Welcome!

Welcome to 5 Skull Reviews. 

My name is Matt and I've been doing music reviews on my personal Facebook page for a couple months now, and my friends seem to dig it. SO I've decided to start this blog to let the world know how I see music. Let's get started by laying down the rules.

I'm going to focus my energy on new music. I'm going to shoot for releases that are less than six months old. I may promote my own music at any time, I play drums in three bands currently. Otherwise any content that I review or share will be the copyright of their respective owners. I suggest that any readers or listeners out there support their musicians by purchasing music that they enjoy.

I will absolutely take suggestions or submissions. You can send submissions to HageEntertainment@gmail.com at any time. I will get to them on a first come, first served basis.

PLEASE if you submit something, include a link to either a YouTube video or a Bandcamp page. I do not use SoundCloud or Spotify and I don't want to buy a whole bunch of silly apps. If it doesn't have an easy way to see or hear it from my phone, I'm probably going to skip it and that sucks.

How the rating system works:

I will write an article about each piece of music. These articles may be short, in the form of a couple hundred words, or possibly very long depending on what the music compels me to write. I am a college graduate and I do have experience in writing music reviews and papers. I am not afraid to be verbose. I am also not afraid to tell it like it is. I am not a corporate slave, I am not doing this for money or recognition. I will not sit here and tell you that a steaming pile of hot garbage is the new greatest record. I also do tend to be a bit more forgiving to different styles of music.

After each article, I will boil it down for you TL;DR folks and give a skull rating. These are on a scale of 0 to 5 skulls, hence the name of the blog. There will be no half skulls awarded. Skulls can be added for originality, groove, creative lyrics, great recording quality, etc. Skulls can be taken away for poor instrumentation, poor composition, poor or boring lyrics, or any other reason I damn well please because this is my blog.

If you don't agree with my ratings, you can feel free to speak up in the comments but please be civil and respect the opinions of other commenters while explaining your position. I may publish amendments to my ratings if I so choose. Sometimes a composition grows on me.

The bottom line

Rock and metal needs reviews that aren't huge sites with corporate sponsors. I understand how those sites work, and it's pretty slimy. The biggest names in the genre pay to have their stupid opinion featured all over the internet while the unsung heroes of the genre continue on forgotten.

I don't care if a band is on a huge label, or if they're in the garage. Great music is simply great music. Let's enjoy!