Have you ever looked back at your old reviews and thought “what the fuck was I thinking?”

I noticed a new Fate Gear on the front page and while checking it out I unsurprisingly realized that I was the only weeb that reviewed that band in the past, so I took a trip down memory lane and read them. For a while it was cool, maybe even just a little impressed with myself, but then I came to this chunk within my review of their first release:

I usually try to avoid certain external attributes in my reviews for the sake of integrity or some such nonsense, but in this case, I'm going to lower my usual low standards just a tad more and state that goddamn is Nico cute. Like a pixie with butterfly wings descending from the clouds to save the world from impending doom, her allure isn't about being sexy but instead irresistibly sweet. The band should be selling official Fate Gear tissue paper at their gigs so the more otaku fans in the crowd aren't making a sticky mess while Nico gives it her all on stage.

I’m not tooting my own horn here; that’s some embarrassing shit and I’m cringing. It’s not even that old, and I can imagine some of my 7+ years ago reviews being even lamer (and creepier). Maybe I’m just getting older and more aware of shit, plus the smartass gen-x wgaf comedian mentality is feeling pretty dated these days.

Also, recently I noticed for my Malevolent Creation Retribution review that I ragged on the intro unaware that it was actually the opening music for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Granted, maybe it still deserves flack due to laziness rather than a lame little composition, but I still look dumb and should probably edit my review if I wasn’t so lazy myself.

I’m actually scared to look at some of my old reviews at this point, though I won’t remove them. Learn from my mistakes, I guess.

Has anyone else undergone this reckoning of perusing old reviews you must have been proud of at the time and now think “Holy shit I come across like a complete asshole!” or “man I was so damn stupid” after a few years or more?

Yes, kind of, sort of with my very first album review written in 2017:
https://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/ ... er_X/58890

I probably will just leave it as is, cause hell the band loved it so much, they even shared it on their wall, not to mention it did gain some additional traction for them (Asylum).

That being said, the title alone drives me up the wall, instead of using the 3 common "...", no I use ".............." like seriously, wth, haha / Then, my very last paragraph, every sentence ends with a "!"... yeah, so I dunno, other than I was excited as hell to write it, that's my only guess. I really don't remember.

In terms of the most wildly off-base from a musical standpoint, the one that always sticks out to me is before I removed all of my Running Wild reviews I had referred to Gates to Purgatory as "basically just a German Venom".

In terms of just generally cringey statements holy shit take your pick from anything I wrote pre-2013ish. Oftentimes I was aiming for zany comedy and boy howdy was I not nearly as good at it as I thought I was.

All of my reviews from back in my teens are pretty rough, but this one from 2005 for Heavenly's Dust to Dust stands out as particularly painful:

https://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/ ... stone/7600



"omgwtflolz"? Can't believe this review wasn't rejected for that alone, even back then, and I have no idea what the ":S" emoticon is supposed to symbolize. Such an awkward way of acknowledging how bad my own pun is. Also, some vocal lines come off as "forced" because the band is French? I mean the Ben Sotto's pronunciation isn't exactly dead on all the time, but this sentence makes it seem like no person born in France have a chance of ever speaking decent english. Then the rest of the review is just LITTERED with CAPITALIZING words where I felt it REALLY necessary to EMPHASIZE certain POINTS

My opinion of the album today is much the same though, so I'm okay with it staying up. I did delete a couple of my older reviews a while back, but only negative ones.

Most of the stuff I did for the first 3-4 years or so was really immature, as per usual... when you start writing on the internet at like 15 a lot of it'll come out pretty cringey later. Especially because I knew so little about music. I was essentially learning as I went and a lot of stuff I said I'd probably not agree with anymore because it was either too nitpicky for no reason because I thought I had to, or was just frankly coming from an uneducated place.

I also got into a habit of doing comedic negative reviews. After a while that started to seem like a waste of energy. I just started to work harder on my own original stuff.

That :S is next level man
I kinda dig it.

The 'zany comedy' insertions make sense in that after writing enough reviews, the repetition concerning musical description gets old. Saying "the bass is low in the mix" for a black metal album or if the singer is in pitch for a symphonic metal release becomes tedious, so off-the-wall metaphors become useful in keeping awake while writing, at least in my case. I've even gone full "novelty" on occasion, which can feel liberating and clever while I'm actually typing the thing. That sense of inspiration and passion is apparent, but damn is that a short-lived feeling, and days later I don't even want to read what I wrote when it comes to the crazier "going against the grain" reviews. Pumping out lengthy, descriptive reviews for a site like this does that over time. In fact, I'm in awe of those who can dish out so many 4 paragraph reviews without losing it and writing bonkers takes.

I also noticed once that I used the word "morass" for whatever reason for like four reviews in a row without even noticing.

And as far as being embarrassed about stuff written by the author's younger days, it makes me wonder how many old bands actually enjoy singing some of the lyrics of their wild youth. They do it because that's what draws the crowds, but still...

Same as everyone here, terrible writing, the fact I'm French only making it worse, as Bloodstone so nicely put it -



Funnily, several of my early reviews were for bands which were later judged "not metal enough" and consequently kicked out of the site. All for the better I guess

I had started to re-write some, but it gets rapidly tedious. As my opinion on the albums usually hasn't changed a lot, even after 15 years, I just leave them in their original crappy state. I've only deleted a few really embarrassing ones (i.e. containing blatant ignorance of basic facts about the band). A few absurd ratings, too... but well... don't care that much about ratings anyway.

I've been reviewing on this website since 2004 (I was only 15 then), so I definitely have some reviews that are poorly written. Some of them are for albums I received promos of, and I realized I'd rather just write about albums I'm actually interested in (whether or not they meet my expectations) as opposed to things that are given to me to review.

I definitely need to fix my Disciples of Mockery/WOMB split review, there's some glaring factual errors in it.

Anything I wrote before around 2012 or 13 is complete trash.

Oh I'm 100% on board with all of this, it's more the old internet reviewer thing I'd do where I'd try to imitate Yahtzee or Spoony and do the whole "I'd rather staple my dick to a burning log and eat John Goodman's asshole than ever hear this again and everybody involved in its creation should be shot out of a cannon into a tiger enclosure" type thing that makes me want to headbutt myself.

I'm not so much embarrassed by what I wrote but just disappointed by my lack of perception and low standard of written English. Then again, that happens with my new reviews too. I don't think anyone ever gets my jokes here, although I still find them funny.

Oh god yeah man. I think anyone who's written for a few years has a few that they cringe at. Over time I've been slowly redoing some of my early, really really really bad reviews but I try not to worry about it too much. If bad old metal reviews is the most dirt anyone's got on me it's no big deal. I reckon anything post say 2011 I'm pretty happy with, problem is that most of my reviews were written before then! Oh well. I've never put that much stock in having dignity anyway so I'm not too fussed.

Most of my pre-2007 writing feels disorganized and lame relative to what I've done since, and some of my older negative reviews are particularly clumsy. A lot of the really crappy stuff that I wrote in 2005 and early 2006 was nuked and is now mostly rewritten, but boy did I make some asinine syntax errors and confusing grammatic mistakes on those duds. I was basically a C student throughout high school when it came to English (I was much stronger in Math and History), so when it came to writing reviews I sort of learned by doing, and I'm continually fighting the urge to go back and make changes to a bunch of those old reviews.

Well I gotta admit after being reminded about Dragonforce and checking out the old review I did 15 odd years ago, I cringed hard enough where I rewrote it. Maybe there'll be more of it, especially as we're in a mini 5 day COVID lockdown here. Gets me thinking that I haven't heard Meshuggah for over a decade so I'm sure my opinion has changed a lot.

I don't really get too embarrassed about my old reviews since they're basically just an unrefined version of the style but I just found out that a user on SputnikMusic plagiarized a review that I wrote for The Eternal Idol back in 2009. They didn't change a single word of it, which I find especially funny since they kept that awkward pros and cons template I used back then. Guess I should be glad that my old stuff still holds up well enough to steal?

I'm surely a minor voice in all this, given my first reviews date back to only 5 and 1/2 years ago, but at the time I was barely 18 and my English was way more bare-bone than it already is now. Fortunately I refrained myself from venturing into lame humour, but that's probably because I didn't know how I could express my most cringe-inducing thoughts with a correct syntax I made some slight updates to the earliest ones every now and then, nothing really embarassing but still very basic, no wonder I struggled so much to get them accepted back then.

In a way, I'm slightly envious of my past self's conciseness - in that Attomica review I explained everything I meant to write in 3 and 1/2 paragraphs, when now I can rarely restrain myself within 6...

A shit ton of my reviews have writing on them that is devoid of common sense. After all writing reviews is not easy. One review I mentioned how the album I was listening to had "static and
tape hiss" even though the album didn't. Actually have that.

Most of my older reviews have been deleted, aside from Aeon Zen's "Ephemera" - the only one that I actually think works well from then.

My old review style sucked, and I'm just glad that I've grown as a writer.

I'm not sure I could bring myself to read a pre-2014 review.

Almost all the time. For some reason, 12 year old me thought that song lyric references and making sex jokes about the band members was funny and not cringe-inducing. Couple that with the constant grammar mistakes and describing every song to ever exist as "one of the best songs of all time". One of my reviews actually got rejected because of juvenile language. I deserved it haha.

Reading the title of my Reign in Blood review from 2020 has me question my sanity from that year.

Most of my old reviews are like this. The scores don't match the scores that I'd give those albums today, but it's kinda acceptable considering the zeitgeist.

Are you still standing by the claim that the Manilla Road fanbase is almost entirely located on these forums?

Yes, but it's mostly because harmlessly and ineffectually bullying the Road Crew is the most fun you can have on this site.

For real though yes obviously their influence is more far reaching than I had initially thought (this forum is no stranger to hyping the shit out of obscurities that nobody else has ever heard of or cared about so I stand by my gut instinct being valid (throwback to when Ulysses Siren was apparently the best band on earth)), but I maintain my core claim that they really only had a handful of truly great albums in the late 80s but Shelton was always an F-tier vocalist and the vast majority of everything they put out after the break in the 90s is terminally boring and the people who love those albums are just pretending.

Honestly I'm too scared to look. Would probably just delete all my reviews if I were forced to read them again. But I do vaguely remember writing a very try-hard sounding review of Lacuna Coil in a gimmicky skit scenario which somehow hasn't been deleted from the archives as far as I know