Rating Ratings

A short post this time around, as I'm just about to go out to the lake to celebrate the 4th of July, the holiday where one celebrates the birth of his or her country by blowing up a small part of it (to quote The Simpsons).

In any case, I recently had another high score published over at The Silent Ballet. This time the review was of Treasure State, a new collaboration between the New York avant-garde percussion quartet So Percussion and the Baltimore-based experimental electronica outfit Matmos.

I've said enough about the album in my actual review, so I won't rehash all that. The short version: the album kicks twelve kinds of ass. Go check it out ASAP. For te purposes of this blog post, I thought that I might say a few words about our scoring system.

I said up at the top that this was a high-scoring review if you read that and then were surprised to see an 8.5 at the top of the page, then you probably aren't very familiar with our scoring system. TSB's official policy n scoring is that a score of 5 ought to reflect an album that is perfectly average. Therefore, a score of 5.5 is a slightly positive score, while a 4.5 is a slightly negative score. Scores of 8 and above (and, correspondingly, scores of 2 or below are considered to be albums of exceptionally high (or low, on the other side) merit. As a website, we've never given out a score higher than 9.0, and we only have a few of those per year. So, on this scale, an 8.5 really is a pretty high score.

The intended goal of such a system is to ensure that high-scoring albums truly deserve their scores. I won't name names, but I'm sure you can think of a few websites that seem to hand out high scores like they were going out of style, where the most common score may be 4 out of 5 stars. This dilutes the value of a high score. I can assure you, if you see a high score at TSB, the album will have earned it.

On the other hand, I think it's a bit silly to have the top two scoring possibilities on the site as (apparently) unreachable. You can go back and forth on whether or not any album is deserving of the perfect 10, but I think that any score on the scale ought to be fair game. When it comes to a score of 9.5, that seems a bit ridiculous. (We actually did almost have a 9.5 once upon a time, actually, but unfortunately the score got cut down before publication. Ah well.)

Regardless, I think that having high scores actually mean something is a valiant goal. And maybe one day we'll actually use full spectrum.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to celebrate the national holiday of blowing shit up. Happy fourth of July, everyone!