For 1,599 reviews, this publication has graded:
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62% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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35% 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: | Chemtrails Over the Country Club | |
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Lowest review score: | The New Game |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 1,361 out of 1599
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Mixed: 176 out of 1599
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Negative: 62 out of 1599
1599
music
reviews
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- Critic Score
Can a pop album succeed without functioning as a referendum on fame or as a work of musicology? Is it enough just to deliver a bunch of loosely connected bangers and bops? At its best, “Radical Optimism” answers yes — or at least makes you want the answer to be yes. Lipa has style and attitude to spare; her singing is sly, throaty, slightly Bond-girl conspiratorial.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 2, 2024
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The LP turns out to be something of a heel turn; it’s got a proudly villainous energy as Swift embraces her messiest and most chaotic tendencies. .... All this lore — it’s a lot. Yet “The Tortured Poets Department” also showcases Swift’s gifts as a songwriter, musician and producer. Her melodies are sticky and her arrangements grabby; working in the studio with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, she’s honed an electro-acoustic style that’s instantly identifiable.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Apr 18, 2024
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It’s as sprawling and as rigorous as we’ve come to expect from the most intellectually ambitious artist in music.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Apr 1, 2024
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The songs blend the same ingredients the Stones have been using since the beginning — blues, rock, soul, country, gospel — but they’re tighter and punchier than on any of the band’s previous late-era LPs. Catchier too.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Oct 20, 2023
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“Teenage Dream” recycles a song title of Katy Perry’s and echoes a twisty-turny melody of Lana Del Rey’s. Yet Rodrigo’s emotional presence is so strong throughout “Guts” — so believable even at its most unrelatable — that you never lose the sense of a specific young person navigating a trial of her own making.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Sep 18, 2023
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Her singing is vivid enough on “Endless Summer Vacation” to make up for some mushy songwriting here and there.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Mar 29, 2023
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Line by line, her lyrics deliver a staggering blend of the profound and the vernacular. ... At 77 minutes in length, “Ocean Blvd” risks tiring the listener’s ear, which is why Del Rey and her co-producers — Antonoff along with Drew Erickson, Zach Dawes and Mike Hermosa — keep folding unexpected sounds and textures into the album’s largely piano-based arrangements.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Mar 27, 2023
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In its emotional sprawl — not to mention its diverse assortment of styles, from dusty soul to throbbing trap to trippy psychedelic rock — “SOS” evokes natural memories of “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and “Beyoncé.”- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 8, 2022
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The songwriting and the vocal performances here are so strong — she’s playing with cadence and emphasizing the grain of her voice like never before — that eventually you stop caring what’s drawn directly from Swift’s real life and what’s not. It’s just a pleasure to get lost in tunes like “Labyrinth,” in which the singer explores her fear of falling in love again, and “Snow on the Beach,” a gorgeous duet with Lana Del Rey with some of the album’s most affecting imagery.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Oct 21, 2022
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Wild and ravishing “Renaissance,” which came out Friday and immediately reshaped the conversation about 2022’s most important music. ... “Renaissance” is miles ahead of the competition. ... It’s like a carefully curated library, this whole thing, with an astonishing depth of knowledge regarding rhythm and harmony that puts Beyoncé as an arranger and bandleader on a level with Prince and Stevie Wonder.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 1, 2022
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The desperation with which he details his inability to healthily navigate being a famous person — the amazing lack of vanity in his language — sets him apart from pop’s other rich-and-sad types. ... Malone’s melodies are maybe a bit less sticky than on “Hollywood’s Bleeding,” though hooks still abound, as do snappy guest spots from Roddy Ricch, Gunna and the Weeknd.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 9, 2022
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His lyrical approach has actually grown more idiosyncratic. It could be hard to glean much of a sense of Styles’ inner life from his early stuff, but these songs are rich with vivid and intimate details.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 20, 2022
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“Motomami” practically throbs with the freedom of someone flush with creative capital; its stylistic sprawl shares something with Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” while the album’s mix of harsh noise and sculpted pop melody can recall the music M.I.A. made after “Paper Planes” became a left-field hit in the late 2000s.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Mar 18, 2022
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Exquisitely rendered tunes lush with echoes of Michael Jackson and Depeche Mode. ... The songs boogie and shimmer just so; the melodies ache with longing and regret. And these vocals! Over forget-me-not grooves as finely detailed as any Mtume or Patrice Rushen fan could want, the Weeknd sings more beautifully than he ever has on “Dawn FM.” ... The year’s first great album.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jan 6, 2022
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“30” offers deep thoughts on love’s causes and consequences. ... Adele’s singing — soaring yet pulpy, gorgeous even at its rawest (as in “To Be Loved”) — gives these musings the blood-and-guts believability her fans crave. There’s some of the brainy energy of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” here, though it’s filtered through the homey wisdom of Carole King’s “Tapestry.” ... Until people stop breaking one another’s hearts, we’ll keep needing ugly-cry ballads — and nobody does those better than Adele.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 16, 2021
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With 21 tracks over 86 minutes somehow still feels tight next to the interminable “Donda” — is an enjoyment even at its bleakest. ... Even minus this get-out-of-jail-free stuff, “Certified Lover Boy” is so sharply composed and performed as to be largely irresistible.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Sep 7, 2021
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[A] curiously low-key album ... These are weird, spare, twisty-turny psych-folk tunes, many of them without the propulsive beats that used to drive Lorde’s music; most of the time, she’s simply layering her fluttering, slightly raspy vocals over Antonoff’s noodly electric guitar in a way that recalls Nico’s 1967 cult classic “Chelsea Girl,” of all things.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 19, 2021
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“Your Power” is the slowest-and-lowest moment on “Happier Than Ever,” but as a whole the album is softer, quieter, more languid than Eilish’s trap-inflected debut. ... The dreamy-jazzy mode suits her singing, which has never sounded better than it does throughout “Happier Than Ever.”- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 4, 2021
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From its picture-perfect album cover on down, though, “Sob Rock” — Mayer’s eighth studio LP and his follow-up to 2017’s “The Search for Everything” — is so crisply rendered that it achieves an almost art-project-like quality that transcends those emotional and commercial circumstances.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 15, 2021
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Gripping. ... The evolution on display on “Call Me If You Get Lost” is more elemental; he’s rethinking what kinds of stories he wants to use his music to tell and how much of himself his success obliges him to reveal.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 1, 2021
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“Exodus” has a distinctly grown-up quality, with thoughts of nostalgia and fatherhood. ... DMX sounds remarkably driven on “Exodus” — a man with life, not death, heavy on his mind.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 28, 2021
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The referents are hipper than with previous Disney stars looking to break out of the Mouse House, and the language is coarser with F-bombs dropping every few tunes. There’s nothing offhand about these songs, though; each has been worked to a kind of exquisitely scuffed polish that suits the album’s hall-of-mirrors vibe.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 21, 2021
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What’s inarguable is that she’s become one of the finest songwriters of her generation, with a lyrical and melodic flair that encourages an emotional investment in her music well beyond whatever it reflects of her real life. On “Chemtrails,” her singing reaches a new peak as well. ... But if the sound is familiar — think of the very sweet spot triangulated by Sandy Denny, k.d. lang and the Velvet Underground’s self-titled third album — the scenarios can still flatten you, as in the gorgeous “Wanderlust.”- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Mar 19, 2021
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A tidy eight tracks defined by restraint and intention. ... The back half of the record parts the clouds for some of the band’s more refined, savvy and uplifting pop yet.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 20, 2020
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For someone so skilled at using social media to cultivate fans’ interest in her personal life, it’s striking — and more than a little moving — to hear her dreaming of seclusion. ... Though Grande’s subject matter shifts after “Shut Up,” the song’s Disney-like strings carry through the rest of “Positions,” which is brighter and sprightlier than the comparatively bleary “Thank U, Next.” ... Prudes can take comfort in the fact that Grande’s sexual liberation hasn’t come at the expense of her winningly earnest theater-kid eccentricities.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 5, 2020
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There are tunes here, including “Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” that feel more spirited than anything Springsteen has done in years, with a touch of the careening intensity that made him and E Street a legendary live act. ... The tunes on “Letter to You” get over thanks to the E Street Band, which drives the songs with purpose and provides a level of detail in the arrangements that keeps anything from getting too mopey.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Oct 22, 2020
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“Club Future Nostalgia” calls to mind “The Immaculate Collection”: Like that 1990 classic — a greatest-hits comp sliced and diced by Madonna and producer Shep Pettibone to resemble a killer club set — Lipa’s record uses carefully designed pop tunes as raw material for a breathless new creation.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 28, 2020
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The nostalgia in the production — a blend of crisp digital synth textures and ringing grooves drawn directly from '90s house music — further bolsters the shadowed euphoria of a song like "Sour Candy," in which Gaga is joined by the K-pop girl group Blackpink; "Sine from Above," featuring Elton John, gets a similar friction from the interplay between their voices.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 27, 2020
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Song for song, “Folklore” does not quite rise to the heady level of albums like “Red” (2012), “Reputation” (2017) and “Lover” (2019). There are no dance floor bangers, no irrefutable earworms, no songs likely to stampede to the upper reaches of the Hot 100. As a collection of songs, though, it stands alone in Swift’s discography. It’s her most album-y album, a creation of and for life in the summer of 2020, ideally experienced alone, late at night, in a single sitting, through noise-canceling headphones.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 24, 2020
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“Gaslighter” turns out to be the Chicks’ most intensely personal effort yet, with song after song apparently inspired by Maines’ 2019 divorce.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 16, 2020
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“Rough and Rowdy Ways” rolls out one marvel after another, with killer playing from the singer’s road band.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 15, 2020
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The result is hardly dry or academic: The palpable anger coursing through tracks like “Yankee and the Brave” and “JU$T” — the latter featuring Pharrell Williams and Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha — feels as cleansing as an acid bath. And fury isn’t the only sensation the group articulates on its most emotionally complex album so far.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 9, 2020
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Moses Sumney and Mike Hadreas have made the albums of our strange quarantine season — bleak but tender, sprawling yet intricately detailed, as suffused with the need for physical contact as they are alert to its dangers and prohibitions. ... Stunning art-soul record. ... Yet as busy as the music can occasionally feel, both albums keep close track of the singers’ voices, which always merit the attention.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 19, 2020
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Moses Sumney and Mike Hadreas have made the albums of our strange quarantine season — bleak but tender, sprawling yet intricately detailed, as suffused with the need for physical contact as they are alert to its dangers and prohibitions. ... Stunning art-soul record. ... Yet as busy as the music can occasionally feel, both albums keep close track of the singers’ voices, which always merit the attention.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 19, 2020
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The result of Apple’s self-imposed social distancing is the stunning intimacy of the material here — a rich text to scour in quarantine. Her idiosyncratic song structures, full of sudden stops and lurching tempo changes, adhere to logic only she could explain, which forces you to listen as attentively as though a dear friend were bending your ear.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Apr 17, 2020
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There’s something oddly reassuring about these songs — not just “12.38,” a laidback R&B slow jam about a drug-addled sexual encounter, or the sweetly romantic “24.19,” but all 12 of them, even those in which Glover sounds close to overwhelmed by his many misgivings.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Mar 23, 2020
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The album is also a fantastic summary of BTS’ accomplishments so far, and charts a path forward in a tumultuous but exciting new era for K-pop. It’s an album about being in a band, about the relationships that form and get tested in the crucible of insane fame, all set to some of the most genre-invigorating music of their career.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Feb 21, 2020
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- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Feb 14, 2020
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As on her earlier records, Halsey can feel like something of a phantom on “Manic,” even when her writing is as vivid as it is in “Graveyard,” which deploys an appealingly creepy metaphor about following a lover way too deep. But her singing, with its pleading tone and its slightly raspy edges, is growing more expressive.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jan 17, 2020
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There’s also an infectious spirit of adventure to the album’s arrangements that brings you over to Gomez’s side.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jan 9, 2020
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As with the free-jazz innovators of the 1960s, Sweatshirt continually pushes against the notion that rap music requires any formulas at all.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 15, 2019
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The new version has been remastered from the original tapes, and the results are spectacular. ... Clark rightly considered it his masterwork, and decades later, this reissue has reaffirmed his belief. A seamless blend of American music — twangy guitars, a rhythm section that taps out dynamic funk and soul patterns, an understated mix of piano, synth and keyboards and lots of backing singers — it connects genres and movements with ease.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 8, 2019
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At 18 songs, “No Holiday” is basically a double album, one that sits somewhere along a continuum of epic works that includes the Clash’s “London Calling” and Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville.” The determination, the vision, the energy — it’s real.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Oct 18, 2019
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A dozen fully formed analog dance tracks into 45 minutes of synth-driven cruising music. ... On “Touch Red,” a distant beat and a few well-chosen keyboard chords offer a monochromatic background onto which Radelet sings, “Touch red, the world needs color.” The shock of luminosity is jarring. Like a rose blossoming in a field blackened by wildfire, it’s one of many moments on the record that capture in equal measure both beauty and bleakness.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Oct 4, 2019
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The 12 songs on “Memory” reveal musicians who have grown both as artists and technicians, even if their approach is as impatient as ever. ... They’ve dug deeper into their decade-long aesthetic, adding a more accomplished sound below while piling mounds of feathery stuff up top.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Sep 26, 2019
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Unlike “Stoney” and “Beerbongs & Bentleys,” this album feels composed of discrete stylistic exercises; no longer is he boiling down rap and rock and a little bit of country into a kind of smearable paste.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Sep 6, 2019
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The gratifying thing about this album — beyond its gorgeous melodies and Del Rey’s singing, which has never been more vivid — is that even as she’s mellowed her attack, her sense of humor has grown more pointed.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 30, 2019
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“Iconology” is a brief reminder of the performer’s genius. Across the five tracks here — four new cuts plus an alternate, a cappella take on one, “Why I Still Love You” — Elliott offers a crash course on what has made her a vital voice in hip-hop and R&B and an in-demand collaborator in the years since she delivered her last project, 2005’s “The Cookbook.”- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 26, 2019
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- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 24, 2019
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Vernon’s comments are crucial to divining his meaning in lyrics that can still tend toward the almost comically opaque. ... But the music on “i,i” bolsters this newly outward-looking sense; it’s far more spacious than the hushed acoustic laments of “For Emma, Forever Ago” or the cloistered electro-folk sound of the group’s last album, 2016’s “22, A Million.”- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 12, 2019
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The singer, born Claire Cottrill, delivers on that early promise on Immunity, which widens her sound without sacrificing the intimacy or the charm of “Pretty Girl.”- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 1, 2019
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For all the natural force of her singing — best displayed here in “Otherside,” a stripped-down piano ballad, and the grand Oscar-bait closer, “Spirit” — Beyoncé puts more thought into her records than anybody else in music, and what’s on her mind now isn’t just where all these sounds came from but how useful they remain.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 22, 2019
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Birgy harnesses her voice, a breathy, elastic instrument that she flexes in myriad ways, in service of songs in which no two measures are alike. Like Joni Mitchell, Caetano Veloso or Tim Buckley, she phrases her lines with the ear of an actor, conveying emotional info and drama with each oblong couplet.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 11, 2019
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Silly mortals. This is Madlib, lord of the freaky loop, who in collaboration with Gibbs across this album proves he can sketch out a classic rhythm with the minimalist precision of Picasso drawing a butt. For his part, Gibbs is an unapologetic street rapper who cusses his way through verses with glee, tossing f-bombs as he relays couplets.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 8, 2019
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The songs are sleek and propulsive, with glistening melodic hooks that make even macho boasts feel sensual.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 3, 2019
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Like the late Talk Talk singer Mark Hollis’ only solo album, Spirit offers lessons in musical restraint and ways in which whispers can sometimes overwhelm even the loudest howls.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 28, 2019
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Anima is slightly more songful than Yorke’s previous solo record, 2014’s “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.” “I Am a Very Rude Person” and “Impossible Knots” both ride funk grooves that recall Atoms for Peace.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 26, 2019
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These songs, simply put, are great: vivid, funny, full of feeling and supremely catchy, even if they don’t quite offer a clear picture of who Lil Nas X is offstage or off-screen.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 21, 2019
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The singer dials down his boisterous rock ’n’ roll attack in pretty, midtempo songs lush with the type of string-and-horn arrangements that once kept session players busy in recording studios up and down Sunset Boulevard. ... What lifts this album above the other is the shapeliness of Springsteen’s tunes, catchier than they’ve been in years, and the vivid images in his lyrics.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 14, 2019
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The EP has a daffy energy that reminds you why it was fun to pay attention to Cyrus in the first place.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 31, 2019
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One of the most anticipated debut albums of the year is also one of the best.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 29, 2019
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His sixth album is a left turn away from his menacing, comic-book-villain rap persona and toward his indie-curious, experimental, Stereolab-citing self. He mixes noodly, ’80s-sounding synth beats (“What’s Good”) with funky boom-bap (“Running Out of Time”), and draws on quiet-storm R&B (“Puppet”) and hallucinatory beat music (“Gone Gone/Thank You”). Crucially, Tyler’s aesthetic connects the work across disciplines.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 24, 2019
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That none of this comes off as preachy or simply lame is a testament to both singers’ astute record-making skills. Though the streaming age requires pop stars to be fluent in multiple genres, Pink and Lizzo are expert in more than most.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Apr 26, 2019
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That none of this comes off as preachy or simply lame is a testament to both singers’ astute record-making skills. Though the streaming age requires pop stars to be fluent in multiple genres, Pink and Lizzo are expert in more than most.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Apr 26, 2019
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Beyoncé’s ambitions outstrip those of her peers. ... Yes, Homecoming is one of the greatest live albums ever. If nothing else, the intention behind her performance makes it so. ... So much action. So many cues and rhythms, so much narrative momentum. Its melodic and rhythmic quotes need footnotes to fully absorb, and her voice resonates with history. Still, calling it the best live album of all time may be a stretch. ... Hell if I know, but it ranks way, way up there. ... So yeah, it’s fair to say that Beyoncé, and this work, is genius.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Apr 23, 2019
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Mixing warm, New Age-suggestive electronic tones with conversational, heart-to-heart lyrics meant to stick on first listen, her work floats through space with a glistening, emotionally rich shimmer.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Apr 1, 2019
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What’s interesting about Honky Tonk Time Machine, though, is that, as eager as Strait seems to reclaim his commercial clout, the album doesn’t downplay his perspective as an aging grandfather at a moment when country music is dominated by youngsters.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Apr 1, 2019
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What arrives is a virtually seamless country rock album, with verses moving fluidly into choruses that travel unimpeded across sparkling, architecturally sophisticated bridges. ... Duffy doesn’t leave a single loose thread on “Placeholder.” Highly recommended.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Mar 8, 2019
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Remarkable... a lovingly assembled production that rarely goes where you expect it to — but, like Solange herself, always puts across a clear sense of place.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Mar 3, 2019
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What arrives is an accomplished roots-music album that serves as a reminder of the band’s legacy.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Feb 15, 2019
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Thank U, Next flaunts Grande’s emotional healing; it’s suffused with the joy of discovering that what didn’t kill her really did make her stronger. ... As eager as she sounds on Thank U, Next to embrace new ideas and attitudes, the album shows that she can still do the old-fashioned stuff--the big vocals that connect her back to Mariah and Whitney and Celine--when she wants to.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Feb 8, 2019
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Nesmith brings grown-up emotion to his recordings of Mel Tormé and Robert Wells’ “The Christmas Song” and Claude & Ruth Thornhill’s rarely recorded “Snowfall.” But the big calling card may well be two vocals that Davy Jones recorded in 1991 and that are newly outfitted in fresh instrumental accompaniment pulled together by album producer Adam Schlesinger.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 21, 2018
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Some listeners may find the meticulous arrangements a tad sterile by the end, but Danny Elfman’s “Making Christmas” brings a welcome bit of edge to the project.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 21, 2018
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It’s rare to find someone with something new to say about the holiday experience, but the 97’s pull it off so well in that the five yuletide standards that follow almost feel anti-climactic.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 21, 2018
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He’s honed in on narrative songs that are well suited to a spoken delivery out of the Robert Preston-Rex Harrison-Richard Harris school of nonsinging actors. A delightfully dramatic outing.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 21, 2018
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The Nashville-based, label-defying group has cooked up eight effervescent originals and added its stamp to a couple of Yuletide chestnuts. ... Boogie-woogie, Tex-Mex, heart-melting pop, retro blues--it’s all here in one irresistible package.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 6, 2018
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Producing the album themselves, he and the band also zero in on a perfectly period musical and sonic vibe for this outing.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 6, 2018
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Musically, Sweatshirt couples the words with rhythmically skewed, sampled loops of vintage soul artists including singer Linda Clifford, funk band the Endeavors and Stax Records group the Soul Children. Unlike the boom-bap producers who did the same in the ’90s, though, Sweatshirt busts the bars into cubist, Earl-descending-a-staircase increments.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Dec 5, 2018
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It’s a short record, clocking in at just over 20 minutes, but the Long Beach linguist crams in a lot of syllables and welcomes into the mix compadres including Earl Sweatshirt, Ty Dolla Sign and San Francisco legend E-40. Though he presents the material playfully, Staples has more on his mind than hot fun.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 30, 2018
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It veers wildly among mechanized garage rock, ’80s-era soft pop, atmospheric dance music and lush acoustic balladry; one song strongly recalls Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” while another looks back to the Great American Songbook. ... Excellent, often thrilling album.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 30, 2018
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Healthy doses of humor sit side-by-side with sincerity in this smartly conceived, engagingly executed holiday song cycle.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 28, 2018
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The R&B-pop singer-songwriter finds a way to bring urban music sensibility even to something as quintessentially foursquare as “Silver Bells.”- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 28, 2018
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The pleasant surprise is the balance between his blues and adult pop instincts that's broad enough to include a fascinating disco-rock meeting-of-the-minds rendering of "Jingle Bells" and his canny interpretations of "White Christmas" and "Away in a Manger," along with one original, "Christmas Tears."- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 28, 2018
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Certainly, there is no small number of Dylan completists who will lap up every shred of tape he ever used. But there emerges a feeling of diminishing returns for anyone not cursed with OCD--obsessive-compulsive-Dylanism--during a stretch on the second disc with nine consecutive versions of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” Likewise the eight takes of “Buckets of Rain” on the fourth disc that are interrupted just long enough for a pair of performances of “Up to Me.”- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Nov 2, 2018
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It’s a warm, appealingly ragged collection suffused with wisdom and reassurance.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Oct 4, 2018
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A fitting subtitle could be “Everything You Know About Funk is Wrong,” thanks to a couple of flat-out stunning solo performances on this session. This is not the Holy Grail of lost or shelved Prince albums.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Sep 21, 2018
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Unlike much ambient music, Gave in Rest isn’t made for background listening. In fact, only with volume can you fully appreciate the depth of Davachi’s creation.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Sep 20, 2018
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- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Sep 20, 2018
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His eccentric phrasing brings out new wrinkles in “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” and in a “Young at Heart” that suggest he’s coming up with the song’s tricky intervals on the fly. And he and his producers, Buddy Cannon and Matt Rollings, make all kinds of unexpected choices with the arrangements, as in a sprightly “Blue Moon” and “It Was a Very Good Year,” which they give a lilting Cuban vibe.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Sep 20, 2018
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Yet as easy as it should be for anyone to appreciate this thrilling and sincere record--truly, there’s no resisting the title track’s euphoric refrain--what might be most admirable about it is Sivan’s determination to make a particular group feel seen.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 31, 2018
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- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 23, 2018
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The songs are shiny and catchy of course. ... Yet there’s an uncommon sense of self-possession to this album--a kind of ecstatic calm--that sets it apart from everything else on Top 40 radio right now.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 17, 2018
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These 14 tracks merge synthetic funk, hip-hop, indie soul and a love of life. Songs including “Weird Part of the Night,” “Freaky Times” and “After the Load is Blown” possess chops and wit.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 17, 2018
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[DJ Mustard and YG] still sound great together in cuts like “Too Brazy” and “Slay,” with YG flexing his SoCal drawl over DJ Mustard’s crisp yet bouncy grooves; the music feels urgent but somehow unhurried, as though YG is sure the beat won’t go anywhere without him. The presence of his old friend brings out YG’s sly charm too.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Aug 3, 2018
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Yet for all its tiresome megalomania, Scorpion is so beautifully rendered--from vocals to samples to features to beats--that Drake ends up pulling you over to his side, much like Kanye West did on his similarly vexing “Ye.”- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jul 2, 2018
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He’s also got a distinctive, no nonsense style: lyrically direct without sacrificing a certain poeticism, willing to look directly at a topic and offer steely-eyed comment.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 27, 2018
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On Everything Is Love the two flex their muscles like it’s an Olympic sport. ... The inside references and the happy proximity to current rap also work in service of a larger point, which is thinking about black achievement in the context of a cultural and political system designed to hinder it. ... Mainstream art makes too little room for stories like that, especially when the grown-ups in question are people of color. But the Carters won’t be denied on Everything Is Love. For them, this hard-won encore is also a beginning.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 18, 2018
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She definitely goes further than Aguilera in tracks like “Ponyboy,” with a harsh beat that conjures smashed glass, or “Whole New World/Pretend World,” which stretches past the nine-minute mark. ... Yet the lyrics favor abstract concepts over intimate confessions; Sophie ponders consumerism in “Faceshopping” (“My face is the front of shop / My face is the real shop front”) and the power dynamics of sex in “Ponyboy.” Then there’s “Immaterial,” which feels like the key to apprehending this fascinating album.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 15, 2018
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Even at its busiest, though, the music emphasizes Aguilera’s powerful voice, which more than anything is what separates her from the younger stars whose popularity has eclipsed hers in recent years. She runs through the full gamut of moods, from flirty to depressed to joyful to furious--each a response, or so we’ve been trained to think, to some real-life situation.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted Jun 13, 2018
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Both a searing, emotional performance of Young and an ace band firing on all cylinders and a time capsule of West Hollywood in the early 1970s, the recording illuminates long-gone magic. Masterfully mixed, you can hear the delicate interplay among Young, guitarist-pianist Lofgren, the late steel guitarist Keith, bassist Talbot and drummer Molina.- Los Angeles Times
- Posted May 16, 2018
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