cokemachineglow's Scores

  • Music
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:
1772 music reviews
    • 85 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Portishead seem to be playing against intuition at every corner.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    This record has a way of making you feel alone and alienated even in a crowded room.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Late Registration really wants to be an album album, which makes all the more frustrating and undermining the fact that it mirrors the flaws of its predecessor: the glut and the stilted sequencing.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    The problem with Stay Positive is that all the great songs subtly exhibit a kind of fin-de-siècle exhaustion, while the obvious attempts to break out of the old ways fall flat.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Maybe that’s the real spiritual value of the album: rather than impress their personal convictions, the band acts as a conduit for all these forces to combine and radiate like a prism.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Robin Pecknold's well-chronicled bout with writer's block and three years later, Helplessness Blues has arrived, and the good news is that it unquestionably sounds like a Fleet Foxes record-which is to say: warm and exquisitely pretty.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    Mezmerize works as a synopsis of the most effective weapons in the band’s arsenal.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    His rhymes are intelligent and image-packed, his drums are classic, and his inspired sample choices come together to make a striking aesthetic statement.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Street Halo shows his commitment to his music both by tweaking it and sticking to the formula. It still makes him capable of bridging the brutal and the delicate. Only experienced crisis negotiators can say that.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Is it their best album? Maybe not. Is it still the best pop album of the year? Of course.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dose’s clever, rich, image-gorged writing is at that forefront more than ever, and, mercy, does he ever slam down the goods.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    The 24 songs... are characteristically and uniformly excellent.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    Those who lovingly caress their copies of Tilt have probably already jumped in its trenches, liking what there is to like, and there is much to like about this album, even if it doesn’t maintain the consistency of that masterpiece; those who find his voice annoying have already set up sniper posts across the field; everybody else is standing in the middle wondering what the fuss is about. The Drift won’t change that.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    They've rapidly become the standard bearers for the funkiest of instrumental soul, and III suggests they could keep doing this thing for several albums before it even begins to approach boring. We should all be as similarly stoked.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Poised as hyper-indulgent fellas, Smother is a startlingly controlled album, one that's exactly as smooth and smoldering as its moniker posits.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    The thing Have One On Me absolutely excels at is the creation of remarkable moments amid its rambling odes.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    His [Kurt Ballou's] success here makes De Vermis Mysteriis the closest thing to a standout that the High on Fire catalog can claim, and the band makes good on what Ballou brings to the table.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    It’s a sophisticated work, delicately and meticulously crafted, and its effete pleasantness lends itself as well to "Late Night" performances as "New Yorker" coverage.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    As relatively good as most of Bitte Orca is, 'Stillness Is The Move' alone gives us reason enough to be optimistic: should Longstreth pursue his newfound fascination with mainstream music further, it's proof that the Dirty Projectors are capable of evolving into a far better pop band than their experimental selves ever let on.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    If you like blues-oriented rock from a man who can pour out his soul like Robert Pollard's bartender pours Bud Lite, then, by all means, give Bubblegum a try.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Nobody who has ever had some semblance of an interest in this band should ignore Journal For Plague Lovers, which is simply far more awesome than anyone had a right to expect.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    A wane in consistency in its latter half keeps I Am Not from achieving the heights of Yo La Tengo’s best work, but it will unquestionably satiate their rabid fanbase awaiting a return to eclecticism while re-establishing Ira Kaplan’s status as an early fifty-something guitar god.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    There’s some talent behind these songs; there isn’t a single instrumental dud on The Chemistry of Common Life. But while the instrumentals leave room for some kind of epic lyrics from the right lyricist and singer, Abraham is neither of those things.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    In terms of a go-to disc for a pissed off stomp around the bedroom, it’s the finest album I’ve heard this year.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    The harrowing track list of Electro-Shock just wears too thin here.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A dozen listens through... and I can’t help but think the band has done better in past.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Ys
    If you give it a chance (or maybe even a dozen chances, if you can stand it), and don't immediately dismiss it because it's by Joanna, I’m sure you’ll find something to love.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Enter the Vaselines serves as a timely reminder of the old ways we found music: for Cobain, one dreams, as a record in a bin somewhere, and for the rest of us, a recommendation from a friend, a cassette loaned around like a dirty one-hitter.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    Strange Mercy is Clark's most tense, nauseous, kaleidoscopic album yet.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Its overcast may be thick like a dustbowl, but well-placed rays of light make this record an especially accomplished return.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Though High Violet sometimes ("Lemonworld," cough) veers dangerously close to self-parody, the National have crafted something exceptional: a massive, dynamic album that still makes good on the National's devotion to meticulous production and a sound they've kept simple and distinctive for a decade.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    The new versions aren’t bad, but the Vertex-era fan might quickly become the unwitting recipient of a $20 coaster.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    With El-P's help, Killer Mike has produced his first unquestionably great Album.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    While he may be fundamentally un-reconstructed, Pink’s clearly a more polished revisionist, more polished than he’s ever been, and while it may not be conventionally recorded, Before Today still feels punchily archetypal.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    The distance that keeps Elvrum’s tiny voice from ever rising above a negligible squeak is applied to our relationship with this pretty, roaring Wind’s Poem. It’s a harrowing problem, like getting stuck between a stone and a hard something, for every Phil Elvrum fan imaginable. And who isn’t nowadays.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Kaputt is the sound of an artist released from his back catalogue and his own notions of how a song should be sung, or written. It is a mighty, mighty piece of work and really worth celebrating. In my mind, this is Destroyer's best album yet.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    The peaks are good, obviously; but they're just peaks. And the dips are experimental fun but together they sound like curios. Still, the unfortunate sequencing aside, Passive Aggressive is a great compilation-especially so for those uninitiated with the band.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    Banks is often all the more mesmerizing when she leaves the beef on the back-burner and takes stock of her influences.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Serena Maneesh injects the Warhols' toothy, cocksure swagger [into] the lush, narcotic insularity of My Bloody Valentine and Ride.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    The band is becoming, depending on how you look at it, either more like a classic jazz group—solos twisting well beyond the compact call-and-answer of formulaic Afrobeat—or something like a more world music-friendly Tortoise.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    While that band has yet to make a record comparable to the sludgy majesty of their live show... Blue Cathedral practically explodes from the speakers.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    A fractured LP, compelling and convincing in its intent, but just plain less satisfying than Vespertine or Post.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    El-P's always been ahead of the curve but Cancer for Cure isn't valuable for its prescience so much as its currency of the now and the way it unites rap head nostalgia for the future beats of the past with the beats of the present.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In a technical sense it sounds, like everything Murphy produces, pristine.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It’s entirely too richly tragic and fitting that the man’s last release is the apotheosis of his work, the finest and most representative example of what he contributed to music and, in turn, how music inspired him.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    This stuff is genuinely, earnestly satisfying, in the same way all great pop music is: these songs, simply and purely, sound fucking great.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Trouble Will Find Me is impeccably sequenced, even at thirteen songs the rare National record that doesn’t contain “the one song they should have obviously left off.”
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Lost and Safe removes much of the chaotic elements of its predecessors, substituting a more focused, and therefore cohesive approach to their cut-and-paste style.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    It is markedly less frenetic and more cohesive, and for that it is pitch-black and menacing, and for that it is head-and-shoulders the better record.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fall Be Kind doesn’t exactly break past the barriers set by this year’s "Merriweather Post Pavilion," but it is an excellent extension of the ethos captured by that particular record.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    What sticks out most about Spoon, five albums in, is how singular they sound, like a jut of brilliant rock standing unfazed by crashing tides of trends and hopeful hype.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    Feels takes the Collective in an exciting new direction, creating the kind of record that expands on the group's less esoteric strengths while also pushing their sound forward.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I think Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the album of this year and maybe of the next.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Well-constructed, thoughtful, emotionally provocative and cathartic.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It sounds exactly like Eluvium, only with an organ and not a guitar, and with more overt classical aspirations than before.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get is powerful and assured, and in making true of its promise--to fight harder, and to love one’s self in the face of adversity--it pulls off one of the hardest feats there is.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    Simply put, in 2006, My Life is a timeless evaluation of Assimilation, sometimes harmless, sometimes bleak, but consistently absorbing.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Burn Your Fire stands against records that damage and internalise by sticking to their convictions, instead of meta-analysing and working out where the lines are drawn.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    The thing that stands out for me this time around is how little Tinariwen are confrontational about their experiences. Instead, it just naturally permeates their music--love songs with a thousand-yard stare.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Meloy’s ever-multiplying prog-rock ambitions are well on their way to swallowing him whole, but for now he seems to be comfortable enough as a guy writing sweet folk pop songs alongside ever-shifting song suites and polite hard rock.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    At the risk of sounding redundant, this being Super Furry Animals, there just isn’t that much to dislike.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    The album still holds together with a surprising cohesiveness, which is essential when crafting a debut that relies far more on the effect of its ambitious whole than any specific genre-bending tracks.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    I don’t think it’s too harsh to suggest that each Iron & Wine album is not a step forward so much as a more sophisticated look at the same paces.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Outside the charismatic skill of Lidell's shapeshifting vocals and his forward-looking arrangements, the actual songs of Multiply aren't of as indelible an essence as the classics that they imitate.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    There’s nothing knee-jerk about it; just the inexorable sounds of ideas beautiful and terrible unfurling. It’s a careful, masterful record.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    This, then, is the future fashioned out of the stuffs of past and present, out of maintaining a firm aesthetic while employing a staggering array of techniques, out of reaching for the proverbial stars. Tronic hits with the intrinsic revelation and self-evident relevance of new truth.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Modern Vampires of the City’s songs rarely feel overstuffed or overwritten, with simple kick-snare drumming, plaintive piano chords, and astoundingly well-recorded vocals at their centers.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    CYHSY’s songs ring of The Bends-era songwriting, but loungier, more playful, more comfortable in their own skin.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    With El Camino, the Black Keys have essentially twenty minutes of worthwhile music, at least as far as partying is concerned.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It’s subtly more adventurous, and certainly scarier, in the way that even mundane things are always scarier in dreams, filtered through a disordered mind, revealing painful truths in unexpected places.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Though wrong and stupid kinda work (in a good way!), Tha Carter III is more a balanced, self-conscious synthesis of everything viably great about Lil Wayne, hyperbolic or not, than the penultimate statement of the MC’s “legendary” status.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    It’s downright exciting for a band like the Thermals to emerge with something so simple and unflustered, so bereft of unnecessary baggage, a shining light of a record that delivers on its early promise.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It’s nowhere near as inviting as his previous works, even with the excellent production and introduction of strings. But give it a few weeks; it’ll grow.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    UGK 4 Life leaves listeners wondering where they might go next, and even if sated with one last release still lamenting that those further steps—gargantuan or tiny, toward greatness or overreach, whichever—will necessarily be solo, uncontrasted by that inimitable, nimble, lascivious whine we’ve lost.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Thorpe and co. can still sound as if they play against rather than off one another. But Two Dancers, a huge improvement that comes only one year after their debut, is certainly the sounds of Wild Beasts becoming a band to keep tabs on.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    A well-crafted doorway into Thee Oh Sees' lovely DIY funhouse, and leave your rock 'n' roll expectations at the giant lips-shaped entrance.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    A gorgeous little nightmare.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    With Julia Holter, with this profound and inexhaustibly gorgeous album, we can transcend our own transcendence and find the greatest bliss in the joyful renunciation of what makes us us.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    It works, but it doesn't make sense, and can't be explained. It can only be heard.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    New Amerykah, Part Two: Return of the Ankh is a record full of smooth, creative, grooving (but not too grooving) songs that are exceptionally well conceived, penned, and executed.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Introspection of this kind can be a difficult thing to pull off convincingly, but Nostalgia never veers too far into sentimentality to let its edges be sanded down.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is a break-up album, a cohesive work embodying a singular mood, and Nadler, like any great artist, sets the scene with such careful, immersive depth that it can be difficult to the seams in her work until you explore every inch.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Swans always understood better than most post-punk bands that the crushing, wall-of-sound repetition pioneered by Glenn Branca could be taken to its logical, nihilistic extreme in rock-n-roll.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Looping State of Mind both conquers and surpasses the only-so-many-pieces-in-the-box standards of most traditional dance forms by appeasing those crescendo/break/denouement expectations in name only.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At this point MacKaye and Farina are splitting vocal duties fairly, um, evenly, and the contrast between his weathered bark and her more soulful emoting creates a dynamic equally as fascinating as their instrumental dexterity.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    For the most part, it works.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    There is not a bad verse on it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Old
    As a rap record, it excels.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    As a breakup narrative, it’s successful. As pop music, it’s either too insular or simply unable to turn Silberman’s own experience into something one would desire to revisit.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    Game Theory’s highs never quite reach those of Do You Want More?!!!??! or Illadeph Halflife (1996), and those albums, even with those highs, are still inconsistent affairs. Which means that the Roots are back on track, but the track itself was never something we praised wholeheartedly in the first place.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    It is the best Swans live record in that it distills the essential loss of agency one is meant to endure as best as two little discs can manage.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 92 Critic Score
    Each song is either a seismic death rattle or aftershock.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    It is a bright and rousing thing.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Baldi manages to find a comfortable place in between the all-potential pleasure-all-the-time approach of his first two records and the potential for all-out sad dude sonic violence, delivering a criticism of and break-up message to computer music by jettisoning every aspect of his work that could possibly be labeled as such.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Skying does for early '80s psychedelic Brit-rock what Primary Colours did for post-punk, and both are as satisfying with such goals as one can imagine. Can their '90s Seattle grunge tribute be far behind?
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    It's true the band has made a radical decision to turn down the volume on the wall of sound they've been building up since their debut, but in doing so they've turned up something else they've been fond of for so long: measured nuance.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    More critically, though, is that Eye Contact works very well as a stamp on this band's original turn with Saint Dymphna: now that we know that a lot of their contemporaries were also going to turn in this direction, it's nice to see a band that was once ahead of the curve still working so hard to keep their sound this fascinating.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Sift through Are the Dark Horse and the sounds of the Beach Boys or Orbison can certainly be found, but the band has yet to learn the clean, economical songwriting of their influences.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    These songs are enjoyable and beautiful and pure hip-hop --- glittering, hard diamonds that hopefully won’t get buried in the underground scene’s mounds of coal.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    Nearly 1700 words and I still feel like this record's left me speechless. That's an epiphany to cherish.