The art of the review

What makes for a good album review?

One that, when you listen to the record in question, has you excitedly and repeatedly exclaiming of the reviewer "Yes, they absolutely nailed it!"?

Undoubtedly, yes.

One that helps you to understand a set of songs that, until that point, seem to have made no sense at all, and enables a newfound appreciation of what you're listening to?

Absolutely (and I'm thankful to this sort of review on a regular basis).

Or one that is so compelling that you feel the urge to listen to the album the moment you've finished reading, or indeed before you've finished, regardless of whether you have any prior knowledge of the artist?

Rarer, perhaps, but no less precious.

Emma Garland's Quietus review of Ethel Cain's new LP Perverts falls into the latter camp. It more than piqued my interest; it made me want to stop what I was doing that instant and experience for myself what she was writing about.

The reality is that, in spite of high hopes, I took an almost immediate and visceral disliking to Perverts as pretentious, directionless nonsense.

But this isn't to bemoan Garland's review - not least because she pre-empts just such a reaction to the record, making no bones about the fact that it's "a boundary-pushing work that, depending on the listener, could be considered either powerfully engrossing or deeply alienating".

On the contrary, it's to say that such pieces make the case for music writing being considered an art form in its own right. Personally, at least, I don't feel cheated at the album having been oversold, just as I wasn't overly upset to discover that some (or indeed many) of the records described so enthusiastically and engagingly in books such as Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up And Start Again and Harry Sword's Monolithic Undertow fail to live up to their billing. Garland's review and Reynolds and Sword's books are all testament to the capacity that music has to stir the intellect and the emotions - and the power that the written word can have, in the right hands.