MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)'s Scores
- Music
For 178 reviews, this publication has graded:
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87% higher than the average critic
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0% same as the average critic
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13% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 13.5 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 86
Highest review score: | American VI: Ain't No Grave | |
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Lowest review score: | Definition Of Real |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 164 out of 178
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Mixed: 13 out of 178
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Negative: 1 out of 178
178
music
reviews
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- Critic Score
Sure enough, the first time through, too many [of the songs] had faded on me. Soon, however, even ones I'd given up on were bum-rushing my earhole.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Recorded July 1, 1998, a 78-minute double-CD proves how stiff and thin this made-up collective's mysteriously canonical 1997 studio album is.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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The band is on it, the backup singers are solicitous, and Cohen's husk of a voice has been juiced up by the exercise.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Burbling electronic ticktocks vie with a carillon of bell simulacra, and rarely have vinyl crackle or laser malfunction generated more musicality.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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The entire construction is a thing of grace -- conservative, and new under the sun.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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They're unflinchingly unsensationalistic. But it's the beats that turn this into noir worthy of Jim Thompson. [Feb/Mar 2007]- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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The thing about the indie-rock life is that even its depressives, not just mere realists like these guys, have a pretty good time.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Never rousing and too often glum, the album is carried by its intelligence, integrity and terrible beauty. [Feb/Mar 2007]- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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The turns of phrase are usually cul-de-sacs, the flights into obscurity have bum wings, and do you really prefer, for instance, Vernon's best-in-show "Now all your love is wasted?/Then who the hell was I?" (much less "Only love is all maroon/Lapping lakes like leery loons") to this Creeley ordinaire- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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This two-hour double-CD/triple-LP, their first product since 2001, is grand, somber, amelodic, arhythmic and slow, leaving plenty of time to admire the notes' altered states.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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It's hard to imagine their music getting much better. But it's not hard to imagine their lives getting much better. Which may be all their music needs.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
- Posted Mar 4, 2011
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Just when I'd made my peace with pop prog and begun to hope arty prog would prove another casualty of the age of digital instantaneity, these postrock warriors get the bright idea of adding tune and humor to their higher mathematics.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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- Critic Score
Never have his arrangements exploited his soundtrack chops so subtly, changeably or precisely.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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'Stay Positive' nails the travails of the aging rock band harder than 'Start Me Up' because it's about fans, and 'Constructive Summer' craftily confuses different ways to get hammered.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Their skilled playing remains modest enough, but on this subtler and more pretentious material, the skills predominate, and just in case they don't, let's add a string quartet here and real choirboys there.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Not only will you hum snatches, you'll parse lyrical bits, too: a basement-dwelling twentysomething high on Gatorade in an underpopulated housing development, a waitressing job for Solange Knowles.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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What's most remarkable about this stylistic portmanteau is that every song is an original even though you assume several are among their shoulda-been-a-hit-but-wtf-is-it? covers.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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This album lays it on too thick... and declines the thematic burden of "Separation Sunday." As stories, on the other hand, the songs could convince anyone that kids have a hard time.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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So much that is sprightly about the debut is subsumed here by ambition, to be kind, and privilege, to be brutally accurate. [Feb/Mar 2007]- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Of course she's quieting down as she grows up, plus covering her bases, so after half a dozen winners she levels off into a nine- song sequence.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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From the start you know this is no mixtape because it's clearer and more forceful. Every track attends to detail, with fun tricks like the chipmunk-chorused "Mr. Carter"'s sudden descent into screwed-and-chopped before Jay-Z comes in.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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As narrative and prophecy, a less coherent response to Christofascism than you might want, but one alt needs, held together and moved ahead by its forthright hooks and beats.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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For a principled slacker like Snider, diffidence is an aesthetic principle, but here it tends to obscure some affecting little songs.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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It serves up the distorted buzz Congotronics fans jones for, sonics that are generally raunchy even though the thumb pianos also generate balafon beauty, and five lead singers.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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It defines vicinity so broadly that you'll also find Beiderbecke and Reinhardt, two Ellington tunes, songs by a jazz critic and Ed Sullivan's bandleader.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Though I wish the beats were less corny-orchestral, Fiasco marks his own turf in a three-song sequence that would have led the second side back in the day. [Feb/Mar 2007]- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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