Fact Magazine (UK)'s Scores
- Music
For 448 reviews, this publication has graded:
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45% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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51% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.3 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: | The Seer | |
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Lowest review score: | >Album Title Goes Here< |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 330 out of 448
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Mixed: 109 out of 448
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Negative: 9 out of 448
448
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
It’s not there yet, but Beast Mode is an excellent place to start.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Dec 22, 2015
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- Critic Score
This is not the moment where he will become a superstar, but it’s a promising beginning to what should be a very long career.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Nov 13, 2015
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The theme of pining which was thread throughout her debut mixtape Cut 4 Me is still present here, but more pointed and poetic this time around. Each song beams with growth.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Oct 8, 2015
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Sep 29, 2015
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Ultimately, Beauty Behind the Madness is a heftier House of Balloons. Its weight is carried in the access to better production and drugs, and what the album truly accomplishes is proving that The Weeknd has never been wretched.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Sep 1, 2015
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DS2 is a relentless, dud-free hour that adds in most of his recent highlights to complete the story of his last year.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 21, 2015
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Thundercat sprung The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam on us unexpectedly, but in its surprise and brevity is the awakening of his voice.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 30, 2015
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 29, 2015
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Prurient’s masterpiece.... Frozen Niagara Falls is also one of Prurient’s most accessible works, with Fernow’s arrangements constantly pulling you along.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 18, 2015
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Its subtle nuances reveal themselves with repeated headphone listens, and though it could use a bit of a trim, there’s plenty here to entice the listener to just lay back, lose yourself, and float.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Apr 17, 2015
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This is a Chinese whispers record, one that has been passed through enough cultural and aesthetic filters as to make it utterly meaningless.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Apr 7, 2015
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Calling the album “ambitious” doesn’t capture the order of magnitude with which Lamar has expanded his scope, as he moves from the singular to the plural without ever straying from the personal.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Mar 25, 2015
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13 Moons holds a broader appeal than some of his more abstract or challenging LPs. That said, there’s nothing particularly straightforward about the album.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Mar 11, 2015
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This honest emotional core is something that Vincent has always put into his music, but rarely has it felt quite so effortless as it does here. It’s the kind of album you could imagine non-house and techno fans getting behind quite easily, and shows that his appeal shouldn’t just be limited to vinyl collectors.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Mar 11, 2015
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The combination of pop and EDM is nothing new, but rarely has it felt quite so enjoyable as it does here.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Mar 11, 2015
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It’s Too Late is a woozy, scattershot thing--Late Night Drake, if you will.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Feb 18, 2015
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If Goldenheart was a monumental but monolithic edifice of an album, Blackheart is a shape-shifting house of mirrors in permanent flux, light where its predecessor was heavy, welcoming instead of forbidding.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Feb 9, 2015
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James never really follows it through.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Feb 5, 2015
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Feb 2, 2015
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Panda Bear’s fourth full-length is a mature album of peace and reckoning, one that weaves ghostly textures, plumbs watery depths, but ultimately happens on something comforting and tranquil.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jan 29, 2015
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Dec 19, 2014
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- Critic Score
Its complex web of emotion and sound make for one of the most confounding yet gripping albums made in 2014; while it isn’t without its flaws, it captures the zeitgeist in a way that few other albums have managed this year, and has both revelers and detractors speaking passionately.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Dec 18, 2014
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In Visa, Ripatti has constructed an album evocative of one extremely specific place--and it’s a place which couldn’t have been accessed by anybody but him.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Dec 15, 2014
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Drums are present, but they often function as little more than pensive timekeepers. All the better to frame those tunes – artful, delicate things, rarely saying more or less than they need to.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Dec 4, 2014
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As its title suggests, Quixotism’s narrative arc is obscure, and as such the album contains no real highlights or low points; instead, each part maintains a discrete identity of its own, serving both as groundwork for each subsequent part and the basis for its counterpoint.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Dec 1, 2014
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Bestial Burden, remarkably, achieves exactly what it sets out to do: to turn the gory inner mechanics of the body outward, and lay bare its unpredictable capacity for self-destruction.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Nov 19, 2014
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Even if his chops as a producer aren’t in question, the writing on Xen is too patchy to fully realise Ghersi’s ambitions. Still, it’s hardly lacking in ideas.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Nov 10, 2014
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Ruins is one of her finest works, full to the brim with emotion in spite of the aching space at its heart.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Nov 10, 2014
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Nov 7, 2014
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- Critic Score
Black Metal is an exceptional record. It is a stronger, more complete statement even than that seen on The Redeemer, primarily because it lays bare its own contradictions.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Nov 3, 2014
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On 1989, she makes mountains out of molehills, but this approach feels one part the ironic distance of the digital generation, one part sincere embracing of the impact of life’s speedbumps. Nothing could be more 2014.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Oct 30, 2014
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It’s the sheer energy on display that pushes Run The Jewels 2 through. The production is popping throughout, funky as hell, and often dotted with unexpected twists and turns.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Oct 28, 2014
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The result is a curious mix: a subtle and often beautiful record about not very much at all.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Oct 17, 2014
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Soused may not be the best record either Sunn O))) or Walker have released in the last few years--those accolades go to Monoliths & Dimensions and The Drift, respectively--but it’s still an endlessly compelling work, the match between singular solo artist and the pivotal group every bit as thrilling as you’d expect.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Oct 16, 2014
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Aquarius is quite a complicated and accomplished album in that it’s amplified the potential of the mixtapes, making Tinashe into an unquestionable contender for real popstar status, without sacrificing the weirdo introspective soul that made them so special.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Oct 16, 2014
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It’s a record that masks its lack of content under swathes of super-hip production tics.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Oct 14, 2014
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Oct 13, 2014
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Each track says something different, but with his honest subject matter and his unique arrangements constantly in focus, Snaith never loses his way.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Oct 7, 2014
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Adrian Thaws is not without its moments.... Elsewhere, it’s a story of misfiring ideas and botched experiments.- Fact Magazine (UK)
Posted Oct 3, 2014 -
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Too Bright creates a captive audience in its effusive refusal to let you look away.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Sep 30, 2014
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- Critic Score
Rich and disorientating, KOCH accesses a different pace of life--or rather several, bewilderingly, all at once.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Sep 25, 2014
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Punish, Honey intrigues, but it’s the prospect of where Seb Gainsborough goes next that’s really fascinating.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Sep 22, 2014
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Ital has finally found a place to call home, and it suits him very well indeed.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Sep 17, 2014
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It’s solid, proficient, fun--not quite transcendent, but, the sort of left turn that feels natural and uncontrived.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Sep 11, 2014
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Sep 8, 2014
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By and large, Overjoyed works when it rocks--the snarling chugga-chugga of “Do It Nation”, the nursery-rhyme feedback shredding of “Overjoyed And Thankful”--and falls a little flat when it doesn’t.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Sep 3, 2014
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Shabazz Palaces deserve credit where it’s due for building their sound outward; if Black Up established their status as hip-hop outliers, then Lese Majesty solidifies their place in the pantheon of rap’s oddball geniuses.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Aug 27, 2014
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Drone albums are by their nature immersive, but it’s rare to come across one so tempestuous, evocative and compelling from start to finish as Wilderness of Mirrors.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Aug 27, 2014
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Aug 26, 2014
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How you find Document And Eyewitness will depend on your appetite for artistic bloody mindedness. Still, if you’re a fan of Wire, you’ll know it can be moreish.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Aug 25, 2014
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- Critic Score
There are moments of sheer beauty and reckless fun all over this record, but there’s a looming question mark over whether or not listeners will feel motivated to pick their way through the expanse to enjoy them.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Aug 25, 2014
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It’s a creditable enough compilation as a whole, although a couple of relative oldies, Burial’s ‘Shell Of Light’ (from 2007’s Untrue) and DJ Rashad’s ‘Only One’ (from last year’s Double Cup) rather make me question the aims of the exercise.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Aug 20, 2014
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Aug 20, 2014
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As with any major pop album, LP1 is a crew effort, there’s no doubt as to whose hand is on the rudder.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Aug 12, 2014
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La Roux’s march may has slowed to a stroll, but she proves here that she can captivate at any pace.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Aug 4, 2014
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There’s no pandering to musical tastes, no whimsical experimentation, but instead real unity between a song’s musicality and meaning.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 30, 2014
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Production-wise, the album sounds as if it could have easily slipped from any number of top tier rap labels, yet with Gates at the helm, the journey is deeper, darker and far more invigorating than anything from the last couple of years with a Rozay, Em or Hov co-sign.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 25, 2014
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The sounds that Dall brings to bear here are often gorgeous, a sun-dappled, analogue-soft electronica of rippling synths and glinting percussion that recalls--and sometimes strongly--the atmospheric IDM of the mid-90s.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 25, 2014
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This album is a good example of how to revive twenty-year-old sample relics and construct new, wildly dilapidated material from them like they were so much reclaimed timber.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 24, 2014
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To praise To Rococo Rot can be to undersell them; their most attractive qualities, their sense of minimalism and simplicity and concision, are hardly the sort of things you bellow from rooftops. And yet, it works, and beautifully.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 23, 2014
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Whether or not stadium pop is to everyone’s taste, this is it in its smartest and most human form.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 16, 2014
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 15, 2014
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In My World is a counterpoint to McQueen’s recent work: while the introduction of vocals reveals another side to Matthewdavid, the humour--too often overplayed--is its weakness element.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 14, 2014
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By and large, the songs on Why Do the Heathen Rage? are brilliantly executed hybrids that manage to subvert received ideas even once you’ve processed the album’s premise, thanks to superb transposing and Daniel’s knack for lashing together motifs from utterly different styles.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 8, 2014
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It’s an honest album, and while you may not skip back to all of it, its jagged pieces all have their place.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 8, 2014
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Even given the sheer wealth of variety and detail Fhloston Paradigm crams in, it’s never lofty or inaccessible; instead, it both upholds an electronic music convention even as it carves its own singular niche.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 7, 2014
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It does occasionally miss the mark, but that there are any hits to speak of at all shows that Eno and Hyde have a good deal more to offer than the uninspiring gruel of their debut.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jul 7, 2014
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The album’s periods of gestation and decomposition so outweigh its moment of flowering that a full listen is much more a chore than a pleasure.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 30, 2014
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Krell’s most complete album to date: not because it exactly answers the question of where his position is in relation to pop--nor the question of the title, nor any questions at all--but because it perfectly captures that oscillation that has always been at the centre of his work.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 24, 2014
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It’s all genre-splicing and too little genre-defining, and I can’t help but think that Martyn, with both his musical knowledge and his production chops, is capable of something better.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 23, 2014
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Packed with bold ideas and striking new forms, Da Mind Of Traxman Volume 2 is as good a testament as any to the ongoing vitality of footwork.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 20, 2014
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In The Lonely Hour is an album made by an artist who spent years waiting to be famous, but when he got there, found that he didn’t actually have that much to say.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 19, 2014
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Ominousness is woven into the fabric of Until Silence, where beauty and bleakness coexist synergistically, as though it’s impossible to have one without the other.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 18, 2014
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With Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey remains a singular figure in music, sounding (and addressing the idea of authenticity) like no one else.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 17, 2014
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An uncharacteristically difficult end to a record that’s not quite a paradigm smasher, but a must-hear for anyone who likes their hip-hop weird and with teeth.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 16, 2014
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Cutler’s music hasn’t tended to concern itself with tension so much as otherwordly harmony. When he introduces a bit of friction--between the real and the imagined, the grit of life and the sheen of fantasy--the results are all the more seductive.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 16, 2014
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There’s very little sense of a uniting personality, and you’re left wondering how genuinely great an album H&LA might make, how much more they would feel like a band rather than a conceptual project, if they cut loose as much as they do on ‘The Key’.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 13, 2014
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Their music is about 40 per cent less exciting shorn from the lurid splatter of their videos, but music in 2014 is a more interesting place for their presence.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 12, 2014
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It succeeds as an exploration of bodies, but more specifically, of the kinds of tension created by the dichotomies between them and within them, throughout an intimately crafted pop record that treads that careful line between wallowing and pleasure in the way that all the very best pop records do.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Jun 10, 2014
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You could even argue that To Be Kind is Gira’s first rock ‘n’ roll album, and though Swans’ records are invariably seedy, To Be Kind is downright sexy, tender like a snake and surprisingly intimate.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 30, 2014
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Despite her Instagram and “turnt-up” references, the bounce brought to the album by of-the-moment hitmakers like MikeWiLLMadeIt and Hit-Boy and her undeniably personal subject matter, the record just doesn’t have the same candid, bold edge that characterised Beyonce’s huge statement.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 30, 2014
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Government Plates is sometimes just incoherent.... But in the end these are minor quibbles.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 29, 2014
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If his aim was to give musical form to the eastern DRC’s “unnerving beauty and unflinching horror”, then A U R O R A is a dazzling success.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 29, 2014
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The result is an album of experimental electronic pop that, sadly, doesn’t do much of any consequence, sounding both big-studio glossy and curiously cheap, busy but largely flailing around in the hope of finding an interesting direction.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 27, 2014
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In Conflict is an impressive record of worthy content, but the day he finds a way to reconcile his musical chops to his pop ear, then Owen Pallett will surely make his masterpiece.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 21, 2014
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Generally the album hits all the right notes, with great vocals and solid sounds, but at times you may be overpowered by the sickly-sweet nature of the beast.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 14, 2014
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Indie Cindy plays just like one of Black’s solo efforts, but with better session players: good, yes, but never great.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 13, 2014
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Possibly, some will leave Luminous disappointed that The Horrors haven’t pulled off another quantum leap, but by slowing down and bedding into their sound, they’ve made a record that feels both studied and instinctual, elevated and elemental, and that’s no mean feat.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 9, 2014
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More sweeping and grand than any of their previous records, the trio’s fourth LP is by far their most cinematic.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 8, 2014
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Bécs is seldom unapproachable; it’s also his style to leave just enough beauty poking through the seams.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 6, 2014
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 5, 2014
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The lyrics are at best perfunctory, at worst an insult to anyone who isn’t a total nork.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted May 1, 2014
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There’s often a disconnect between the production and what’s going on vocally, the two elements at times even working at cross purposes.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Apr 29, 2014
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Plenty of new producers are doing interesting things on the outer fringes of the style--Filter Dread is probably Runge’s closest contemporary--but nobody sounds quite like this.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Apr 25, 2014
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By and large, this is a downbeat record, one suggesting maybe Albarn recently had a listen to ‘Mr Robinson’s Quango’ and decided never to do ‘whimsical’ again. Still, there’s a couple of more upbeat numbers that work in neat counterpoint.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Apr 24, 2014
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I Shall Die Here is a bracing listen, certainly no easier than The Body’s conventional albums, and in its application of intense studio treatment, at times perhaps even more intense. But it is also a whole lot better than The Body’s 2013 album for Thrill Jockey, Christ, Redeemers.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Apr 23, 2014
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Z is billed as an EP, but that undersells the completion and cohesion of these 10 songs. Her voice may be gentle, the songs just left-of-center, but SZA’s lyrics demand attention.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Apr 22, 2014
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Future’s lyrical sensitivity wouldn’t work without the album’s pitch-perfect production.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Apr 22, 2014
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Weird Drift is a little laid back, lacking the vertiginous drama that you find in the best synth-pop, and I’m more inclined to stick with another recent Planet Mu foray into the form, Miracle’s overlooked Mercury.- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Apr 18, 2014
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- Fact Magazine (UK)
- Posted Apr 17, 2014
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