mikelowry

I'm looking for websites dedicated to album/cd reviews with an extensive archive. Know any good ones? Thanks!

Celtic Bob

There is www.metal-rules.com and it has a small rock section as well.

[email protected]

I know this might be obvious, but there's always Amazon.com for personal reviews.

For links to professional reviews, I like to use metacritic.com for movies and music.

Mr. M

http://www.allmusic.com/

Leather Face

http://rateyourmusic.com/

Hollowgen

this has been asked & answered many times in the past here. the consensus seems to be (and is the answer, imo): www.allmusic.com

Trout

Metal Archives is pretty good too.

Flashback

I love that site (actually their books as well, before I started using the internet, years ago). May or may not agree with some of the their reviews but they are generally pretty good and very extensive imho.

Hiro11

www.allmusic.com
www.popmatters.com
www.metacritic.com

Hollowgen

i've used amg pretty much exclusively for years now. i find their reviews to be very objective and even-handed 99% of the time.

cupcake jesus

www.pitchforkmedia.com

cheers,

-the Jesus

Breton

Another good thing about allmusic.com is that the reviewers are almost always assigned to review artists that they like or are at least familiar with and open to hearing. It results in more accurate reviews than sites or magazines where the reviewers just cover anything that's thrown at them by their editors. If they really hate an act, there's no way they can give a fair opinion of it. The site does have a few holes here and there, but they review more releases than most.

Flashback

I remember noticing that a long time ago in the stone tablet .. I mean book version. When there was a weird rating that was not consistent with the rest of the albums (good or bad) sure enough it was a different critic.
But I did like when they were from the same person. At least you had some sort of idea of how would feel about certain albums.

Superman07

I stumbled across that site recently, but the more I looked into the reviews I found that they have a bias. If the music doesn't fit their alt-rock/indie desire than it gets a low ranking. Plus the amount of newer artists they cover appears to be small.

maxfisher

Yeah, pitchfork has some interesting write-ups sometimes, but I don't take them seriously at all as a review source. Like a few others have mentioned, Metacritic is a great starting point. They do a fairly good job at compiling reviews for both major and smaller releases and there's usually a diverse enough group of reviews that I'm able to get a feel for if I'd like the album or not. Really, though, I primarily use review sites to find out about new bands. For ones I'm already familiar with, I usually look to their website or myspace page to stream material from a new album and see if it's interesting enough to buy.

cungar

Allmusic.com is the most comprehensive album review site on the internet by far. It has pretty much every album by every artist from obscure to huge. Their reviews are pretty good, but I've never forgiven them for this:

Paris
Paris Hilton
Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

4 1/2 stars

As everybody knows, Paris Hilton is famous simply for existing. Even before she was a household name the heiress to the Hilton hotel fortune was famous in certain circles, partially because of her pedigree, partially because she was at every exclusive party, partially because of her very name, an instantly memorable and malleable moniker that spawned T-shirts ("Paris Hilton Is Burning") and gossip websites alike (perezhilton, naturally). All this hipster activity was bound to spill over into the mainstream and it did in a spectacular fashion in 2003 when she and Nicole Richie — her best friend for life circa 2003 — starred in the reality series The Simple Life, which saw the two pampered socialites attempting to fit into the real world of Wal-Marts and roadhouse saloons. Just before the series hit the airwaves, a sex tape of Paris with her ex-boyfriend Rick Solomon was leaked to the Internet and the resulting media hoopla of the show and the porn made Paris a bona fide celebrity. Pretty soon, she was everywhere and she began dabbling in almost every part of the entertainment industry, from film to fashion. What all these projects had in common is that they all featured Paris as Paris — even when she was getting whacked in House of Wax, she wasn't really playing a character — and in all of them her presence never matched her persona, which always was more compelling as seen through the prism of tabloids. She seemed destined to never deliver any project that would justify her fame, and it certainly seemed that the album that she spent two years recording would not be the project that would be a flat-out success — that prolonged gestation for a pop album nearly guarantees trouble of some kind.

Amazingly, that long-to-materialize album (it's hard to call it highly anticipated) turns out to be shockingly good — and not just according to a grading curve for actors-turned-singers. After all, Paris was never an actress to begin with; she was a media creation who peddled the same image to a number of different formats, and it just so happens that her sexy, spoiled, shallow act is perfectly suited for bubblegum pop. Of course, it helps that she has a crack team of professionals supporting her on Paris, chief among them songwriter Kara DioGuardi and producer/co-writer Scott Storch, who is name-dropped on the first song, "Turn It Up," and leaves a heavy imprint on the rest of the record, producing just over half of it and serving as one of the executive producers along with Tom Whalley and Paris herself. They come up with a sound that's casually modern and retro with enough heft in its rhythms to sound good at clubs, yet it's designed to be heard outdoors on the sunniest day of the summer. This is exceedingly light music, as sweet and bubbly as a wine spritzer, yet it isn't so frothy that it floats away. Like the best lightweight pop, Paris retains its sense of fun through repeated listens, long past the point that the novelty of Paris Hilton releasing a good album has worn off.

Make no mistake, Paris is a very good pop album, at times deliberately reminiscent of Blondie, Madonna, and Gwen Stefani, yet having its own distinct character — namely, Paris' persona, which is shamelessly shallow and devoid of any depth. Where that might be irritating within a movie or within pop culture at large, when placed in a shiny, hooky dance-pop album it works splendidly, particularly because the songs are strong and Storch and company know how to keep things light — and everybody involved knows that it's fun to play around with Paris' image, no matter if it's her murmuring "that's hot" at the beginning of the record or covering Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy," or writing about her feud with Nicole Ritchie on the delightful "Jealousy." But for as much as Paris is about Paris, she doesn't necessarily stand out here; her voice — which is almost certainly auto-tuned and tweaked by a computer, yet it's nevertheless appealing, more so than Britney Spears' often awkward squawk — may blend into the production, yet that actually helps the recordings since it emphasizes the melodies above everything else. And there are some irresistible melodies here: the breezy "Stars Are Blind," the gilded rush of "I Want You" driven by a "Grease" sample, the sweet "Time After Time" rewrite "Heartbeat," and the great power pop of "Screwed," for starters.

Yes, there is no denying that this is a pure piece of product, but it is indeed pure as product. Paris makes no apologies for being mass-market pop, but everybody involved made sure that this was well-constructed mass-market pop. It may not bear the mark of an auteur the way Christina Aguilera's Back to Basics does, but it never feels tossed-off, and track-for-track it's more fun than anything released by Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson, and a lot fresher, too. It's easy to hate Paris Hilton — lord knows that she and her friends like Brandon Davis are walking advertisements against the repeal of the estate tax — but any pop fan who listens to Paris with an open mind will find that it's nothing but fun.

Hiro11

Sometimes you'll find a review on allmusic that simply makes no sense (like that one). I've also noticed somewhat frequently that you'll find a review where the star rating doesn't match the review, for example this fairly negative review of Blondie's "Eat to the Beat":
...which is fairly surprising since they gave the album 4 1/2 stars (and it is a great album).

Norm de Plume

^That's true. On the flipside, sometimes a rave review is strangely accompanied by 2 or 3 stars.

Even so, I echo what the others have said. Allmusic is to music what IMDb is to movies. I also really like rateyourmusic.
http://www.melodicrock.com/reviews/reviews.html and http://www.rockreport.be/reviewsindex.asp are more niche sites, but serve their purpose well.

Tscott

Are there any sites that will always include info about the physical content of a CD in a review?

I'm buying most music online these days, and I'm constantly debating on if I should buy the actual CD or pay a bit less for the MP3s (AmazonMP3 and eMusic are my two main stops). I hate when I opt for the MP3s only to find out later that the CD comes with a bonus DVD (like the latest Kaki King), or book of extensive liner notes (like the latest Natalie Merchant). Or the flip side, I hate when I opt to pay more for the CD, only to find it arrive in a single cardboard sleeve with nothing else (like the new Jonsi album).

Superman07

Check out allmusic. Once you click on an album at the bottom under the review it will list the releases along with "other". The "other" category contains any material like you are describing.

Hokeyboy

You should probably be seeking out allmusic.com.

Red Medicine

All Music is for chumps.

www.markprindle.com

That's all you need. And his reviews are very entertaining as well.

Hokeyboy

Welcome to the forum, Mark.