For 566 reviews, this publication has graded:
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51% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.3 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score: | I Like to Keep Myself in Pain | |
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Lowest review score: | Graffiti |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 456 out of 566
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Mixed: 97 out of 566
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Negative: 13 out of 566
566
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
With relatively strain-free production that sprinkles orchestral textures across folk-rock arrangements, Bird also shows an affinity for lifting the emotional temperature at lower volume levels.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Apr 26, 2019
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- Critic Score
Over 11 songs in 33 minutes, Lizzo rarely lets up, a relentless assault that favors excess verging on camp over subtlety.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Apr 19, 2019
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- Critic Score
The follow-up amplifies the hooks, widens the scope, deepens the wordplay.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Apr 5, 2019
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- Critic Score
The Mekons thread humor and poignancy through songs that crackle, veer, swoop and combust.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Mar 29, 2019
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There’s loneliness, heartache and regret mixed with more than a pinch of decadence in these songs. The boozy, druggy indulgences match the haziness of the best songs, the self-medication of a generation of Los Angeles kids raised on broken families and bittersweet relationships.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Mar 22, 2019
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Nick Waterhouse (Innovative Leisure) occasionally comes off as a little too clean and polite. But when he loosens his tie a bit, Waterhouse brings a spark to his songs that transcends era and genre.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Mar 8, 2019
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Though the songs are broken up into two- and three-minute arrangements, they seamlessly blend with the interludes to create a continuous mood piece designed to be absorbed in one 38-minute listen. In contrast to the more traditional song structures and insinuating melodies on “A Seat at the Table,” the new album lacks a signature tune. Only the reggae-flavored playfulness of “Binz” cuts through the haze on the first few listens, though shimmering moments of beauty flutter to the surface throughout.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Mar 5, 2019
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That sense of surprise, the risk-taking of an artist daring to dig for truth, no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable it might be, isn’t something to be taken for granted. That it informs every song suggests that “Crushing” is likely to become one of the year’s enduring albums.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Mar 1, 2019
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- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Feb 22, 2019
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- Critic Score
“Sugar” carved out a path to the dancefloor, but it also made Khan sound like a heavily filtered singer-for-hire as she belted out the hook. The song anchors “Hello Happiness,” and the remaining six tracks are essentially more of the same, with Khan’s voice rarely in the forefront. Her vocals become just another texture in stretches of the title track. ... “Too Hot” provides the sole exception. ... It’s terrific.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Feb 15, 2019
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- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Feb 11, 2019
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- Critic Score
Rather than singing from inside the darkness, he steps back and tries to find glimmers of hope and, dare it be said, happiness. The dozen songs offer a more forgiving perspective on time, memory and the past and how to live with and move beyond it.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Feb 1, 2019
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Rogers is listed as coproducer throughout, but her distinctiveness only comes through when Kurstin and some of his other high-profile production accomplices (Kid Harpoon, Ricky Reed) take the day off. ... In contrast, Kurstin--with Rogers listed as a co-conspirator--swamps many of the remaining tracks in virtual choirs of wordless backing vocals and squiggling, squirming keyboard and synthesizer textures.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jan 25, 2019
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At times in the past, Gunn’s songs felt like they were skimming the surface of multiple genres. On The Unseen in Between, the guitarist more fully submerges himself--and by extension, his listeners--in his most personal songs yet.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jan 22, 2019
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The tension between Van Etten’s melodies and Congleton’s sometimes chaotic sonic coloring makes for a bracing listen on the album’s best tracks.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jan 11, 2019
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Bowie at his best was both a crowd-pleaser and provocateur, a pop visionary and an avant-garde subversive. The crowd-pleaser is on full-force display at Glastonbury 2000, but the facets of his stage persona that made him the most unsettling of rock stars are nowhere to be found.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Dec 7, 2018
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He makes the 11 songs on Warm (dBpm Records) sound effortless, sprinkled with Byrds-gone-country twang and touches of ambient dreaminess and acid-tinged atmospherics.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Nov 30, 2018
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Bedroom jams, cameos and gimmicks pad the album’s second half. Paak resorts to a corny-sounding Jamaican patois on “Left to Right,” a cheesy saxophone disrupts “Cheers,” and Snoop Dogg appears like the avuncular ghost of G-funk’s past on “Anywhere.” After raising the bar with “Malibu,” Paak doesn’t quite reach the same heights this time.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Nov 27, 2018
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Her first album in four years, the singer navigates the uncertainty of today. It toggles between stark reality and more abstract images, sometimes blending them in ways enhanced by the production.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Nov 2, 2018
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Though the album is less immediate than “Body Talk,” the choruses not as insistent, it exudes a hypnotic pull nonetheless: this is a gentler brand of body music about absence and need.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 29, 2018
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Greta Van Fleet now adds its name to the list of Zep disciples who have made albums that sound kinda, sorta and sometimes exactly like its primary influence. If nothing else, the quartet has demonstrated that guitar-rock can still be popular with a young audience that either hasn’t heard of Led Zeppelin, or prefers Greta’s version to their grandparents’ original.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 25, 2018
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As self-effacing and understated as Noname can appear, the weight of her songs and words eventually can’t be denied.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 17, 2018
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The vulnerability is one of the album’s most endearing features. It skirts the-great-man-stares-into-the-abyss-of-mortality melodrama that has become a late-career-album cliche for many of McCartney’s peers. Instead it presents a plainspoken realism, an earthiness in keeping with his working-class upbringing.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 7, 2018
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It’s a microcosm of Brexit England and Trump America, a distillation of pressure points that becomes audible with the ominous clickety-clacking drums and bass that usher in the staggering “Colossus.” And yet Talbot’s narrators find a way to rise above, and the songs turn strangely celebratory just when things seem to be bottoming out.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 31, 2018
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[“If You Really Love Nothing” is] one of Interpol’s best recent songs, but its standard proves difficult to maintain on what is in many ways a typically hit-and-miss latter-day Interpol album.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 24, 2018
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Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Fulks wrote the bulk of the songs, sang, played guitar and banjo and produced, all in service to Lewis, who sounds as if she’s having a blast.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 13, 2018
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Shires’ fifth album, is in some ways an attempt to bust down some of the cliches that inevitably attach themselves to an artist stereotyped in that way (acoustic, folk, introspective, sad). And it does the job well. Shires’ way with words is still very much intact.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 6, 2018
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About half the album falls into a bland exercise in proficiency for these rock lifers, flavored by horns and saxophone that sound tacked on.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jul 24, 2018
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The California quintet is as comfortable submerging itself in cheesy beauty as it is in conjuring mayhem, all in service to the neo-poetic lyrics of singer George Clarke. That boundary-free approach makes the band’s fourth album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (Anti), both a divisive and energizing listen.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jul 13, 2018
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If anything, Bon Voyage is even stranger than its predecessor, seven songs splashed in psychedelic colors.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jun 15, 2018
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