"Maxim" Reviews Black Crowes Album Without Listening to it

The Black Crowes are pretty upset with "Maxim" magazine--reportedly one of its writers reviewed their new album Warpaint without actually listening to it first.

[The review seen below].

Apparently the tepid two and half stars, out of five, rating given to the album by reviewer David Peisner, in the published March issue of the mag, was based on an "educated guess."

Unbelievable!

The writer couldn't have heard more than one song off the album, the label says. Why? Because, reportedly, no advance copies were made available.

When management for the Crowes contacted the magazine, an editor, allegedly, replied via email, saying:

"Of course, we always prefer to [sic] hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don't want to ignore that aren't available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It's either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former."

Warpaint, the band's first album in seven years, is set for release March 4.

Portions of this blog entry courtesy of Gawker and AP.

Update: Maxim has issued an apology for the, um, incident: "It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

I wonder what is going to happen to that writer.