Lost in the Amazon

Oh man.

I really don't know why I read customer reviews on Amazon.com. Nothing ever comes of it but pure frustration.

Admittedly, I myself have one review written on the site, but it was a review that I previously published on this very blog, and I really only put it on Amazon because I really like Kanda's album and think people should listen to it, and in response to the idiot who wrote the first review of it on the site. Comparing a band that you think sounds like The Postal Service to The Postal Service is one thing, but going one step further to accuse them of ripping off the Postal Service, when Kanda has been around doing their thing since before Jimmy Tamborello and Benjamin Gibbard ever started working together just goes to show that you're writing reviews of albums by bands that you haven't bothered to research very much. If you don't know a whole lot about something, why bother to write about it?

But, I digress.

Amazon customer reviews are usually so useless and irritating that they certainly won't help you make any decisions about what to buy and what not to buy. That's what happens when you give every person sitting at a computer desk in a small dark room with headphones wrapped around their heads and an overflowing ashtray resting next to the mouse the power to voice their "expert" opinions to the world. These people seem to think that listening to lots of records gives them the status of music connoisseur, and therefore they should share their opinions (I'm getting the strange sensation of attacking myself as a blog writer as I make that previous statement. I suppose there's a justifiable difference to be found somewhere, but I don't feel like thinking about it.)

Looking through Amazon for a few new albums, however, I stumbled upon one reviewer who is by far the strangest I have read. He has written 153 reviews as of this writing, and while I didn't read all of them, I read the first few pages of them. Of those that I read, it seems like his criteria for determining whether an album is any good or not is how it measures up to the new Deep Purple album, "Rapture of the Deep." Pretty much every review fell into one of two categories: 1) Reviews of classic albums that no one has any business reviewing anymore (like Beatles and Elvis Presley albums), or 2) reviews of new albums by new artists that may or may not be as good as Deep Purple.

It's hysterical! Check it out.