Expert Witness (MSN Music)'s Scores

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For 232 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 98% higher than the average critic
  • 0% same as the average critic
  • 2% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 17.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 91
Highest review score: 100 Run Fast
Lowest review score: 70 Brighter
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 232 out of 232
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 232
  3. Negative: 0 out of 232
232 music reviews
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Back on Time
    For once drum'n'bass's impossible Conlon Nancarrow beats, which Plug does pretty well with on those EPs, are the bed where the real music crinkles, crashes, chimes, swoops, swells, squiggles, gurgles, cracks wise, and just generally hooks you.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Long.Live.A$AP
    Rocky raps over the music without saying a damn thing older, meaner, and sharper rappers haven't said before. Then, bang, three dynamite songs.... Then, aww, three tracks that could be more obvious by half.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    An Argument with Myself [EP]
    The first three songs on this EP are strong, the fourth misty, the fifth sweet and slight, but all know melody and all fill out a portrait of a young man your daughter should only bring home to mother.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pura Vida Conspiracy
    Re-examining his past, he imagines a future you can hum in your mind.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Generation Indigo
    The four humanist protest songs she rolls out just before an unnecessarily dreamy closer seem so unforced you feel for all those who have striven so hard to do nothing more. Ari, Viv, Exene‑-because sisterhood is powerful, this one's for you.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Vicki Leekx
    Whether she's singing it for her penniless sisters or her affluent self is impossible to tell. That's why they call her provocative. Also, um, controversial.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Lonely At the Top
    On his fourth and least austere album ventures into songlike territory without ever enlisting a vocalist, although vocal sounds do enter the mix.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Cole World: The Sideline Story
    He's worth the shot Jay couldn't resist giving him. But he's still not comfortable enough or clever enough.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Onwards to the Wall [EP]
    The placeholder EP is blunter and slighter than the album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Obscurities
    Nine seven-inches etc. plus five previously unreleaseds including three remnants of an abandoned musical obviously add up to an intentional hodgepodge. Still, I wonder whether the intention was to backload.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Mature Themes
    Mature my patootie--and that's a good thing.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Rave On Buddy Holly
    The way his heedless old songs liberate cautious young professionals lays to rest any doubts as to whether he belongs in the same pantheon as George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin. He just bequeathed us a smaller book.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Dreamer
    As usual the songs come clear eventually.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Grand Theatre, Vol. 1
    Soon Hammond's "You Smoke Too Much" is fitting right in. As together as can be expected, and as Miller requests with a hint of desperation, "Please Hold On While the Train Is Moving."
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Baseball Project, Vol. 2: High and Inside
    These 13 excellent songs are sufficiently specialized to make you realize how classic Volume 1 was--and what a theme statement "Past Time" was.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Nursing Home
    Fortunately, they also do what all maturing s.-p.o.w.t.a. wish they could do‑-write better songs. I noticed the guitar roar first and the tunes second. But I stayed for the lyrics.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    A Turn in the Dream-Songs
    Try "Cult Boyfriend," one of the funnier and more philosophical of the many reflections on romantic frustration this lifetime bohemian's cult career has afforded.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Between the Times and the Tides
    Just the album you'd hope from a thoughtful 56-year-old after his band of 30 years breaks up.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Folila
    This never takes off the way Welcome to Mali did. But it does hang in there, and rewards attention.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Working in Tennessee
    Now 74 and short half a lung, he's not making the best music of his life, just the best albums.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    51
    True, the record shudders to a virtual halt when the ecumenical auteur turns beatmaker midway through, and some may judge the rhymes irresponsibly playful.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Heist
    I find only the alcoholic's confession "Neon Cathedral" too much, and that one's counteracted by the relapser's confession "Starting Over," just as "Sayin' `That's poetry, it's so well-spoken,' stop it" counteracts his art talk. He's especially good on old cars and old clothes.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Tripper
    Less dynamic and more ruminative than The Ruminant Band, here are 10 songs and a poky instrumental for country hippies manque and other shaggy folk down on the little luck they ever had.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    False Priest
    Some will surely find this preachy, yucky, or technologically compromised. I'm just happy I can say amen.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Coal Miner's Daughter: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn
    Lynn still owns the songs, but she's pleased as pie to lend them out, and they come back to her lovingly countrified even when the borrower is Hayley Williams, of Paramore and Franklin, Tennessee, who acts naturally over an acoustic guitar and should give Jack White lessons.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Mountaintops
    Their seventh album opens with a simulated big-pop anthem and maintains that size and momentum without compromising their ability to play the new songs live.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Falling Off the Sky
    It's like H&S [Holsapple & Stamey] never went away.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Wack Album
    Struggling for cred as aging rappers will, they stumble occasionally. Some of these ideas obviously seemed funnier when they brainstormed them.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    What We Saw from the Cheap Seats
    Many of these songs are merely bemused, and when she revises "I'm just a soul whose intentions are good," all she achieves is a different singalong from the one you expected.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Light of the Sun
    I agree, men are dogs. But it gets my radar in a lather when this loving, lovable woman structures her 2007 album along a break-up's narrative arc and then four years later the same thing happens twice‑-only the first guy leaves her with a boychild who, let's be candid, she loves more unreservedly than she has any grown man on record.
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