Who writes these allmusic.com reviews?! Honestly!

Probably an oversight, curating nightmare but I could imagine a ‘forum comments’ link on every album page…

Have you thought of tapping into Gramophone’s data

It goes back 50 years or more I think. I have a subscription but it costs more than Roon !!

Maybe you could negotiate

Mike

He’s well known for his poor reviews - really little more than trolling.
Shame you can’t filter out particular reviewers! I certainly don’t want to turn off reviews - just ensure that we have some degree of objectivity.

As and when Roon can offer multiple reviews then we the Roon community can collectively determine which reviews we prefer by upvoting and downvoting them.

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Reading James Leonard’s reviews, one is reminded all over again how great, how dramatic and heroic, how profound are the albums in one’s music library. Unfortunately, one is also reminded all over again that the English language is susceptible to surprising abuses.

Phrases that should be clear and substantive are overwrought and empty. Clauses that should be short and concise are turgid and gooey. Descriptions that should be informative and illuminating are mucilaginous and slimy.

Some readers may admire Leonard’s floridity, his profusion of adjectives, his elevated ideals. But one can understand why other readers might prefer other writers, finding his constructions awkward, his rhetorical formulas strange and strangely repeated, and his metaphors cloying. In any case, no one could fail to respond to his propensity for repeating one idea in different words, his impulse to say the same thing over and over again, his inane redundancy.

Some might argue that his brash, singular perspective offers fresh insights into the artists and works he discusses, but such an argument could not be based on his reviews.

His preferred fonts are lovely but shallow and lacking in depth.

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I think being exposed to James Leonard is a good exercise for learning to live in a free society. Who can’t handle unpleasant prose?! Honestly!

I have no problem with Leonard’s duff reviews. They make me laugh in the same way that Trump’s statement that he is “a very stable genius” made me laugh. You just can’t take self-important tosh like that seriously. Getting angry about it though is pointless.

OTOH, Mr. Leonard does not have access to the nuclear codes, so he’s much less dangerous…