Interesting album reviewer on Rate Your Music: keeponrockin404

I should get round to "What About Discord?" in the next day or two. Sadly.

I saw this somewhere the other day; my apologies to whoever mentioned it as I can't find that original source now. Anyway, the Rate Your Music website is a place where people can post reviews of music, surprisingly enough. A user by the name of keeponrockin404 has been compiling quite a large collection under the heading Brony music time, I'm going to do it, you can't stop me. The website doesn't make it that easy to navigate, but it's doable.

As you'll quickly find if you read through some of that list, they're very clear about what they do and don't like, and it's fair to say not everyone's going to like it. On the one hoof, PinkiePieSwear's oldies collection PPS 2011 gets a solid 7.75 (all ratings are out of ten) and SoGreatAndPowerful's "phenomenal" The Standard Model does even better with 9.75. They're a fan of much Vylet Pony, too, so this certainly isn't someone just out to laugh at fandom music.

On the other hoof, Aviators' admittedly age-showing The Adventure is absolutely hammered: "an abject failure of an album", with "Never Back Down" being described as "FUCKING ABYSMAL" (oh yeah, keeponrockin404 swears quite a bit) and songs like the classic-to-many "Friendship" and "One Last Letter" also going into the hate column. The album as a whole scores... one. 1/10. Fair to say the reviewer doesn't like it, and they let us know they don't like it.

It goes on like this, and though keeponrockin404 to their credit explains the reasons for their ratings they're not in danger of being called a boring conformist any time soon. "Discord" (Tombstone version) also languishes at 1/10, d.notive scores terribly for stuff like "Vicious Lies", 4everfreebrony tends to do averagely at best, though Foozogz does okay and a musician I'll admit I'd never heard of named Cats Millionaire is frankly adored.

Despite the title of the review collection, keeponrockin404 does cover a few official MLP albums. They're quite open about the fact that they prefer the early seasons' songs, to the extent of being really quite harsh on S4's music – a pretty unusual viewpoint, in my experience. This isn't really the heart of the reviews, though, as the pieces about fandom albums are considerably more fun to read, even if (as happened a few times) you totally disagree.

It's obviously a really terrible idea to treat any one reviewer as the Voice of Truth when it comes to assessing brony music, just as it is with ponyfic. But this reviewer can write an entertaining piece* and so the reviews seem worth at least taking a gander at. It's nice to see some attention being paid to a range of music, anyway. Of course there's a debate to be had about what actually qualifies something as "brony music", but that's for another day...
* Though their weird approach to capitalisation, which seems to be deliberate, is grating