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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    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    Cataloguing the perks of power he sounds as geeky as Mark Zuckerberg, and because grandiosity doesn't suit him deep down, the sonic luxuries of this world-beating return to form have no shot at the grace of The Collede Dropout or Late Registration. But because he's shrewd and large, he knows how to use his profits profits to induce Jay-Z, Pusha T, the RZA, Swizz Beats, and his boy Prince CyHi to admit and indeed complain that the whole deal is "f***in' ridiculous."
    • 93 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Some Girls [Deluxe Edition]
    Where the regular album is musically quirky and lyrically either risky ("Some Girls," "Far Away Eyes") or generalized ("Respectable," "Beast of Burden," damn right "When the Whip Comes Down"), the bonus disc is musically classic-Stones and lyrically small-scale.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
    This doesn't rock, and it shouldn't. But it rollicks, skanks, and two-steps just fine.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Channel Orange
    The musical craft on this almost sampleless album is so even-keeled that there's no song here as forgettable as "There Will Be Tears" or "Dust" either.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Good Kid, M.A.A.D City
    The atmospheric beats Dr. Dre and his hirelings lay under the raps and choruses establish musical continuity, shoring up a nervous flow that's just what Lamar's rhymes need.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Jama Ko
    Two melodies reach back centuries. Strong-voiced frontwoman Amy Sacko delivers the word. And although the ngoni is a mere lute, Kouyate gets more noises you want to hear out of his strings than any two jam-band hotshots you can name.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
    A succession of enjoyable songs with plenty to offer.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Like a Rose
    Slowly you'll realize just how rare it is for a major-label Nashville hopeful to put this much care into every song even if you're not convinced by the one that connects whipped cream and whips.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do
    An album that's damn catchy after all.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Greatest Story Never Told
    Saigon don't play. He's a social realist and a realist moralist who makes his seriousness work for him.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Same Trailer Different Park
    The finest lyricist to rise up out of conscious country since Miranda Lambert, if not Bobby Pinson himself.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bad as Me
    The three strongest tracks on Waits's most rocking album ever all feature not just Keith Richards but Tom's drummer son Casey.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Your Turn
    Six songs-with-lyrics, each with its own vocal signature although there's not a proper singer to be heard, and six instrumentals, some straight and some avant and one a loving yet crudely irreverent "Take Five" cover, converge toward the same goal: demolishing your musical illusions.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Undun
    What I get from the album as a whole isn't a feel for the fictional Redford Stephens. It's the pop refrains, Euro orchestrations, and simplified drumming absorbed by a sound that shows no sign of standing pat.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Kindred [EP]
    The six tracks divided evenly between his 20-minute 2011 return and his 30-minute 2012 stride forward, cohere almost seamlessly as the album they become when you don't have to turn any plastic over.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Grifter's Hymnal
    The follow-up is his party record, and deeper as a consequence, dark and hilarious and gone so fast you're too busy tapping your inner foot to cavil about pitch or timbre.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Annie Up
    A lark evolves into a business proposition as an album of 10 inspired three-minute songs eventuates in an album of 12 expert three-and-a-half-min​ute songs.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Suburbs
    With beats this straight and stolid, you'd better keep the anthems coming, and they do, almost.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Beautiful Africa
    she recorded her fourth album with Polly Jean Harvey adjutant John Parish, and musically they get results.... But non-Bamanan speakers may well find that her supple vocals are no more engaging should they follow her unremarkable spiritual tribulations in English or French.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bouger le Monde!
    Though capable lead vocalist Ricky Likabu and startling high tenor Theo Nzonza don't soar on record the way they do live, both lift audibly out of the wheeled conveyances from which a gang of polio survivors articulated their humanity and launched their inspired hustle.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Let England Shake
    Creating a suite of well-turned if unnecessarily understated antiwar songs, she's a gifted, strong-willed minor artist bent on shaking England in particular.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Body Talk
    From "Don't F***ing Tell Me What to Do" to "We Dance to the Beat," her songwriting in that vein is as strong as anybody's. Scattered across her three 2010 CDs is one great album. How I wish this was it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Who Kill
    She deploys her superb music to address an issue so pressing few can stand to think about it: who kills who?
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    How I Got Over
    I love sampled beats. But 90 percent of the time I'd rather ride Ahmir Thompson's hand, feet, and brain.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Kaleidoscope Dream
    He's major now, and musically, this locks in top to bottom.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Halcyon Digest
    Conceive it as DJ electronica that makes its point, starting all partial and halting before gathering itself to a properly modest climax. Except that it's played by a live band. And has OK lyrics. Smart, nothing‑-pretty darned intelligent.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Come Cry with Me
    Displaced Canadian "middle child" cultivates honky-tonk misery so extreme it dallies with the absurd.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Cosmogramma
    Part of its delight is how naturally the disparate parts fit together, but another part is how they add up to phantasmagoria if you let your attention wander (and don't be a tight-ass‑-you should).
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Stone Rollin'
    More Prince than Ray Parker Jr., he plays with himself to beat the band, and makes these 10 tracks bump and pulse.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Locked Down
    With one or two exceptions, this CD never lets up, epitomizing his biz-wise mastery of rhumba boogie and the second line. The two pop hits lead. The gris-gris tracks are songs not shtick.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Acid Rap
    Amusing though he and his yelp can be, I like him best when anxiety is a mood rather than a subject.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shaking the Habitual
    An exciting, multivalent Dreijer sibling showcase. Karin provides saving shades of humanity by exercising the vocal cords nature gave her. But Olof's imagination, sense of humor, and bent rebop carry the day.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    So Beautiful or So What
    The music is the mild, irregular folk-rock he's explored for decades, graced with global colors that sound as natural as that guitar.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Street Halo
    The six tracks divided evenly between his 20-minute 2011 return and his 30-minute 2012 stride forward, cohere almost seamlessly as the album they become when you don't have to turn any plastic over.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Essential Modern Records Collection
    There's too much of the same on Flair's 25-year-old R&B Dynamite, which omits "Shortnin' Bread Rock" and adds only the very early "Be My Lovey Dovey" to her A list, though it includes all the obvious keepers. I prefer this in part because it's shorter. Makes the voice easier to treasure.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Good News
    He surveys his doubt-ridden world with uneasy resolve and disillusioned, self-deprecating wit.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Old Ideas
    Give it its long chance and you'll find that Cohen's sense of humor alive and kicking from the first words.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent [EP]
    He wants to set his people on the right path and keeps thinking up explicit ways to say so. But none of them have gotten near that goal so far, not even theoretically, as they might if his skills included the ability to rise to actual hits, as opposed to pleasurable musicality, and also to sink to them.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Kaputt
    This is how the pleasure principle feels to an alienated unbeliever resigned to engaging the world on his own perverse terms.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Second Chance
    The quirky murmurs, yelps, and coos of his head voice, a high end of unequalled softness and give, sound responsive where Jackson's sound willed. There's a girl there, or just as likely a grown woman. And whether or not El seems manly to you, he's turning her on and vice versa.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    1991 [EP]
    Quick-tongued, lascivious, catchy, and delighted with itself, there hasn't been a more pleasurable record all year and probably won't be‑-not even by her.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Light Up Gold
    The hook on these 14 two-minute songs isn't tunes except occasionally. It's whichever of the two guys who "sing, if you must call it that" comes packing the most anxiety.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Treats
    That their most charming song by far is the straight George Clinton rip "Rill Rill," which leaves open the question of what they can do for an encore. I'll grant that minimalist bands always leave that question open if you'll grant that too often the answer is repeat themselves.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hell On Heels
    Chirping their expertly executed tunes, scorning the guitar swagger good old boys think makes them so sexy, they're a pop cartoon worth more than gold.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Nomad
    With an American bassist on half the tracks and a German drummer doubling Bombino's own guy half the time too, this is the hardest-rocking of the hard-traveling Tuareg guitarist's three distinct albums.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
    There are hooks here, folks, and literalism fan that I am, I say they're most effective on the strictly reportorial "Nearly Midnight, Honolulu" and the lost-love "Calling Cards."
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Eleven Eleven
    To call this the best record of his solo career isn't to claim it's great, it's to reckon that it's pretty darn good.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran
    Vocally, duet partners from 41-year-old Alison Krauss to 86-year-old Ray Price outdo themselves keeping the young powerhouse in check‑-only on the ill-advised showcase does Johnson get to show off.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Tape Two
    You'll soon feel how all those slight musical differentials hoist the group's collective spirit, and how courageously the music's depressive candor strengthens their will to be alive.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Modern Vampires of the City
    Each verse/chorus/bridge/​intro melody, each lyric straight or knotty, each sound effect playful or perverse (or both)‑-each is pleasurable in itself and aptly situated in the sturdy songs and tracks, so that the whole signifies without a hint of concept.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Strawberry
    There's more distortion, less naturalism.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Celebration Rock
    Kind of heartwarming that it's still possible for a young band to rock out with palpable joy about the pleasures, terrors, and life lessons of the road.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nostalgia, Ultra.
    His romantic laments are models of texture, respect, and profound loss, their beats subtle, seductive, weird, and seized like time.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    I Hate Music
    It's only natural that this is less of the same, and that in "Void" and "Staying Home" early on he's as bummed as a good grunge visionary should be.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Tempest
    How much you admire this record will depend on how redolent you find two of them: the quiet jeremiad "Scarlet Town" and the quieter love-triangle cut-'em-up "Tin Angel.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Control System
    He's just a gifted kid who likes his weed and his words, which he twists with palpable delight around sparse synth beats musical enough to layer on some delight of their own.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Blunderbuss
    White's nominal solo debut is as striking sonically as any album he's ever authorized.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Attack On Memory
    Congrats to Baldi for getting one right.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2
    With a push from Nas and a whoosh from Santigold and new life from their chorusing kids, the beats spritz and submarine in signature Beasties style as the rhymes claim contexts high-living and low-life.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Wounded Rhymes
    The meaning's in the music, which to her considerable benefit shares the widespread Stockholm suspicion that the distinction between pop and dance music isn't worth troubling yourself over, but is nonetheless pinned for appearance's sake to the shades of yearning that mark it verbally.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Fear Fun
    Though he dumbs up his songwriting half the time by fearing fun literally as regards forward motion, don't give up.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Majesty Shredding
    The hoarse, throaty voice knows its consonants, and the lyrics are full of the everyday breakdowns most of us survive into midlife and beyond.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Live: The Storyteller
    There are stories proper galore, plenty more than the three tracked as such, and every one is worth hearing‑-always as narrative and usually as music, where Snider's acquired drawl provides a species of musicality akin to that of prime rapping, especially over a vamp.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Wild Flag
    Bouncing off each other like loaded dice, they could make you cry once you're away long enough to think about it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Twenty-Five for the Rest of Our Lives
    More than half the songs sound effectively the same. Rocking, absolutely. Tighter, too. Tuneful, in their way.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    We're New Here
    The snatches of Scott-Heron's voice, cracked for sure but deeper than night nonetheless, delivers it from callow generalization and foregone conclusion.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Four the Record
    This does wind down into your basic quality country album.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Black Up
    Play loud. I can't speak to the listening practices of the post-illbient beatmakers whose tricks Palaceer Lazaro gathers together and improves on like he's just been waiting for the go-ahead from Tricky himself.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Nine Types of Light
    Beautiful, especially if you like your beauty grand. And beauty is good.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    This Is Country Music
    Horny for his wife but not horny enough, loving her like she's leaving because he thinks that might help, his songcraft is undiminished, and he remains the smartest and nicest guy in his world.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Europe
    Though her tempos have slowed half a turn, reducing the twee factor if that was a problem for you, her melodies are still very much there and her lyrics are sharp throughout.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sunken Condos
    You'll grow to love the queen of Bowlmor Lanes, the Jazz Age gangster who takes pride in his work, the souvenirs of dooms past rusting in the back of the sci-fi shop.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Words & Music by Saint Etienne
    Her male partners Bob Stanley and Peter Wiggs provide reliable disco-inflected pop or vice versa that the remixers on the optional bonus disc trick up with more wit and fidelity than we who avoid remixes sagely expect.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Fade
    Their quietest and most fragile album is also their most orchestrated.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Pattern + Grid World
    Part of its delight is how naturally the disparate parts fit together, but another part is how they add up to phantasmagoria if you let your attention wander.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Past Life Martyred Saints
    Insofar as she pretends her willful pose is the holy truth, she's annoying. What saves that pose is the willful power of a presentation less Courtney Love or Chan Marshall than PJ Harvey.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Love Me Back
    Although overdoing the soulful melodrama doesn't beat overdoing the suave cool as decisively as the retro-nuevo believe, the songwriting here is a big extra difference maker, with enough pop moves to lighten the overall mood.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    TSOL
    Yes, he nails those internal rhymes. Nobody's Rakim. But he earns the brag.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Monomania
    Consider me converted, at least until Bradford Cox lurches off in yet another direction.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Money Store
    Excoriating as Burnett and Hill are, the real abrasive is Flatlander.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sing the Delta
    DeMent craves stuff she can "see and touch," but her songwriting makes do just fine with feeling.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    En Yay Sah
    These grooves vary structurally‑-hooked​ by a bass drone, an insistent drum pattern, some fetching keyb. And they always move.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Yuck
    This array of whomping exotica reflects its creator's appetite for any Third World dance movement he can get his ears on, including such new ones on me as kuduro, barefoot, and -- from the mysterious depths of the District of Columbia -- Moombahton​!
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Transcendental Youth
    Matthew E. White's horn charts are the musical development Darnielle has in store for us. But the dealmaker is Jon Wurster's spare, inescapable drumming.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Replica
    Chugging, grinding, crackling, swelling, bubbling, babbling, these tracks don't sound like part of the natural world, but they do sound cognizant of the natural world.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sorry To Bother You
    Boots Riley has at his disposal a rich, seldom-tapped seam of scathing rhetoric and concrete metaphor and fleshes out leftist analysis with humanist muscle and poetic integument.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Kenny Dennis LP
    The narrative matters on this album, and as always, newcomers should hear Dennehy first. But Cohn is one of a kind, and he don't stop.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Section.80
    Just when you're thinking not bad at all, come some songs.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Lucky Shiner
    After I got over my high I began to feel the rest of the album was a letdown, but far from it--just lesser variations on his trick of deploying short samples as beats without settling for staccato. Kind of like in rock and roll even if you'd never know it to listen to it--only to think about it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Tassili
    Not "desert blues." Sadder than blues‑-too sad to be merely calming.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    A Treasure
    What it sounds like is the redemption of Young's lost mid-'80s‑-the countryish album Old Ways was supposed to be, neither rote like Re-ac-tor nor static like that sacred cow Harvest.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Everything in Between
    It's a punk album with a difference, which at this late date is the only kind you can count on for a thrill.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Call Me Sylvia
    They add muscle to their sound and lose a smidgen of edge in their writing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    12 Bit Blues
    After more time than anyone from either camp will be inclined to give it, the album takes on a compelling, sui generis sonic identity, at least for someone from the blues side.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Run Fast
    The riot godmotherrr commands pretty much the same old skinny soprano, only with soft edges that sound tender or thoughtful sometimes.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    100 Proof
    American Idol haunts this artistic breakthrough.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Older Than My Old Man Now
    After he goes down on his knees and prays, as he promises he will, this album will be Exhibit A on his application.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    African Electronic Music 1975-1982
    Though half are also on La Condition Masculine, which is generally deemed Bebey's best album, this selection is hookier from the just-released "New Track," whose subject is white starchy foods, to "The Coffee Cola Song," whose subject is the cash economy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Coexist
    They add up to a song cycle with a happy ending--the joy of which may grow in wisdom or crumble back toward nothingness tomorrow.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Child Ballads
    Yet subtle fiddle, accordion, pump organ, and especially bass liven up the acoustic guitars just a touch, and both Mitchell's fluting, childlike lead and Hamer's mellower follow avoid purist sanctity as well as modernizing pizzazz.
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