I'm usually happy to chug along listening to whatever album catches my attention. Sometimes though, when the album isn't particularly spectacular, I take pause and wonder if anyone on earth has put as much effort as me into the music in question. There's the worry of time being wasted, for one; I start wondering if there are other things to do besides yielding three-fourths of an hour to something I don't feel a strong affinity towards. Of course, one can't know beforehand if something is going to be above average, because no matter how much background reading you do, there's no accounting for emotional reaction. It leaves me mildly suspicious of people who claim to be consistently discovering great albums: is it just that they have different standards? Or is there some trick to sussing out mediocrity that I've yet to discover?

My suspicion is that the "fault" lies with my ol' principle of listening to albums straight through, even when there are empirical signs suggesting it isn't a wise course. I can imagine that it's significantly simpler to get the feeling for mediocrity through a random sampling - while you still "waste" time listening to the tracks, at least you spread your bets out. The downside is that you leave to chance the possibility that there's some great (or even just good) that you miss out on. Then again, it leaves more time to focus on things that reward close attention. That seems like as laudable an end as any, but there is also a joy in really understanding an artist through their albums. There are quite a few albums that I recall fondly because they teach me something about the person behind them. When I perceive that they have similar traits to me, that creates a stronger emotional connection to the music. Is this empathetic connection "better" than that created purely through the music? Of course not, but it's not apparent to me that the converse is true either.

Sigh, so that means there's no definitive answer, as I suspected: it's all a question of choosing the trade-off one is comfortable with. Another spin of Set the Twilight Reeling, then? (I feel bad calling it mediocre, but I can definitely say it's disappointing. And I've got statistics, I've got facts to prove that basically no one has heard the darn thing.)