It really depends on the review I'm reading. As a music fanatic, I'm predisposed to give nearly everything at LEAST the benefit of the doubt: as one of my musical heroes, Frank Zappa, said: "A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open." And that's the biggest problem I have with most professional reviewers: their minds are NOT open. They review bands, albums, and artists because they have to, and they don't seem to want to open themselves to the emotions that music is capable of stirring within people: it is not, after all, called the "universal language" for nothing.
It also doesn't help matters that my particular tastes in music tend to run a little askew. I do tend to go out of my way to look for musical reviews that are deemed to be "negative," for the same reason that Dincrest noted in his (her?) post: can it really be THAT bad? I find myself pleasantly surprised a lot of the time that, no, it's NOT really that bad, it's just that there's an agenda behind it: either they don't give a rat's ass about the game they're reviewing, or it's a game that's received a lot of hype that they just don't want to give a decent shot, or it's a decent enough game that they were hoping was going to be super badass, or whatever. I see the same kind of thing with regards to reviews that have nothing to do with video games whatsoever.
And every so often, there comes a reviewer who really does give a damn about the thing that they're reviewing: the music. I've been checking out the soundtracks section for this site for at least thirteen years now, and it's the biggest thing that has kept me coming back to RPGFan. The soundtrack reviewers have been very passionate about reviewing THE MUSIC, and not the bloody game it comes from, and I would not have found so much killer stuff if they had been predisposed to slag off the music based on whether or not they thought the game it came from was shit or not. Here, if I read a review that tells me something is shit, there are some bloody good reasons why they think it's shit, and there are also plenty of reasons given why I should maybe check it out for myself to see if I agree or disagree. I tend to agree a fair bit of the time, but you know, I REALLY like being given the option to figure out for myself why an album sucks based on somebody else's opinion, or why they think it absolutely rules when I can't find a bloody thing to like about it, and they give me enough information to maybe change my mind about it, along with the latitude to allow me to have my own opinion.
Open minds. What a beautiful thing.
