(Andy Synn presents six short-but-sweet releases from across the Hardcore spectrum)
A book I read recently (and I’m just now realising that “recently” was actually months ago) brought up the topic of “overflow”, particularly as it pertains to the impact – or impacts, plural – of simply having too much information.
And while the original focus of the discussion was more about how an excess of scientific data, leading to a glut of scientific publications, can potentially devalue the resultant perception of the work, the theme also transfers over nicely to the topic of reviews (and, particularly, review scores).
Put it this way, with more and more music being released (and, importantly, made more widely accessible) each year, and more and more reviews of said music being written in response, it’s inevitable that there’s going to be more albums receving higher scores, which will in turn give the audience the impression that reviewers are being too generous and that scores are being devalued… even if the normal distribution remains the same.
It’s a problem, even if it’s not one people think about very often, and one reason I’m glad we don’t do ranked scores here at NCS, as our role is more to curate the vast array of new releases each month and help them find their audience, not put them against one another in competition.
