I found a Rate Your Music user who has this very weird voting criteria, which though trying to VERY objective, ends up more like robotic, in my opinion.
Here it is :
Catchiness, aesthetic appeal
Lyrics, topical focus and originality
Vocal expressiveness
Musical originality, creativity
Songwriting, movements, layering
Variation over the album
Structure, pacing and strength over the album
How does it compare to the canon?
Cover art
Personal bias
Each category gets a 1 to 5 rating.
I think some of those categories are really bizarre. Will you dock off a point from your favourite album just because it has a bad cover art? And how do you judge a cover art anyway? You end up almost analyzing pictures, rather than the music. And what about the "How does it compare to the canon?" ? Does it matter how the album stands among the band's previous work? But the voting system is terrible anyway, I'm not even going to get furtherer into analyzing it. (Vocal expressiveness - poor Miles Davis)
But what are the most important things to keep track of, when
evaluating objectively an album, in everybody's opinion? Sure, there is the influence, the production, the song-writing, the lyrics, the accessibility and of course, its impact upon the listener and whether he likes it or not. But do other things matter? Like say... its structure. Can you knock off some points from an album if the songs' orders are not the one you consider it to be right? And what if, the album was supposed to be something different? Like in The Beach Boys story. Everybody was expecting SMiLE, but then 'Smiley Smile' came out. Can you knock the latter for not being the album you expected? After all, you can say that it could've been better if released that way. Just as you can say that a song would've been better if a different version of it would've been used. But what about others?
Hope any of these makes any sense whatsoever.