How Many 5-Star Ratings Do You Give?

Also, what counts as an "essential masterpiece" in your book?

It has to be consistent - overall highly enjoyable - the songs should be very significant and memorable. the uniqueness and innovation and ofc the quality of the compositions.

I´d also be interested in how much your subjective feelings about an album influence your rating. for example an album thats compositions are superb and of highest quality but just doesn´t appeal to you.. does it deserve 3 or even less stars?

i think my ojective - subjective ratio is pretty 50/50 or 60/40 ... what do you think? is there a way to tell?

Mind_Drive wrote: It has to be consistent - overall highly enjoyable - the songs should be very significant and memorable. the uniqueness and innovation and ofc the quality of the compositions. I´d also be interested in how much your subjective feelings about an album influence your rating. for example an album thats compositions are superb and of highest quality but just doesn´t appeal to you.. does it deserve 3 or even less stars? i think my ojective - subjective ratio is pretty 50/50 or 60/40 ... what do you think? is there a way to tell?

Interesting question. I think in my case it depends entirely on how strong my subjective feelings are. As an example, I'm going to assume that Godspeed You! Black Emperor are good at what they do, but I find their albums so mind numbingly slow and boring that they generate a complete sense of distaste and I couldn't give them anything other than a 1 star rating were I actually to be bothered in trying to review their albums. Give me your stereotypical Neo Prog or vanilla Progressive Metal band (or a "djent" band these days) and though I'd be just as bored there's at least something for me to latch onto in their musicianship so they'd have a better chance of being bumped from a 2 to a 3 star rating and would have to be really bad to incur a 1 star rating from me (I'm looking at you, Torman Maxt). In short my subjective feelings overrule any objectiveness I would have had with the former due to how strongly they make me feel about it.

Another question would be is it better to for music to create strong feelings like hate or weak feelings of boredom and even total apathy?

 


Edited by sleeper - June 08 2014 at 05:57

I'd give five star ratings when I think it is a masterpiece. Personal preferences are a bit of another story: there are some albums I'd give 4 stars which I play more often than some albums which are 5 star imho.

The criteria for what might constitute a 5 star album are clearly subjective and at the furthest reaches of any sad sack's notion of what might resemble an exact science (heaven forfend © Dean who could paraphrase my entire post in one sentence and make it a damn sight funnier to boot)
I've seen albums rated 5 stars even though the reviewer only liked one track e.g. Tarkus, 2112, Foxtrot et al where one epic composition tends to deaden the timpanic membranes of those plankton underclass who moonlight as arbiters of taste round these parts y'all. For those who approach aesthetic appraisal as you would approach weighing bananas: You are reviewing the whole album, not just the bits you like. Ya dig bro/man/dude? (delete as applicable, hopefully all three)

For me, the 5 star spangled banner is only hoisted where every track is uniformly strong e.g. Benny the Bouncer on Brain Salad Surgery is often compared to the wet eggy fart in the shiny ironed Prog spacesuit but I think it has a brilliantly witty and funny lyric, a piano solo to die for and confirms that ELP were NOT po-faced earnest knob-ends who roped off fun and humor as unbecoming of Prog. Shakespeare has comedic interludes designed to lighten the cerebral load, was he therefore the Jerry Lewis of Elizabethan drama?

For me, a five star album has to be enjoyable all the way through, and to stand the test of time for me. In other words, I have to love it in all aspects, and consistantly.

Edited by presdoug - June 08 2014 at 12:13

I have given 35 out of 106 ratings as 5 star though I do tend to only rate albums I like a lot. 5 stars to me are albums i've listened to many many times and the highlights vastly outweigh the minor blemishes.

Aldebaran_Well wrote: There is also another thing I call the album's aura:now that is the key factor for my personal,purely objective 5 star albums, eternal friends and companions that shaped me as a person.

very nicely said! it´s the aura that enchants the most...

HolyMoly wrote:  Also, since this site does contain albums that aren't really prog albums (e.g. Saccharine Trust's early stuff is art punk), I will take that into account as well.  Sac Trust's debut EP is a personal favorite that I consider a near-perfect specimen of its species, but since it is not by any means "a masterpiece of prog" (it's a masterpiece of punk), I couldn't give it a five.  I gave it a three, in fact.  Got to consider the audience too.