Reviewing new music can be a bit of a task, especially if you have a whole pile of promos to sort through and you just don't give much of a rat's ass about most of them. But let's say there's a release that your publication has deemed relatively important, and by relatively important I mean SO important that a review MUST be included in the next issue, despite the fact that you haven't listened to it yet.
Luckily, if you work at Maxim, that doesn't even matter! The Black Crowes recently released a statement bashing the magazine for negatively reviewing their latest album, Warpaint, even though the writer had only heard the record's single, "Goodbye, Daughters of the Revolution." An e-mail conversation between madder'n'hell Crowes manager Pete Angelus and the Pulitzer-bound publication yielded the following explanation from Maxim's music editor:
Of course, we always prefer to (sic) hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don’t want to ignore that aren’t available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It’s either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former.
Seriously, they're that good. I might try my hand at this "educated guess" school of reporting. From now on, I'm not even going to attend the concerts I review. Instead, I will write an elaborate account of the stage-diving accident that left one concertgoer with a beer bottle permanently fused to the back of his head, as well as the legendary and inexplicable appearance of Tom Jones during the encore. Doesn't matter what show I'm talking about or if the concert ever happened; our readers have to be kept in the know. Even if we don't know. Right.
Here's the Maxim "review" in full:
The Black Crowes • Warpaint • Silver Arrow
The Black Crowes already sounded like grizzled classic rockers on their 1990 debut. While it certainly was a neat trick for a bunch of twenty-somethings to pull off, it hasn't left Chris Robinson and the gang much room for growth. Now that they're legitimately grizzled, they sound pretty much like they always have: boozy, competent, and in slavish debt to the Stones, the Allmans, and the Faces. --D.P.
