I've found that with my new job I went very quickly from having a lot of free time constantly, to practically none at all. For the most part I welcome this, but it has had some snags.
The main snag is for a while I had a build up of reviews that needed doing as a result they were rushed and it felt like a chore. I also found my passion for Folk music dying slightly. I assume this was because I had such restraints on the reviews that it wasn't fun doing them. Thankfully I had some time to plough through and I am now fully caught up.
I was concerned though that perhaps my love of folk would still be affected. Thankfully I was giving an album called Bare Foot Folk by Ange Hardy to review.
This album is one of the best I have reviewed so far and really helped rekindle that love in me for the genre, it inspired me to give the review a good write, much like my proper standard, and I hope this comes across.
In case you don't know I write for two online magazines, Bright Young Folk and Fatea. They both have completely different ways of reviewing so I need to put a different head on when working on them. Fatea has quite a large catchment working with Folk, acoustic and some stuff I would argue is Indie. They take a more liberal attitude of celebrating most music.
The trouble is I've had to review a lot more music that is outside my interest, which is good and bad as it develops my winder understanding of music, but also I find it harder to put as much 'Umph!' into the writing.
Bright Young Folk has a much closer remit which is much more my area, so I enjoy the music more. The catch then is all reviews for Bright Young Folk are supposed to be neutral in writing, so, like with Ange Hardy, I find music I want to just sing countless praises for, and I can't because the review needs to be neutral. This isn't a bad thing, Bright Young Folk concentrates more on spreading Folk and accepts that a reviewers personal feelings towards a certain album may be different to other Folkies, so Bright Young Folk aims to show what people would be getting. Fatea is more emotional in the writing (but aims for positive, avoids negatives reviews instead choosing not to review something not liked) acting more like a celebration of music rather than simply a platform to find new stuff.
Another plus for Fatea is we get sent the actual review CD, Bright Young Folk sends mp3 files. See my last post to understand why I regard that a plus.
DFTBA
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