Blender's Scores

  • Music
For 1,854 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 39% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 58% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Together Through Life
Lowest review score: 10 Folker
Score distribution:
1854 music reviews
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Curt Kirkwood has written a gorgeous album that channels his brother's world-weary relief. [Aug 2007, p.116]
    • Blender
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    If America was a self-respecting nation, there'd be a street named after him in every city. Alas, if they're based on this record, we'll find ourselves striding Vague Call to Goodness Street.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    An elegant soundtrack, but not much of an album. [Feb/Mar 2002, p.116]
    • Blender
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wailing, distorted guitars and jumpy backbeats deliver messages of escape, refuge and, ultimately, sweet hope. [May 2003, p.124]
    • Blender
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Overall, this is the grimiest and grimmest of the band's Bob Rock productions. [#17, p.145]
    • Blender
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    X
    The search for the perfect stand-alone song leaves a ragbag of unrelated ideas. [May 2008, p.77]
    • Blender
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It’s strange and sometimes fascinating to hear R.E.M.’s oldest songs played so differently, though vintage tracks are rare in a set concentrating on 2004’s mostly inert "Around the Sun."
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Like Morcheeba at their worst. [#10, p.124]
    • Blender
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Girls isn't as pop-friendly as 1998's From The Choirgirl Hotel, but Amos's take on Depeche Mode's starkly beautiful "Enjoy The Silence" is irresistible. [Aug/Sep 2001, p.120]
    • Blender
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Still recovering from 2004’s tepid Tical 0: The Prequel, Meth hints at the bluster and wit that made him an instant star nearly 15 years ago.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's fun to hear here negotiate the contours of Top 40 pop for the first time since "Like A Prayer," without any European house music hose-head gumming up the pleasure and catharsis with mediative schmaltz. [May 2008, p.73]
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bedingfield’s second U.S. release sticks mostly to love odes and peppy self-help bromides, which occasionally veer close to Colbie Caillat’s lake of goop. It would be irksome if not for the uniformly strong pop and R&B songcraft.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    There’s nothing like a concept album for faking musical maturity.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Usher has called Here I Stand his “grown and sexy” album, and he’s half right. Apart from a couple of A­up-tempo tracks by Danjahandz (“Appetite”) and Scandinavians-of-the-moment Stargate (“What’s a Man to Do”), the production is cocktail-lounge crunk, full of splashy cymbals, jazzy electric guitar and tinkly pianos.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Much of Voyage to India is a soporific swath of happy-hour wallpaper. [#11, p.127]
    • Blender
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beans's themes may be everyday, but thankfully his wit isn't. [Nov 2004, p.129]
    • Blender
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The tearjerkers flow free on their sixth studio album. [Jan/Feb 2007, p.88]
    • Blender
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    If Borrell's originality ever equals his confidence, Razorlight might be as good as he thinks they are. [Nov 2004, p.141]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A folk-rock anti-Midas, he reduces everything he touches to a molten core of sadness. [Dec 2005, p.151]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    9
    Even when he tips the sensitivity scales too much... Rice’s innate, anti-lite-FM intensity saves him.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Travis may have grown serious, but at least it hasn't gone to their heads. [Nov 2003, p.122]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Though Loeb can weave a pleasant, elaborate melody, her originality wavers. [Apr/May 2002, p.115]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Loewenstein manages a decent impersonation of, well, Sebadoh, undercutting his bright melodies and morose shrugs with caustic bass lines. [#8, p.118]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anything involving a string section is disastrous, but a couple of choruses are suitable for both raucous fist-pumping and rampant pouting.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A new, liberating vulnerability marks the more reflective songs. [May 2006, p.110]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Chinese Democracy's non-existence is so well-known and ingrained, the source of so many jokes, that its actual existence can only be a letdown. That is until you hear it. Then, somewhat astonishingly, 5,475 days, at least $13 million, fourteen studios, twenty or so musicians (including five guitarists and a harpist) seems just about right.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Without a target for their ire, TBS opt for sheer emo relentlessness. [May 2006, p.111]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    When he’s in command, Barzelay seldom feels the need to be so subtle. But don’t sweat the details and many of the tracks will fall into place eventually.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    JSBX still crackle like firecrackers soaked in kerosene. [Jun/Jul 2002, p.114]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Too bad, then, the album drifts off into the ambient sighs and murmurs of their recent movie-soundtrack work, minus the diverting visuals.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A set of piano-based chamber rock so tense and acidic they need to let off steam every two or three songs. [Apr 2005, p.124]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    [OK Go's] sophomore album rocks most amiably when wordy frontman Damian Kulash loosens up. [Sep 2005, p.135]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Split[s] the difference between guaranteed hook appeal and a decent simulation of emotional truth. [Oct 2004, p.129]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    E=MC2 is Carey's most-fun album, and her best.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Those in search of a gloriously moronic keg-party soundtrack will wet themselves with pleasure. [Apr/May 2002, p.112]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The music is sexy in the dirtiest possible way, which makes up for the band's stoopid posing. [May 2003, p.114]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Here the pleas and tirades strive heavy-handedly, little aided by the Blokes' equally unsubtle barroom marches. [Apr/May 2002, p.112]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    He took three years to produce this follow-up, and the labor shows, for good and ill. [August 2007, p.117]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trying to express her actual feelings, instead of inhabiting a fantasy, she leaves us looking for an authenticity and vulnerability that isn’t in her skill set.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's done two good things for the Stills: sharpened their songwriting and returned them after a dull Album No. 2. to the crystalline guitar minimalism of their debut. [Sep 2008, p.84]
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These are big songs, and Moore's voice fills them out spectacularly, without turning the enterprise into a retro stunt. [Nov 2003, p.117]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Best enjoyed in the privacy of home. [Apr 2008, p.76]
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Less scary but more melodic, Korn guns for hits, not street cred. [Mar 2006, p.113]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    If she's trying to skewer empty luxuries, her delivery is too disengaged to register as ironic or feisty. [Apr 2009, p.63]
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    There's a little too much goop here. [Mar 2006, p.113]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Their tightest, bounciest album. [#11, p.125]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    They've given up on ugliness for its own sake, trading it in for prettiness, which allows McCracken to rest his throat. [Oct 2004, p.128]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ultimately, the anthems are as generic as they are hooky. [May 2003, p.123]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Williams' rapping is thankfully peripheral and the music is a fantastic, distracting mess. [Aug 2008, p.90]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Noel Gallagher has even less to say than he used to. [Jun 2005, p.112]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Despite its boldness, Perfect Symmetry is as swollen with corny grandeur as a political convention, guided by the delusion that a pompous speech somehow becomes fun if it’s accompanied by a balloon drop.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Weezer dwells on his well-documented obsessions with bad girlfriends and geek nostalgia, but without the usual giddy, mathematically precise songcraft.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    These ringers are lively, and complement one another surprisingly well. So why is the record so underwhelming? That’d be the men at the helm.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A much more conventional Busta. [Aug 2006, p.111]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With Encore, Eminem rediscovers his sense of play and lets it run naked and screaming across the stage. [Jan/Feb 2005, p.100]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Though lighter on star power than its predecessor, this compilation... still packs weird extraterrestrial punch. [Apr 2006, p.118]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It is very good.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Aubert’s dude-sings-like-a-lady tenor conjures false hope for a relationship he knows is doomed. SSPU salute misery as a kind of ideal, the opposite of love but just as beautiful.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Despite the endurance test inherent in any double-disc, his Olympian performances are worth the weight of his pretensions. [#12, p.156]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Quirks and all, it's a consistently absorbing tale from a songwriter who's still pushing himself. [Sep 2003, p.132]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Luckily, Bon Jovi's country-music move yields just... one irritant. [Jul 2007, p.113]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A party band to the core, the Ting Tings can't leave the dance floor without stumbling. [July 2008, p.76]
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's one big, horny wink--halfway between charming and totally sleazy. [Apr 2008, p.78]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    While perfectly accomplished, this is big-budget background noise, purpose-built for any one of the plush cocktail bars it's soon to be endlessly played in, but lacking anything as distinct as, say, a personality of its own. [#10, p.130]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    EBTG still have some way to go before they can mix such disparate elements together successfully. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.108]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sets the gold standard for diva records in 2005. [May 2005, p.118]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clarkson has never sounded this depressive or spiteful. [Jul 2007, p.112]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    There's nothing remotely original about any of it. [Apr 2007, p.111]
    • Blender
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    What remains is a concept that's been stewing too long and a singer who's one scream away from a hernia. [Dec 2006, p.180]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crow's subtle, stirring vocal style exhibits the same resilient innocence that makes Meg Ryan a sympathetic screen star. [Apr/May 2002, p.115]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    His choked yelp and hootenanny backing suggest fun should be had. It isn't. [#10, p.116]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It shows the old ska formula to be an unimprovable invention. [Sep 2005, p.135]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Some Loud Thunder is certainly uncompromising--which isn't the same thing as "good," although it's got a handful of very good moments. [Mar 2007, p.131]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Zigzags between immensely beautiful and crushingly ordinary with disorienting regularity. [May 2005, p.122]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This is beautiful, baffling late-night music for shy boys and robots. [Aug 2006, p.108]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Aside from disposable ballads and the sappy "Perfect Man," Survivor blasts haters, child molesters, and "been-around-the-block-females," keeping the blood up as they whup ass. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.108]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Alien Ant Farm's songs may be catchy, but their wishy-washy personality makes it hard to care. [Sep 2003, p.118]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Superfine pop moments never stifle the underlying Jamaican flavor... even if Beenie sometimes sounds a bit like a guest on his own album. [#10, p.114]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Her voice was made to rip, and when she lets go just a little, the coyness turns sultry--proof that she might just have a life after high school.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The first third of 0304 tries too hard to impress.... But soon she calms down and knocks out undeniable hooks. [#17, p.142]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This album stands on its own, with... an emphasis on beats rather than technical tricks. [#27, p.149]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The group aims for a mix of artistry and cred, a la N.E.R.D. or the Beastie Boys, but their music is rarely as catchy. [Aug 2004, p.130]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Solid, sometimes brilliant. [#11, p.146]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Too much about Tracy Chapman's Let It Rain is austere. [#12, p.138]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Where they once spun enveloping hood verite, here they just list gangsta signifiers without building a world from them. [Aug 2004, p.136]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The ceaselessly blistering tone does get overbearing. [Nov 2004, p.145]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wildflower is assiduously intimate: lushly orchestrated, strictly mid-tempo and abundant with musings about balancing freedom and love. [Oct 2005, p.136]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    When Caleb evokes God's wrath on the "crucified U.S.A." or describes lost-highway lonelines, the batter-fried U2 atmospherics and portentous Dixiefied grunge makes his worry as real as Brimstone. [Oct 2008, 2008, p.80]
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The sitar flourishes ini "Splitting Atoms" are muted by Learning's adult sheen, which lands this unusual record in an awkward middle ground between Bjork and, say, Oleta Adams. [#9, p.150]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dub, metal, Okinawan folk, hip-hop and various strains of out jazz all inflect Blondie’s hooky popcraft, and they never pretend they’re something they’re not, such as young.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    These amply melodic songs offer a style manual of orchestral pop and twinkly genre touches. [Mar 2006, p.112]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kelly's true genius is the metaphor-laden sex jam, and Double Up has some great ones. [Jul 2007, p.115]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    DMB's five nimble instrumentalists... take Putumayo globalism to a Sigma Chi frat party. [Jun 2005, p.107]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Manson's music still evokes decay, but he sounds more fertile than ever. [Jul 2007, p.116]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    On the harder-rocking half, Duritz is nearly emo-esque in his self-loathing.... The disk's Sunday Morning half, is more acoustic, quieter, reflective. But after the epic bender that precedes it, it's also just kind of a drag. [Apr 2008, p.78]
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The tone of these literate tunes remains as light as Chesney's singing of them stays soulful. [Mar 2005, p.136]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    With CSS, even biting the dust is a blast. [Aug 2008, p.82]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The songs are richly and surprisingly textured, having more in common with experimental jazz than folk. [#15, p.122]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    His flirtations are mostly asinine, autopilot-Lothario stuff... but his voice is, as always, a hypnotic melt of menace and charisma. [Dec 2004, p.145]
    • Blender
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mya gets lost on Moodring. [#18, p.128]
    • Blender