handsomematt

I've been criticised on these boards before for liking Muse and I can never work out why. All of their albums have been uniformly brilliant and live they are the best in the world. I simply *cannot* wait to get my hands on this album, it's going to be amazing. Just like all of their other albums have been.

Let's target everyone, they said, not just the people who want to be challenged, to learn, to discover, to lose themselves. This resulted in homogenisation of music journalism, and alienated those that cared, that wanted more. You're right, people aren't allowed to say what they think about music anymore, because the herd, as you call it, the supposed majority, will shout them down and tell them to fuck off. For an example of this, go to the DiS forums.

Can you expand on that last statement? I think you may have a point.

I think a lot of people wonder what gives a person the right to be a critic. Aside from the fact that people generally want someone with a modicum of writing talent (and, of course, a passion in the medium - in this case music), what qualifies someone to be a music critic? Louis, what makes you different from the vast amount of other people who have a passion for music and can write well? Why should we believe what you say about a record? Why become a music critic? Is it because you have a passion for talking about music, writing about it? Or because you were unable to make it as a musician and had to settled for second best, as it were (as Kenneth Tynan, a critic himself, once wrote, "a critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car")? These are, of course, rhetorical questions, but valid nonetheless.

and I've still got it and still listen to it. However, Return to the Last Chance Saloon is their best, by a country mile.

Why don't you have the courage of your convictions and stand by your original review? I hope that you afford the same luxury to every album review you've ever done, just in case you've made a mistake, or you find that you're getting too much stick for giving a bad review when everyone else says it was a good album. Yeah you can change your mind, I really have no problem with that at all, but as I stated before, I fully expect you to now go back and re-review everything else. Are most people slagging Muse off now? Well, go back and give Origin of Symmetry 3/10 instead of the 10 you originally gave it. You utter fucking cowards.

I bought it without having heard anything from it but having read a few not very positive reviews about it. I thought that the people who wrote these reviews were sure to be sadly mistaken; how could a Radiohead album ever be rubbish? I listened to it. I loathed it. Still do. I dust it off every now and again, just to see if maybe my tastes have changed a little and allowed me to like it. Maybe my tastes have changed since this album was released, but I still hate Kid A, I think it's not just a bad Radiohead record, but a bad record by any standards. Utter rubbish, in my opinion.

This was, and is, one of my favourite ever albums. In my opinion, "Alive" hasn't been diminished because of copyists trying and failing to replicate its genius. Every time I listen to it, I always think "My God this is a great song". I'm pretty certain it would be on my desert island compilation CD. I don't think it's lost anything over time.