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Arista album reviews


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Ouch! "If Eric Carmen played baseball, he'd be Lou Brock. The guy sure can steal." 

It was a cute and clever line in the review of Eric's 1975 Arista album. However, the writer was a copycat himself, driving home the "derivative" tag in almost every line. That narrative was already old at the time, and it seemed to hang around Eric (and the 'berries) like a noose.

Fair? Or unfair? Well, I guess it depends on your perspective. You could hang the "derivative" label on pretty much everyone in pop music, including our beloved Beatles.

And what's with the line about a nose job? 

I hated writers like this, who literally love an album but can't come out and say it. Yes, the EC 1975 Arista review is actually a rave, for the most part. You just have to keep reading between the criticisms and insults to find the "thumb's up." If I were the guy's editor, I'd have sent it back to him and said, "Stop trying to straddle the line. You like all the songs but one, you like the album, you like the guy. Why spend so much space trying to trash him? Rewrite." 

I'm afraid to read the other reviews! Lol

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2 hours ago, Kirk said:

Never heard of this rag before today. Thanks for flushing out those reviews. Some would be better off flushed, now that I think about it;)

Their focus was more on British rock and punk/new wave, so I suppose they may have held an innate bias against pure pop. It had pretty much ceased publication by the time I started avidly reading the rock press, but I did find the various editions of their record guide books indispensable to my punk edumacation. I have a few print back issues of the mag but the entire run is digitized at trouserpress dot com. 

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