Dot Music's Scores
- Music
For 1,511 reviews, this publication has graded:
-
55% higher than the average critic
-
2% same as the average critic
-
43% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.7 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 69
Highest review score: | Untitled | |
---|---|---|
Lowest review score: | United Nations of Sound |
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 1,005 out of 1511
-
Mixed: 449 out of 1511
-
Negative: 57 out of 1511
1511
music
reviews
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It’s not as remarkable a transformation as the one Rick Rubin performed on Johnny Cash, but this is a fine collection and as pleasurable a listen as it undoubtedly was to record.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's a masterclass in why they were, and still are, the greatest rock band to grace the Earth.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Kanye's ...Dark Twisted Fantasy is also the densely-produced work of a clearly erratic soul.- Dot Music
- Posted Dec 7, 2010
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
'Love And Theft' is a much tricksier, elusive and - important, this - entertaining beast, one that mingles reflections on ageing with a host of jokes, both good and bad, and some wickedly limber music.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This release at least gives some sense of the visual brilliance, media spectacle and utter fertility of artistic energy that came together in Tropicalia.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
'In Search Of' throbs with an innovation hewn from the patchwork of the past yet anxious to transcend it and head for undiscovered planets. The real revolution is here: support future music, reject imitation - 'In Search Of' really is one of the best albums you'll hear this year. [Review of UK version]- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
"Orphans" is that rarity of an album: one that will satisfy hardcore fans as well as the uninitiated.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Delivering his lyrics in a breathless barrage, 'Boy In Da Corner' packs the energy flash of London MCing into its grooves and for that alone it deserves attention.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Their records sound very different, but they're both astounding.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Not since Oasis in their gloriously unstoppable and unapologetic heyday have we been given the opportunity to embrace such straight-ahead, ebullient, desire-fuelled guitar music.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Once you've taken in how wonderful it sounds, it'll be time to thrill at how much of it there is, then how dense it all is.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
What 'Original Pirate Material' makes abundantly clear though, is that - whilst Skinner may not be at the very cutting edge of Garage's club soundtrack - he's a man blessed with an astonishing aptitude for pop and a mainline into the Zeitgeist.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Show[s] that the early chapters of the Staton story may not match the later commercial success, but trump the four-to-the-floor stuff with grit-in-the-grooves southern soul.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
“Funeral” is the sort of perfectly-realised record you’d hope from a band at the top of their game. For a debut release it’s unmatched in recent years. Hearing it is to wake from a black and white slumber and to view the world in widescreen Technicolour.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's eclectic, electrifying, eccentric and more than a little bit ludicrous, but Sir Lucious's ambition is as infectious as its madness is dazzling.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Untrue is a devastatingly accurate depiction of urban UK--plugging the listener into the matrix of some godforsaken south London satellite, with its identikit fast food joints, repellent inhabitants and anonymous decaying sprawl.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Throughout the album, Primal Scream set a furious pace that only narrowly stops itself before the last note is spat out. In the preceding 65 minutes, what you get is as monumental a sonic statement of the times as 'Screamadelica' was over ten years ago, the first great album of the millennium and probably the best record of the year.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A unique and beautiful work that will be returned to again and again. Definitely, already, an album of the year.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
'Since I Left You' is nothing short of stunning.... There's more imagination in this hour-long odyssey than most sample-based artists manage in their entire career. Not since DJ Shadow's 'Endtroducing' has an album showed what you really can do with a bunch of old vinyl.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
"Modern Times" offers further evidence that this man remains more than capable of greatness.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's hard to believe a better advertisement for music's capacity to be simultaneously adventurous and entertaining, funny and moving, leftfield and mainstream will be released all year.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This is music that sounds like it was plotted by sad psychics graduates in lab coats. It's clean, melancholic and sterile (in a totally non-derogatory sense) - full of gently undulating rhythms and melodic pulses.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Merriweather Post Pavilion's rare combination of great songs and vital invention make this one of the year's most important records, already.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
'The Sky Is Fallin' is a beast.... 'God Is In The Radio' has got just such an awesome riff, like the Lord himself hotwired to a Marshall amp.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Fortunately, the depth of great songs written by Francis results in something that feels more like a proper album of still-dynamic psycho-rock than a shoddy cash-in.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If you didn't like the casual misogyny, glorification of crack dealing and unapologetic thuggery of the debut then stop reading now, because "Hell Hath No Fury" makes it sound like "Meat Is Murder" by The Smiths.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If anything, this 25-song double set sees Belle & Sebastian at their finest.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
And to anyone that contends they don't make them like they did anymore: listen to this. They still do.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If you can’t find something here that has you smiling and quoting the old saw about rumours of indie’s death being greatly exaggerated, it’s time to take up opera.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Although "Hypermagic Mountain" is no less a terrifying, red-eyed and rampaging behemoth than its predecessors, the duo have unleashed a beast that assumes a more recognisable form.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
TV On The Radio sound wise beyond their years, youthful stars whose mouthpiece contorts itself into funk shapes and whups without sounding like an out-of-depth chancer.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Take the time to squeeze inside, and you'll discover a startling, significant, endlessly inspiring album.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
In Hammond, [Waits] has found a worthy collaborator, one who gets to the heart of what these strange lyrics are actually about and imbues their sharp angles, acute observations and nicotine-stained introspection with some real insight and understanding.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Though Manitoba's constructions are joyously slap-dash and defiantly experimental, he still manages to lure the listener in with woozy melodies and strangely beguiling textures.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This time around Polly's drama school project is playing a Rock Star, and therefore this must be a Rock Record. And from the opener 'Big Exit', a simplistic, effective stomper so swathed in echo that she seems to be singing from the bottom of a pit, to the raucous semi-bonus 'This Wicked Tongue', it's just that, a back to basics special.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's unlikely you'll hear anything as near to perfect, magical and downright lovely all year.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A fine collection of songs from an immensely talented, tragically lost soul.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's not radically new - although the Timbaland and the Trackmasters contributions are genuinely exciting - but it's exactly what a lot of people want to hear from a hip-hop album right now.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A fragrant bouquet of melody, light, love and naughtiness wrapped in an unfamiliar joie de vivre.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
"Fishscale" is a purist's delight, an album seemingly crafted solely for those who've been chasing his maverick tail for the past decade.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
“Arular”, as well as being a particularly great and brave album, could well be this year’s Portishead or Massive Attack.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It might not be the dance album of the year - but it's certainly pushing musical boundaries and deserves to be in your record collection.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Ironically, though defined sartorially and sonically by this short window in history, the songs on their debut album are mostly timeless. Few better will be released in 2008.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Panda Bear has created one of the most unusual and beautifully strange statements of the avant-garde.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
'The Argument' is the sound of a band stretching out and thereby consolidating their position as a unique entity.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
There's a rolling, free and expansive feel to the album as a whole that is not only one of its most attractive features, but is also the most difficult thing about it to pin down.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's not too ambitious to suggest few other releases this year will match its grace, humanity and power.... A magnificent album.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A deeply special album, and one you hope enough people will allow to get under their skin.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It won't usher in a bold new era where boys are boys and bands play guitars, but there is more than enough here to chew over and enjoy.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
As it is, with all their knobs set to downbeat, there's something restrained and knowing here that will trouble some newcomers. Still, there's very little on "xx" to suggest this band will end up on the compost heap.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
'Post-rock', which Sigur Rós most assuredly are, may be little more than the shoegazing of a decade ago in an ironic T-shirt, but that's no reason to dismiss it outright. For a start, much of it is very lovely.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If "Neon Bible" doesn't quite dazzle as "Funeral" did, that's more a measure of the latter album's benchmark brilliance, rather than the inferiority of the former.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Tweedy takes conventional songforms birthed on his acoustic guitar and scrambles them completely, reassembled into fractured, dissonant epics with the help of the reliably brilliant Jim O'Rourke.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
What is different about the overall feel of this messy and ambitious album is that it marks The Roots' liberation from genre, the neo-soul meanderings of 'Things Fall Apart' only appear when they're wanted and never outstay their welcome.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's likely to be a defining point in their career even if it's not their definitive release.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
"Seven Swans" is as a graceful tour de force of an album - beguiling, bewitching and beautiful.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A dreamy, sun-dappled delight, blending pastoral folk, psychedelia, free-wheeling, West Coast Americana and orchestral pop with such apparent effortlessness that its darker lyrical themes - the workings of sinister, invisible forces and the destruction wrought by war - are uncovered only by careful listening.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Perhaps it's no surprise that eighth album Let England Shake is the first for which Harvey does not appear on the sleeve.- Dot Music
- Posted Feb 15, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This album feels like it's tuning into everything, connecting with everything. Welcome to Maii. And welcome to the future.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's a canny mix and results in Hercules And Love Affair making music for feet and heart, but also for the soul.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Beyond the shiny surface of these songs lurks an unusual wealth of detail decorating the landscape through which the Furries power, scattering verse after chorus after verse at breathtaking speed.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
"Thunder, Lightning, Strike" is an immensely derivative album, but one which cuts and pastes its influences in a strikingly original way. Chiefly, by piling them all on at once.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Despite its branding as work-out music, 45:33 feels more like an amazing club DJ set than something to quicken one's pace on the treadmill. [Review of UK release]- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Built on a repetitious platform of bass, drums and guitar, what starts off as a genuinely thrilling journey tends to conclude in a cul-de-sac.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If you're the sort of person who can see music--even if you can't, perhaps--this is so colourful.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A mighty fine album which neatly sidesteps the tired alt.country tag, 'Feast Of Wire' is an engaging musical road trip that you wish would never end.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It gathers momentum slowly, making for a brew so quietly potent and pulsating with repressed energy you're almost afraid to leave the room while it's playing in case it explodes messily all over the walls.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A single-disc equal of "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below".... Even if it only sold 14 copies, it would still be the best record of the year.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The record that Bright Eyes fans have been praying for - carefully played, quietly honest, dripping with glorious poetry and painful insight, truly the work of utter genius.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Exquisitely detailed, you can well believe that this is an album many years in the making and one with twice those years of pain inscribed in its emotionally wracked songs.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
"Late Registration" feels more comfortable in its own skin than its predecessor.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
They've resurrected with this, their fourth album, the seemingly outmoded concept that with enough nurturing and faith, a band - and by extension it's audience - can grow into a beautiful thing.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A far more sonically ambitious statement than its predecessors, perfectly fusing organic sounds with production techniques that are usually the preserve of underground dance producers or R&B mavericks.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's startling that a commercial rock band could sound this blood-and-oxygen vital, this meaningful and mighty six albums into their career.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
No doubt Helplessness Blues will win Pecknold further fame and success, whether he likes it or not.- Dot Music
- Posted May 11, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Even if "Hypnotize" is simply more of the same, with SOAD operating at such astonishing creative and emotional heights, it'll still leave every other metal band on the planet scrabbling in the dust.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
That every track here reinforces that memory of him makes it an unexpectedly fitting tribute.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
What really makes this record engaging is that the simmering tension often chooses not to explode, yet somehow it works.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
They don't make a better sound than your average bunch of Sonic Youth fanatics, but they make it feel better, make it seem more important, more romantic almost.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The 'world-music' excursions of the previous 'Global - A Go Go' album are less in evidence and 'Streetcore' is a sharper, leaner collection for it.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A fine writer, possessed of a honeyed, deep, richly expressive voice, Ice-T may have been the rapper of choice for white suburban teens in big shorts, but that doesn't mean he or his music have ever been anything less than grippingly authentic. He might not have always walked hip hop's artistic frontline, but 'The Evidence' proves he should always be ranked among the music's great practitioners.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Overall, Smother is brilliant, and a record by a band with a big brain, a generous heart, hungry ears and a permanent erection.- Dot Music
- Posted May 12, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It may be epic, sprawling and too unwieldy a tool with which to prise open a place in the charts, but it's also nothing short of remarkable.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The quintessential much-loved cult band, they’ve yet to make an album their fans didn’t adore, but the good news is that “Oceans Apart” is one of their finest.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
With such songs as 'Southern Point,' which builds from shuffling, folk-jazz grooves into a squelchy, winding fairytale, breathtaking piano-pop anthem 'Two Weeks' and the towering drama of 'I Live with You,' we join the consensus: this is a record to swoon over.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
"Kicking Television" documents a band on fire and a frontman in clarion clear voice.- Dot Music
- Read full review
-
- Dot Music
- Read full review