Hello everyone and welcome to my fabulous album review site. My name's Nick Karn, and I've been doing this kind of thing for quite a while now. I occasionally wrote full length music reviews for the school paper junior and senior years in high school, and that's kind of what originally sparked my interest in this sort of thing. I completed my third year of community college recently (turned 21 in September of last year) and unsure about what the hell I'm gonna do with myself (I'm a journalism major, but that very well may change), so this is pretty much my huge project in my spare time, outside of school and occasional work (which, actually, hasn't come that much - I'm so lazy).
I started this site originally on January 24, 1999 with around 200 for the most part not too detailed or objective reviews. Casey Brennan, a friend of mine, heard about this project in late April and decided to join in, and began reviewing his collection of mostly classic rock albums from the 60s and 70s, with a few more modern albums thrown in. It's kind of interesting that it works out that way, because we both try to fill in each other's holes on this site - I'm not terribly familiar with older albums, although I am getting there, and he's not too familiar with newer stuff that's out (who can blame him?).
Over time, though, this site has expanded to include the contributions of several new reviewers to give it a kind of 'staff feel' like the All Music Guide and Satan Stole My Teddybear have. MJA isn't accepting new reviewers anymore, mostly because I am trying to make this more of a band-oriented venture, and don't want the opinions to be any more confusing and inconsistent than they already are. Many of the reviewers, however, have evaluated enough albums that you can probably get a feel for what their standards might be, so in most cases that shouldn't be too much of a problem. The goal with this site is to rate albums as accurately as possible based on our own opinions, feelings, and observations, attempting to avoid the mistakes of sites like the All Music Guide (who hardly give clear or accurate pictures of what an album's like at all), and I'll try not to over-analyze albums or finding obvious faults with them all the time, or just pull very high or low ratings out of the air without much explanation for it like I've seen other sites do, carefully approaching everything with an open mind.
Another reason I started this site is that so people who come here could
get a pretty clear picture of music that I've listened to, and hopefully,
be convinced enough from one of my reviews to buy an album they don't know
about, and enjoy it. My whole philosophy on music buying and reviewing
has changed somewhat, as it has turned significantly into a band-oriented
venture. I attempt (along with my brother to a lesser extent) to accumulate
the full discographies of bands I'm actually interested in doing so. The
way I see it, it's more interesting to evaluate subpar albums from great
bands where even in this state their genius may be apparent, than merely
decent albums from bands who don't go that much further beyond that. These
type of bands are much harder to create interesting reviews for
than, say, Genesis or R.E.M.
I have of course been reworking this site a bit drastically to expand my
reviews from the last time some people have been here, because quite a few
of them I didn't think were too well thought out... rushed just to complete
the deadline on the site I had set for myself. This site is now even more
obviously interactive (like those wonderful sites by
Mark Prindle,
George Starostin and
Brian Burks, all of
whom have been big inspirations for this site), so if you ever
come here you can add your comments or whole reviews if you want. I'll post
any of 'em here (unless they're obviously irrelevant to the subject). I began
by merging Casey's page, which had previously been a separate
site, with this one (and changed the name of the site, which was originally
called The Freak Music Guide), to continue to keep things a lot more convenient.
Then came the recent explosion of new reviewers that sent this site
into a momentum where it continues to thrive to this day.