Bigger on the Inside

It has been a long time since I wrote a review for Pop Matters. Due to various personal reasons, much the same reasons that this site has been somewhat dormant, I have not been able to. However, I contacted my editor the other day to ask her if she would be interested in me coming in from the cold. She said yes. Not only that, but I have my first assignment. It is the new Nine Inch Nails album “Ghosts I-IV”.

You’ll have to wait until the review is published to find out what I thought of it, but the process of writing the review has been interesting. I thought that it would be dead easy, like falling off a bike or some other cliché. It seems not. I really had to get my head right back in the writing zone. The writing zone is a really weird state of mind where you say things about things that you would not say in real life. A bit like the dialogue in a Joss Whedon script; it is at all not the way people speak. at least no one I know.

As a result the review has taken me longer than I thought. I started writing of these contrived sentences that contain too many descriptive words. They shall have to go. This review is going to take some hacking to get to the nugget that is at it’s centre.

I also, stupidly, forgot about all of the research that I used to do. That information does not come from nowhere. It has to be crammed into my brain before the writing part can configure it into something resembling english. So note to self and anyone where cares to listen. When writing an album review:

1. Research before you sit down to write (this includes listening to the record in question)
2. Get rid of distractions
3. Don’t get carried away with your own genius because other people will have to read and make sense of your magnum opus.

The research that I did do lead me to the new album by Saul Williams which if you don’t have, go get it. For $5 you get a cracking record. Worth every currency converted euro cent.