Drowned In Sound's Scores

  • Music
For 4,812 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 Parades
Lowest review score: 0 And Then Boom
Score distribution:
4812 music reviews
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It'd be reductive to try and describe a timeless album like Smother as a step up from its two predecessors, or even as a surefire Mercury contender--although it is, on both counts.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It is a stunning and ambitious piece of work; one for the ages.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Really, the only fault of this record is that its most arrestingly beautiful minute is its final one: everything that comes before, however brilliant it is at the time, pales once that choir swells, just for a few too-fleeting seconds.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Depending on your taste for that kind of home-brewed, distinctively British weirdness, I’m All Ears is either a massive leap forwards or a sad lurch towards the middle-ground.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In other words, it’s exactly what a Pavement retrospective should be - a heavily slanted, palpably enchanted slab of richly flawed anarcho-pop.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bitte Orca isn't a record that'll reduce many to tears, except perhaps of awe. But when something's so astonishing in every other respect, we can allow for that.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Devotion contains just enough variety to make for an enticing listen.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    When the band truly comes together, there's a lightness of touch and a winning intimacy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Overall, Journal For Plague Lovers is a strident comeback that would have been a worthy direct successor to "The Holy Bible" had circumstances been different.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    There are moments of ‘saneness and plainness’ on the album, but these are only short, giddy moments. The great bulk of material on it plays under the assertion that one conclusion, or one reading of a situation is impossible. Great works contain multitudes, and that is exactly what you’ll get here.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the first spin this is a set of highly listenable light pop tunes. However, this is by no means insubstantial and some real gems begin to reveal themselves.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In spite of all of this [still packed with his slow tempos, slurred sadness, and dour imagery], Grass, Branch and Bone stands as one of the easiest to inhabit of all of Joyner’s albums. Happily, it’s also as rewarding to explore as anything he’s done.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All Things Under Heaven is on another level.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Truth be told the record is hard to quantify - it's so dense and layered that attempting to describe why it works just makes it seem contrived, while it's success should measured by the fact that it sounds anything but.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It’s got something for everyone, providing everyone is at least a little fucked in the head.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    It's an absolute must-buy release.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    He filters these gifts of poetry and keen observation through his bruised, romantic outlook, into a fully-formed album that sounds as if it was always in there, waiting to see the light of day. Or the darkness.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Celebration Day is a fitting title: it's an enchanting tribute to the eternal power of rock, no matter the age of the music or the performers themselves.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    At most, half the songs on this album are capable of successfully fusing Finn’s compelling narratives with rather less than impressive instrumentation for an effect that’s worth some merit. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t ‘hold’ for the remainder.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Despite the running time, it should be noted that Pure Comedy moves at a clip; only ‘The Memo’ and its cold boardroom-speak textures belabour the narrative a little too much on a record that’s all about stretching out an exact, unwavering thread.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ys
    It’s a vivid and beautiful painting that you can walk into; a magic window into another world that I'd be happy to get lost in, and never come back.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There really is very little out there like this, and Demdike is a very acquired taste. If you've got the stomach for it then Elemental is their banquet - 18 nightmares you'll want to revisit.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Struggles to offer the same level of excitement that previous Jaxx albums provided.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Far from being just a gifted synthesiser experimenter, then, Sarah Davachi is increasingly establishing herself as a multi-faceted explorer of the many liminal terrains of minimalist music. Gave in Rest is a work of disarmingly simple, yet often extremely profound, beauty.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anyone who owns the 1992 Sub Pop compilation The Way of the Vaselines might be thinking there's nothing for them here, but beyond the re-mastering adding significant depth to Dum Dum (the difference it's made to the EPs is negligible to my admittedly rather damaged ears) there's also a second disc of previously unreleased material.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    These 17 vignettes glow with Cold War paranoia, picking up where Threads, the most scarring piece of TV ever made, left off. It might also be the duo’s most accomplished album yet--and that’s coming from someone unable to remove the Hi Scores LP from his stereo.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Much like Actor, it's the contrast of tendernesses in both the red-raw and Elvis senses of the word, that marks St. Vincent's music out as something more sophisticated and enthralling than it might first appear.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    His third studio album, Astroworld, feels like the grand opening of a vision that took a half-decade to perfect, still using the same psychedelic synth warps, diamond-cut drums, and reptilian hooks that initially skyrocketed him to stardom.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Far from being disappointing, then, New Bermuda is comfortably good enough to blow even Deafheaven’s sceptics away.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    If the results are as finely crafted as The Harrow & The Harvest, she can take as long as she likes with the next one.