cokemachineglow's Scores

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For 1,772 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 51% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 Art Angels
Lowest review score: 2 Rain In England
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,444 out of 1772
  2. Mixed: 270 out of 1772
  3. Negative: 58 out of 1772
1772 music reviews
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    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Who's Your New Professor
    Sometimes this gets boring, when tracks lull and hunch into the next and Sam’s voice doesn’t do much to challenge the monotony. Sometimes it’s confusing to hear such graciously restrained music eventually show itself as meticulous, experimental, and deep, deep, deep. Well, not confusing. Refreshing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Winter Of Mixed Drinks
    The Winter of Mixed Drinks is a minor disappointment, then, in that in wake (and perhaps as a result) of his heart’s subsequent rehab Hutchison’s songs can’t really sustain the weight-loss of their ego.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Cassadaga
    On Cassadaga Bright Eyes sounds like John Mayer.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain
    Inevitably, most of the studio design on each song is greedy and belabored. Everything is in its right place, but everything is too obvious or too proportionally gaudy to warrant more than a signatory “lo-fi” moniker.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
    Lookout doesn’t have the feel of a major step forward for the Silver Jews: sonically, it falls pretty comfortably between "Bright Flight" and "Tanglewood" and doesn’t have the sort of big events that marked those two records.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free
    Akron/Family are in a state of constant flux, ever changing, so Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free strikes me as no great sea change (no more than usual, anyway). It’s just the latest iteration of a band that’s never twice the same.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Life Of The World To Come
    Regardless of his collaborators or how he chooses to approach his songs, The Life of the World to Come is further proof of Darnielle's ability, evident since long before he traded a boombox for a studio, to imbue his imagery, his sentiments, and his many characters with astounding weight and power.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Parc Avenue
    Parc Avenue often strays too far into excess and departure for departure’s sake to enjoy the brand of a songwriter’s tour-de-force.... But as a fully realized and lovingly sculpted aesthetic, there may be few stronger full-length debuts waiting in this year’s wings.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Habits & Contradictions
    Habits & Contradictions is a pleasurable listen with head-scratchingly pretty samplings and lyrics more or less liberated from value care of Q's devotion to "weed and brews" and the delirious enjoyment of something so simple as saying "fuck" a lot.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Occasion for Song
    There's nothing but clouds on Occasion for Song, but rather than uninviting it's eminently listenable; an unflinching, graceful, truthful exploration of how to go on living when you've lost a friend, of how to recognize a world that suddenly seems that much darker and less hopeful.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Transnormal Skiperoo
    Jim White’s latest collection of songs has a humanity about it that is too multifaceted to categorize in broad terminology or flowery descriptors and is quite possibly beyond adequate summation; overthink or undersell as much as you please.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    A Sufi And A Killer
    There may be more pop structure and less willful wandering than, say, cLOUDDEAD, but there is still something strictly subconscious about the album at its most gripping, even as it consistently engages over repeat visits.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Foreign Body
    What Fortino and Harris have done here and across Foreign Body is construct a kind of suspended reality, where the consequences of day-to-day life fail to adhere to their distended sense of duration.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Employment
    This is an not an album designed for navel gazing introspection, but rather one to be played at neighbor-annoying volumes before you hit the town on a Friday night.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Chaos And Creation In The Backyard
    A sturdy if frustrating effort that exceeds and disappoints expectations all at once.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Comfort Of Strangers
    Comfort of Strangers isn’t only Orton’s best album to date, it’s her most daring.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Wow
    While No Wow certainly has its missteps, they largely come as a result of the band’s most basic concept: simplicity and repetition.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Death Magnetic
    All of this provides a great recipe for exactly one good listen. That one listen is best the volume down though, as Death Magnetic might very well be the most distorted, punishing mastering job since the advent of the CD. After that, the charms of the album become significantly reduced.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    A Different Ship
    A textbook example of restrained, stylish writing, Here We Go Magic have found their muse: a 40-something producer from England who just knows well enough to get out of the way.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    The Stimulus Package
    Another hip-hop comfort blanket, The Stimulus Package reminds us a dope loop and a capable MC justify their own existence.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Odd Blood
    An overcooked vanity piece from a band inflated by praise, Odd Blood heads in every direction at once.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 45 Critic Score
    Trouble In Dreams
    I’ll be as straightforward in my assessment of his Trouble in Dreams as I can: this is his tenth solo album of the same old shit.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Salon des Amateurs
    Salon des Amateurs is undeniably an important album for Hauschka, both for its distillation of his rigorous methods and its energized perspective.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
    It’s inoffensive, painfully so, with the smell of something run through focus groups from the get go, written and produced by committee to sell the greatest number of copies.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    A Healthy Distrust
    On A Healthy Distrust his delivery has noticeably improved.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Breakers
    When it's warm it offers a cool side, the underside of one's pillow, and when it's frosty it offers a coverlet of weight or the stable resting of a hand.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Mothertongue
    Mothertongue oscillates between the comfort/terror of singularities and excitement/terror of potentialities, but the possibilities this duality affords for Muhly’s future work are frankly exhilarating.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Bloom
    The style of songwriting is remarkably similar to that found on Teen Dream. Yet neither suffers much for it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Why There Are Mountains
    Why There Are Mountains is plain pleasing indie rock--how it used to be, how it’s ceased to be since, at least in spirit.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Springtime Can Kill You
    Holland seems confident placing herself inside a mythology much older than her years. It’s this fact, along with her penchant for lyrics about crazy dreams and old-fashioned moonshine, that make many of her songs, though originals, sound borrowed from another era.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    Several Shades of Why
    It's not that Several Shades doesn't showcase Mascis's talents. It just denies us his flashiest ones.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    Ships
    The eleven tracks here are the most concise, effortless, and melodically conspicuous songs to come out of the band’s camp.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    Friend And Foe
    The line between cheese and accessibility can be thin, and whistling or handclaps or a hidden track or an overt songwriting method can all reek, but Friend and Foe has, just as ostensibly, no wasted space. The hinge is in the balance the band manages with every inkling of sound or production seeming both spontaneous and stultifying, both labored-over and cast off.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    A Long Hot Summer
    Masta Ace’s maturity informs his simplicity; experience strengthens the straightforward so that his words come methodically and sincerely.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    Carousel Waltz
    The majority of Carousel just plain sounds the same. It might as well be the same pace, might as well be in the same key, might as well be the same vocal melody over and over; it's a carousel if there’s ever been one.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    4eva N A Day
    If this isn't the most mature mixtape K.R.I.T.'s produced yet, it may very well be his most honest, and coming from this guy, that's high praise indeed.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    A Blessing And A Curse
    Taken for what it is, a straight up and down rock album, ABAAC is quite good.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    The Dissolve
    There are a few moments on side B that could fool you you've picked up an old Orb album, but otherwise The Dissolve is very forward thinking. Picture a melting pot on par with Burt Bacharach's.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything All The Time
    A damned great indie rock record.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Special Moves/Burning
    Special Moves illuminates the band's act for what it is.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything
    It comes into the world jubilantly, then spends the next forty minutes kicking and screaming against your ideas of what you can landscape it against. It dies with a characteristically quick whimper. No cheap shots against Explosions in the Sky, I promise, but that’s not pretty. It is beautiful.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Is Is [EP]
    As a stand alone work this is one of the most convincing collections that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have produced thus far.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    Just Once [EP]
    This turns out to be an interesting but ultimately disappointing experiment, and the reason for its failure is telling: unlike the posturing shitgaze set who lean on lo-fi as a superficial crutch, How to Dress Well never treated lo-fi as a simple affectation, and as a result he can't walk away from it so easily.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    You & Me
    This variation in the songcraft amid absolute adherence to a predetermined aesthetic attests to the band’s ability to craft a well-paced, engaging arc, an album as much attuned to its coherency as it is to being a springboard for a few spectacular singles.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Constant Future
    Parts & Labor have turned what might have been the crippling loss of an essential member into just another development in a long and respectable career.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    More Fish
    Thus is the template that makes More Fish so relevant, rewarding, and unpredictably necessary: uniformly fantastic production (except Doom) and Ghost coasting just enough that he doesn’t utterly eclipse the people he’s trying to let shine.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Desire Lines
    You won’t hate this record; you won’t be any more capable of hating this record as you would a particularly aesthetically pleasing houseplant. But the record’s greatest achievement is that it’s happy with just not being hated.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Modern Guilt
    The concept of a modern type of guilt is probably supposed to imply the effortlessly achievable comfort and depressed humility with which much of the album is sung. Perhaps ironically, the best way to enjoy Modern Guilt is with blinders on to this sort of temporal perspective.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Love Kraft
    Even by SFA’s lofty standards, the production on Love Kraft is little short of incredible.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Kingdom Of Rust
    While it feels a little sheepish to rag on a band for being a little too competent at what they do, the best you can really say about this, their fourth LP, is that it’s simply a good product that’s easily recognizable as a Doves album.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crystal Castles [2010]
    It’s a middling album that managed to get the best of collective consciousness.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Plastic Beach
    Find, here, Gorillaz’ third record, some sort of masterpiece within the band’s canon, and undoubtedly the best chillwave record ever recorded.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Fantasies
    Fantasies is, rather unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, just another Metric album.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Admiral Fell Promises
    Kozelek appears to have returned to himself with Admiral, though the draw here is that (oddly, after so many years) he's finally discovered he can actually really play the guitar.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Terror
    The Terror is an unselfish view of a world free of human manipulation, and as such is a staggering listen to fans accustomed to the Lips’ sheeny pop orchestra and, before that, their lo-fi quirk.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ryan Adams
    Ryan Adams, is up there with his best work because while it doesn’t have a lot of sweat on it, it’s a record that feels clearly considered enough, and carefully produced to maximize Adams’s strengths.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Far Side Virtual
    In essence, Ferraro has crafted a noiseless noise record.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Trees Outside The Academy
    It doesn’t pretend to hold a candle to the big-dogs and game-changing double albums that cacophonised your youth, nor does it want to.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    Hey Venus!
    Hey Venus! is like a really good haircut: it's brisk, light around the ears, and after so many 'do permutations it's bound to get some compliments about how civilized it looks, how grown up.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    King
    When T.I. is on, he’s really, really on, and, at several points, King lives up to its own hyperbole. It’s just that those points correspond precisely to the places where T.I. is actually talking about how great he is.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Prophet
    When it's good, it doesn't get much better.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    Valende
    Sweet Jesus, these guys sound like Syd Barrett.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 61 Critic Score
    Georgiavania
    What’s so frustrating about this effort is its potential to be great, a possibility visible even through its painfully apparent flaws.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    The Cool
    'Superstar' boasts a sanguine hook and a sophisticated mess of rhymes about fame and backlash and fandom and such. Unfortunately much of the rest of the record lacks this clarity, and while the first part of that “sophisticated mess” description remains valid the second part becomes dominant.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Field Music
    The record is a gem. Twelve tracks with a sense of cohesiveness that side-steps homogeneity in favor of straight-up old-fashioned album workmanship.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    W.A.R. (We Are Renegades)
    Ultimately, that is the problem with most of W.A.R., though. Monch is so busy adopting the typical backpacker agenda of putting himself at odds with the mainstream that he takes steps towards a new conformity instead of just destroying sh*t.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Live at the South Bank
    For either Reid or Hebden completists, Live at the South Bank is a useful and worthwhile artifact. For someone seeking entry to the catalogues of two vital artists, this is a thorny and difficult listen.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    Born Like This
    He’s filled his abdicated spot with greater authority than ever before, patched up the walls punched in from Ghostface’s temper tantrums and assured us that villian-rap’s appeal will remain evergreen as long as it infused with this genius, this wild idiocy, these manic flights of syllabic invention.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Moderat
    Moderat never combines as effortlessly and endlessly as that still-breathless collaboration between Apparat and Ellen Allien, Orchestra of Bubbles (2006), but it is alternately as enjoyable as seeing these two collaborate should be and a roundabout disappointment.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    The Repulsion Box
    The record can get a bit dull or just plain hokey.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    The Maginot Line
    While it requires some patience, The Maginot Line is far from impenetrable.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Letter
    Love Letter is more like a respite, a detour from the beaten path we should just be glad exists, and something to cling to when the next porridge of jizz and tears, The Return of 12 Play: Night of the Living Dead, drops wetly on our heads.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    The Fool
    Warpaint is Chillwave rendered Actual via the performance of actual instruments, rendered Credible via the presence of an actual rhythm section, full of big austere drums interwoven with deeply locked-in bass lines, and rendered Sexy via the music's performance by real life, actually sexy, adult humans.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harlem River
    The charms of Harlem River are hard to explain, as this record thrives on a certain groove, a certain verve, that makes it an overall pleasure to listen to.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Take Care, Take Care, Take Care
    Take Care, like all of the EITS albums, still has quite a lot going for it: its bombastic gestures are still appropriately dramatic, its production still crackles and shines exquisitely, its conventional undulations are still paced for maximum emotional effect. But there is no surprise or wonder to be found here, no chances or risks taken.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Volta
    An album of pasty songs, severe missteps and bizarre overreaches, but an album nevertheless shimmering occasionally with the inherent sometime-genius of its creator, Volta is one of those pretty-bad records that may stick around, may sound better in a few years.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Deerhoof Vs. Evil
    Deerhood vs. Evil is just simultaneously astounding and utterly familiar, correct, and right.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Last Night Becomes This Morning
    Last Night Becomes This Morning is the exhausted, beaten down sound of the nineties lo-fi movement years after the party ended.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    Celebration Castle
    The Ponys' arms are so full of the good old stuffs, they can't offer much that's new or really interesting, yet they're talented enough to make it difficult to care about that sort of thing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Ashes Grammar
    Ashes is A Sunny Day’s stripes, their first truly great album of scope.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Living With War
    Young's best record since at least Mirror Ball and probably Ragged Glory.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    The Iron Gates at Throop and Newport
    The music of The Iron Gates at Throop and Newport is about as universal as this stuff gets.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carrier
    Even though it’s as proficient as the Dodos have always been, albeit in subtler ways, there’s nothing about this record that feels arbitrary. It’s an album that feels like honesty, or at least a very well done facsimile of it.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    The King Is Dead
    A good few years on from the rise and partial Fall of the Decemberists, Meloy and Co. are managing, still, to carry the fire.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    All Eternals Deck
    All Eternals Deck, the band's first album for North Carolina superindie Merge, effectively picks up from where the apocalyptic finale of The Life of the World To Come (2009) left off.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Plumb
    From the ground up, Plumb is through and through the work of a band that has absolutely mastered its craft.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
    If Mogwai are looking for new routes to explore then Hardcore is a strong first venture.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    Roots & Crowns
    Califone are continuing the progressive refinement of their roots, giving an assured argument for the possibilities ignored by folk musicians enslaved to tradition and a smart recall to all the forward-thinking others who have moved too completely and arrogantly on.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hesitation Marks
    It’s an earnest and worthy effort to prove that this band can matter without the PMRC stickering its album cover.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Staying In
    To me this sounds like clear-headed music for lovers of straightforward disco pop--an unblemished set that asks haters and the insecure alike to wait behind the velvet rope where they’re most comfortable while the rest of us throw a cloth over the lampshade in the living room and put on a really great record.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Let the Poison Out
    Perhaps the best thing about this catchy, super-short record (it'll take less than thirty minutes of your time) is the balance it strikes between tight songwriting and a loose, improvisational feeling.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Year of Hibernation
    Powers definitely has the compositional wherewithal to make something special--he just has to put more of himself into it.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Cryptograms
    Half of me thinks the group was aiming for a bit of something hypnotized and dreamy, that they worship Spacemen 3 and the patience that entails. But then the other half thinks Cryptograms is something gritty and furious, maybe something religious, but still something of a turtlehead waiting to poke through.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Loud Planes Fly Low
    The most interesting thing about Loud Planes Fly Low is the way it uses that rift, confronting the inherent tension and wringing it out. It may not be Howard and Crisp's best work to date, but it's perhaps their darkest, sincerest, and least expected.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 62 Critic Score
    Everything Ecstatic
    It’s an intermittently interesting and somewhat forward looking work-in-process, but at the moment Hebden sounds like an underground hip-hop producer with a few ideas but no MC.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Infra
    What Infra is, is perfectly pretty, atmospheric, rainy day music.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Parades
    Parades is an album of slow-growing rewards from a band with whom relationships are formed, not instantly identified.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Ex Hex
    Timony sounds fresh and honest again, instead of encased in the anachronistic amber of songs about dragons, fairies and dungeons.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Days
    It feels both classic and surprisingly new; this is Real Estate, and this is all Real Estate will ever be.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Kiss Each Other Clean
    Albums like Kiss Each Other Clean and The Age of Adz are so giddy with compacting layers and counter layers into the already mapped-out confines of their pre-existing aesthetics that they come across like snowflakes: each one is beautiful and unique, except that the detail is too small to see and anyways there's about a billion of them shits and you have to shovel the walkway and hope public transit isn't delayed. It's distracting, basically, because nothing gets a chance to breath.
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