A technique used by wine people to describe the taste of a wine is to relate that taste to other, non-wine, tastes that can be related to. I was at a tasting once and was asked to describe what I tasted with a particular white wine. My reply, based on what I could taste in my mouth, was, "A hint of Stilton cheese". Some people giggled at that, but the host said that the mould used to give that grape the "noble rot" (botrytis, I believe) was similar to that used in cheesemaking. Other wines were related to strawberries, melon, etc. This technique gets some snide remarks as being pretentious but, actually, it's one way of giving an idea of the wine.

A similar way of describing music would be to rely on people's ability to relate an unknown sound to one that is known. But if I said, "It sounds like Billy Pigg mixed with Jeff Beck", you would have to know Billy and Jeff to make sense of that...