Sid's Album Reviews
About
Hello, and welcome to Sid's Album Reviews!
This website originally started as a Google Site in 2024, but has since been revamped into this Wix site.
I started writing album reviews in September of 2023 as an outlet to express my opinions regarding music without having to go through the hassle of actually convincing people to listen to me ramble. My style has continued to improve since then, but my old album reviews remain up for transparency. The first review I ever wrote was for the 1984 album Tom Petersson and Another Language.
All of the pieces that have been carried over from the old website do not have official publishing dates because I neglected to write them down, but all subsequent posts will.
My writing has also expanded beyond writing album reviews to include essays and short opinion-based pieces, all regarding classic rock. These can also be found on the website.
I do not have a consistent update schedule for this website, but I try to write one review per month with longer pieces in between.
Song of the week: It's All Over Now Baby Blue - Link Wray
I made this for a presentation about LSD in my sophomore year of high school
How this started
A combination of things convinced me to try my hand at music journalism: watching Almost Famous one too many times, finding out my freshman year math teacher was a published music journalist, and having unfettered access to 70s Rolling Stone magazine articles the first two years of high school.
Of course, you can't really do music journalism without studying the work of those that came before you, and through that you tend to gain influences. My major influences are as follows:
Cameron Crowe
Ben Fong-Torres
Robert Christgau
Lester Bangs
Frank Zappa (out of spite)
Tom Wolfe (vaguely)
A note on sources
Having a life-long interest in classic rock means I've absorbed a lot of information about various bands, events and incidents without being able to pinpoint one specific source for such information.
Books, documentaries, interviews (both print and recorded), radio broadcasts, old articles from Rolling Stone, Creem magazine, Hit Parader (etc.), and word-of-mouth have all operated as basic sources of information.
Discogs is the primary source I use for album reviews, such as checking personnel listings, record labels, and release dates. Information written in other pieces are double checked before being posted, and sources are linked when applicable.
If a photograph is not credited, it means I could not find a source for who the photographer was. I try to avoid using uncredited photos as much as possible.