music but capable of bringing something completely special and unique that really can redefine your view of music, or is simply being made of nothing but great songs enough to warrant a ten?

Now I hesitate to give out a 9.5 rating because to me, even though some people never ever read that first review, using that score is like saying “this is as good as Dark Passion Play”. And, while being as good as Dark Passion Play certainly isn’t a bad thing, there’s a lot of albums out there that are better than Dark Passion Play but not as good as, say, Enchant (Emilie Autumn) - my favorite album. Are those albums all at the 9.5 level, or is there a range below those few absolutely perfect albums where you can still be a ten? I feel it’s unfair to drop an album from the ten level for not being as good as something like Enchant because albums that are just that good are apt to only occur once every few years. There’s albums that maintain a consistently exceptional quality without being that incredible, and to me I really feel they still deserve that ten rating - especially when there’s really very little that could have been done better with them. I stand by my rating and I’m not going to go back and change it, but sometimes I feel I went half a point too high on that one in retrospect. It’s an incredible album, but there are enough flaws that I wonder if my status as an extreme Nightwish fan pushed it up just a little. Or maybe I was right and that should be the standard for a 9.5, an exciting but still less than perfect album, and I should just be less hesitating about giving a ten to anything above that. I’m really not sure, but ultimately I think I really need to just go with what I immediately think is a fair score for the album and not try to justify to myself why I’m giving it that score.

Thoughts anyone?

This was all brought on by my desire to review the new Angelspit album, Blood Death Ivory, and not being able to quite decide where the rating should stand. I’m sure this conundrum will come up in the future, though I’ll probably keep it as a personal problem at that point, but the good news is after writing this I think I’ve decided what score the album is going to get. And, so as not to drive you crazy with anticipation, it gets the ten - but for more details you’ll have to wait for me to write the review.