That Aningan review sure is awful.
Reviewing huge amounts of music, and not having enought time to get to know a release before reviewing sounds detrimental, especially in case of ambient/dronish stuff. Small, subtle things in the structure of the album can make a huge difference and at least I tend to miss a lot of those details on the first listen. Then again, it's difficult to say when you've listened to something enough to feel that your opinion is a well founded one...
I'd personally like to see more critical reviews of ambient/experimental electronic/etc. since, thanks to modern technology, there's dozens of albums released every week if we're counting all the netlabels/web releases as well. Not every piece of music is a good one and it might benefit the artist as well to know why some listeners don't enjoy their release. Very often all you (or, at least I) see is positive reviews or reviews that are really politely trying to evade saying anything actually critical.
Saying that a particular album is, for example, "nothing new under the sun" is of course all too easy but in some cases there's actual grounds for demanding something novel. That doesn't have to mean reinventing the whole genre but there's just so much ambient that sounds unambitious, and plain nice at best, and it feels there's nothing more to it. If this is what a reviewer feels like after giving the album enough time, I think that's what she should write, then. (This is not meant as a comment on this particular FDW case but just picking up from here...)
Best,
Kaaris
