Sasha Frere-Jones is absolutely right. I am happy to join him in his revolution, in my own small way.
(I have only been asked to four of the "listening sessions" he describes. The first was Tool's Lateralus, which I gave a 7 out of 10 because it sounded like it had been recorded concurrently with its predecessor, five years earlier. The third was Metallica's St. Anger, which I demolished in a 1000-word review that ran in about seventeen alt-weeklies. Somewhere in between, I heard the last Disturbed album at the lead singer's apartment in Chicago, while writing a cover story on them for Alternative Press. I got to listen to it two or three more times over the course of my weekend in Chicago, though, mostly while driving in one bandmember or another's SUV. It was, and remains, a very good album. And I heard Slipknot's Iowa at a "listening party" in some shitty bar in lower Manhattan. It was nearly inaudible over the jabber of two-dozen open-bar-exploiting rock hacks. The inaudibility turned out to be a good thing.)
I mostly review small, indie-label releases. It isn't like blowing off big-time publicists is a major part of my life. But from this day forward, as others before me have said, if called, I will not go.
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