MetalBear’s Album & Gig Rating System

What factors are taken into account when reviewing a metal album? And what about when reviewing concerts? Both excellent questions to which MetalBear shall shed some light over the following lines to ensure a more seamless scene setup prior to the first, and much expected (at least I like to tell myself so) “Top 2023 Albums” post. Beers ready and let’s deep-dive into it.

Album Rating System

A 5 point grading scale will be used with the following rating breakdown:

• 5.0 – The Eternal Masterpiece (Album of the Century contestant type of material)
• 4.5 – The Instant Classic (Album of the Decade contender stuff)
• 4.0 – The Epic One (Album of the Year challenger)
• 3.5 – The Next Level (racing for the Top 10 in the respective release year)
• 3.0 – The Brave Attempt (has a few epic tracks you’d come back to regularly)
• 2.5 – The OK Stuff (a largely forgettable experience with 2 to max 3 solid songs)
• 2.0 – The Serious Letdown (boredom galore with maybe 1 standout track)
• 1.5 – The Painful Listen (when 3 songs in and you wonder if it can get any worse)
• 1.0 – The Absolute Disaster
• 0.5 – The Insult to Metal

To arrive at any of the above ratings, there are a number of components MetalBear would look at. From the production quality of a given album through the band’s career stage to the level of uniqueness of the record. Below a more elaborative overview of the those along with additional factors considered:

• Production Quality: while my sound engineering knowledge is very, very modest, and hence this category won’t be analyzed through an expert’s lenses, there are albums out there whose flawed production is instantly recognizable even by the regular fan ear (given the significant technical advancements over the past two decades in this space, this is rather unacceptable, especially for experienced acts).
• Band’s Experience: what this refers to is how experienced the band, and most precisely the majority of its members, is/are at the time of the album’s recording. Rating the debut album of a brand new metal act whose members have no prior album release history I consider to require a different rating approach compared to metal veterans with tens of albums behind their backs. The clarification about the members is an important piece as it is a quite frequent case to have a debut album by a band that is actually made up of highly experienced metal musicians (examples are likely in the thousands, but for the sake of it – think The Halo Effect).
• Album-on-Album Growth: one thing MetalBear is genuinely interested in is the sound growth trajectory of a particular band when looking at their latest record and comparing it to their previous release(s). Being able to consistently release strong albums in a vein clearly demonstrating consecutive album-on-album improvement is seriously challenging and should be rewarded accordingly. Of course, there are albums in a band’s discography that are extremely difficult to build upon and the subsequent release will inevitably be perceived as a somewhat of a step back (examples again in the thousands, I’ll go here for an all-time favorite band of mine – Nevermore with their “Dead Heart in a Dead World” which is a perfect example of “The Eternal Masterpiece” – but we will definitely cover this album as part of “The Archive Materials” series at some point). Nevertheless, the ability to remain consistent throughout a band’s career and keep bringing strong records to life, even following an Eternal Masterpiece, is a major testament to a band’s genuine commitment to their fans.
• Originality/Uniqueness: here we are looking at the level of uniqueness the band has settled for with their latest release. There is a good number of bands out there bringing out albums with a higher frequency than Bears going into hibernation mode, which per se isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, when a band has released 3 albums in 4 years and I can’t tell which song is part of which album as they all sound nearly identical, then I consider this to not be a good trend (this also links to the previous AoA Growth point). More of the same can be a formula but only to a certain point – at one stage it leads to mere sound generic-ness and even if the band has carved out an unique sound by their own right, they are giving up on originality in favor of release regularity. Bear’s take: it is better to release 1 “Eternal Masterpiece” / “Instant Classic” album in 5-6 years than 3 “OK Stuff” / “Brave Attempt” albums in the span of 3-4 years.

Gig Rating System

In the case of concert reviews, I’ll go again for a 5 point grading scale taking the following shape:

• 5.0 – Beyond-This-World Epic (think Savatage at Wacken 2015 or Manowar at Kavarna Rock Fest 2008)
• 4.5 – Phenomenality Defined
• 4.0 – Spectacle Long to be Remembered
• 3.5 – Brutally Solid
• 3.0 – A Dedicated Effort
• 2.5 – Its OK as a background while drinking my Beer (preferably towards the back)
• 2.0 – Couldn’t Care Less but gonna stay a while longer for the sake of Beer
• 1.5 – Totally Unlistenable
• 1.0 – They Gotta be like REALLY Wasted aka WTF Is Going On Here?
• 0.5 – Let’s Get the Hell out of Here IMMEDIATELY

As with the album review system, the rating of a given concert is made up of a myriad of factors, such as sound quality, the show’s spectacularity and chosen setlist, for example. Let’s take another closer look into what components make up the Bear’s gig rating system:

• Sound Quality: this is where the wizardry of sound engineers gets to shine the brightest as the difference between an impeccable live sound and a mediocre, or at times purely terrible, one can get easily evident in the span of just less than 60 minutes. I believe this is something all of us metalheads have witnessed at one point or another throughout our concert attendance journeys, particularly during festivals where one can headbang his brains out to a headliner whose sound quality is mind-blowingly crisp, and an hour later be totally gutted by the sound of another headliner that day performing on the second main stage. Obviously, what needs to be taken into account here is that sometimes the sound quality can be beyond the band’s/its tech crew’s control due to unforeseeable circumstances.
• Show Spectacularity: while stage setup including decors, multiple stage levels, roaming platforms, lightning and any additional stuff that can be added (from tanks to massive Harleys, you get my point) undoubtedly contribute to the overall performance, a gig can score extremely high even with a very simple stage setup. Because what I’d count in to this category is the band’s stage energy and dynamics, and how truly invested they are in delivering a fantastic concert.
• Setlist: if the previous two factors can be perceived as fairly objective (if the sound is poor, chances are the vast majority of metalheads have realized it pretty quickly – this can also be dependent on the level of booze consumed, of course), this one is the most subjective one. What might be a dream setlist to some, can be a very average one to others. With this in mind, the “Setlist” factor has the least weight in the gig ranking system but is still considered (if a band decides, for whatever curious reason, to play one of their least popular albums in its entirety – hell, Bear is gonna rate that poorly).
• Altered Live Delivery: MetalBear has no idea what the technically correct term for this is (and hence this rather weird sounding one picked) but essentially what this refers to is when a band decides to make a quite sensible tweak to a given song when performed live. I’ve experienced this working in truly amazing ways – usually the song is prolonged with the addition of an extra instrumental passage (can be in the opening, middle or closing section of the track). But it can also be simply in the vocal department with the frontman performing certain parts of the song quite differently to the album version but in an equally captivating, if not even superior at times, manner. To share an example from Bear’s experience – one of my absolute all-time favorite Dream Theater songs is the rather unpopular (in terms of live performance in the band’s setlist catalog) “Space Dye Vest” and when they included it for the first time in their setlist (which was about 10 years ago and about two decades after the song’s release), the version they played live was instrumentally upgraded in an absolutely magnificent way.

I hope the above lines provide sufficient clarification into the ways MetalBears rate albums and concerts. Thanks again for taking the time, grab a Beer now and blast some good ol’ Nevermore (or whatever you feel like). Beers!