Boards
8
A made a possibly unfair accusation on another thread that too many reviews seem to assign 8s as a score. I checked out the last 20 reviews on DiS, and of these:
There are 8 scores of 8
There are 9 scores of 7
There is one each of 6, 5 and 4
The average is about 7.1. I don't know about you, but for me, an 8 is a very strong album with wide appeal and with barely a weak track.
If there are no weak tracks and it is a genre standout (or better still, defines a new genre or a significant step forward, it's a 9).
If it's a landmark album (whatever that is, I could see a 10 being awarded). In honesty, I wonder if you could only ever retrospectively award a 10 once the album could be seen in the context of the wider musical scene.
Apologies if this has been done before, but I wondered what other DiSers felt about not just '8', but about thresholds for other scores. I know a lot of people will just feel scores are irrelevant, and the other thread on which I made my accusation queried the very point of reviews.
Looking at what I bought last year (of which say 75% was pre-2011 releases), I'd say probably five or six albums were 8s out of 30 or so purchases (and I'm a cautious buyer, informed by reviews without the 'suck it and see' mentality).
Over to you...