Dusted Magazine's Scores
- Music
For 3,082 reviews, this publication has graded:
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53% higher than the average critic
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5% same as the average critic
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42% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.1 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score: | Ys | |
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Lowest review score: | Rain In England |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,474 out of 3082
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Mixed: 574 out of 3082
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Negative: 34 out of 3082
3082
music
reviews
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- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
Their joint compositions are undeniably atmospheric, evoking south of the border drama on “Pray For Rain” and surging apprehension on “Something Will Come.” But they’re also as rigorously structured as any popular entry in a hymnal or hit parade. If you like for your tunes to tell you what they’re going to say, say it, and then tell you what they said, the soothing “Life And Casualty” and the white-knuckled “Hurricane Light” are equally at your service, and they’re not alone.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Aug 27, 2021
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What’s more effective is that the band have become more skilled at writing for chord changes rather than just riffs. They don’t exactly back down from the effect of the latter when they go there, but the attention to harmony gives the whole much more heft than it otherwise might have. The heft is certainly in the physicality the music achieves in its peak moments. But it’s also in the fractured beauty of this music, its emotional catharsis, the beauty of something lost perhaps.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Aug 25, 2021
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Whether it’s the soaring psychedelia of “Paper Fog” and “Pigs,” the more straightforwardly folky “Bird of Paradise” and “Vegas Knights,” or even the delayed fuzz-guitar squall of “Another Story From the Center of the Earth,” the pedal steel is there, and so is a songwriting sensibility that does feel very personal and emotionally powerful even though there’s not a lot of comprehensible narrative.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Aug 25, 2021
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Hayter’s voice admirably performs that complexity on Sinner Get Ready; it’s a beautiful instrument that will fill you with terrible woe, and then terrible wonder.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Aug 23, 2021
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Refuge clocks in at over an hour, an hour in which, as stated earlier, not a whole lot of stuff happens. And yet maybe it takes that long to clear out the buzz and chatter, to slow down, to focus on one sound at a time and to find a stillness. It’s too long, it’s too slow, it’s too eventless until it’s not, and then you’re there.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Aug 18, 2021
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The momentum picks up a notch on “Whitewaterside,” in which O’Connell recounts standing in cold water, watching the ripples and admiring the quiet stillness of night. The stage is immediately set for a stark, reflective listening experience, with nature as a focus, rendered with zen-like clarity.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Aug 16, 2021
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Overall, this new chapter in Liars’ fascinating story is perhaps their most easily digestible for years, synthesizing many laudable qualities of different chapters of the band’s career.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Aug 4, 2021
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This is a memory album that is touched with love but almost entirely free of cheap nostalgia. It comes from a long way away, using everything Dacus has learned since to capture her experiences clearly, with art but without too much ornamentation.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jul 29, 2021
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One of the most beguiling and rewarding Six Organ of Admittance albums — 39-minutes of synth ballads, cracked space-glam and 1980s-glossed guitar overload.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jul 28, 2021
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At 44 minutes, Life, and Another is lengthy compared to many new albums, but its 16 diverse tracks all earn their inclusion, each piece of the tapestry finely crafted and lovingly stitched into place. Few albums released so far this year have felt quite so magical and transportive, carried along by a mischievous dream-like narrative.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jul 22, 2021
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I Know I’m Funny Haha is not so very different from this last album from Webster, but it feels more assured and confident, and the subject matter is more upbeat.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jul 22, 2021
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Like Endless Boogie, Birds of Maya knows how to wring every sweaty drop out of a heavy groove. The basic foundation, thunderous drums, a gut-checking oscillation of bass notes, picks up various other elements as it goes on — mumbled spoken word, eruptive guitar solos, flailing drum fills. It is always the same but always changing, and you can get lost in it.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jul 21, 2021
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Mirror II finds The Goon Sax deep in the lovely, perplexing mess of life, embracing the pain and pleasure, savoring the taste of change, finding inner strength and the consolations of a collective that allows individuality to flourish and supports it with an empathy which seems so sorely lacking in our world.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jul 21, 2021
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The album is beautifully sequenced overall. Sometimes the transitions purposefully jar and provoke—elsewhere they’re seamless, prolonging, elongating a motif.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jul 8, 2021
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Layers of clever reference resolve into songs that resonate emotionally. They’re smarter than most songs and better played, but they also have that elusive way of landing, so that they seem to tell you more about life and persistence and suffering than what’s in the words.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jul 6, 2021
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The whole thing took shape with hardly any notice and minimal rehearsal, across language and cultural barriers and in front of an audience, but nonetheless catches a wave and holds onto it in a very intuitive way. Probably if the players thought too hard about what they were doing, they’d lose the thread, but they don’t. It’s a fast ride and a jam and well worth experiencing.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jul 2, 2021
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FACS knows how and when to apply the exact amount of pressure to engage pain points and pleasure centers.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jun 16, 2021
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There are moments here that feel like being carried aloft by a parade, and moments that feel like the jail doors shutting. There are pools of calm and surges of impossible triumph.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jun 10, 2021
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Though they are spare and though there are a lot of these songs (17), the album doesn’t sag. A restless energy courses through them. Spike-y, unsentimental observations keep them engaging.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jun 10, 2021
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Penelope Three spends its 35-minute runtime exploring this fertile intersection between haunting folk and anxious electronica, creating a deep, resonant space that’s beautiful, eerie and unsettling.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Jun 2, 2021
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Scatterbrain is a record of stocktaking but also of hope, at 32 minutes perhaps a lesser entry in The Chills’ canon, it is reminder that one of the great shapers and survivors of the antipodean sound still has much to offer.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted May 26, 2021
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Jurado’s records are always slow burners, but this minimalist one takes an especially long time to catch fire. It sounds like less than it is for half a dozen spins and then suddenly rears up, fully-formed and out of hiding. It may not be as mesmerizing as the Richard Swift triad, but The Monster That Hated Pennsylvania is its own odd, quiet, disconcerting triumph.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted May 21, 2021
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There are two distinct types of songs on The Power of Rocks: the herky-jerky, dada-ist contraptions described in the first two paragraphs and a sort of luminous dream pop that might remind you of the Green Child.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted May 19, 2021
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The band is very good, good enough to pull off this edge-of-your-seat flirtation with breakdown.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted May 14, 2021
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This isn’t a case of trying to reinvent the wheel so much as it is reveling in just how very good you’ve gotten a making wheels in the first place.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted May 13, 2021
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The Danish four-piece tapped Spaceman 3’s Sonic Boom for production on this uncharacteristically uplifting endeavor, and you can see the uneasy alliance of the bright colors of Peter Kember’s recent work mixing into the half melted, slushy desolation of Iceage’s aesthetic.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted May 12, 2021
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The recording shows little evidence of how acoustically challenging the glass-walled structure can be; every element registers clearly so that the music yields where it needs to and slams where it must. And slam it does, with big beats and massed choruses that bring the messages down hard and certain.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted May 5, 2021
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Hayashi’s eclecticism gives the album the feel of an anthology and although his beat making is terrific and provides a thematic backbone, the real interest here is what’s going on around, beneath and between. If his wish were to destabilize and upend expectations, then full marks, but too often he seems to retire behind his tools and allow his technical skill to overshadow his considerable artistry.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted May 5, 2021
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Endless Arcade will do nothing for the people who wish they would let it rip again one more time—but it’s fine, well-crafted, intricately plotted mid-tempo rock. The edges, if they were ever there to begin with, have been sanded off, and it’s all rather noddingly pleasant.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Apr 27, 2021
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Having the backstory on Walker’s path to sobriety isn’t necessary to appreciate Course In Fable. There’s enough allure in Walker and guitarist Bill MacKay’s elaborate latticework of glazed melodies and modal chords that call to mind McEntire’s other band The Sea and Cake, and how drummer Ryan Jewell floats through it all with loose, jazzy flourishes.- Dusted Magazine
- Posted Apr 23, 2021
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