New Musical Express (NME)'s Scores
- Music
For 6,014 reviews, this publication has graded:
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55% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.9 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: | to hell with it [Mixtape] | |
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Lowest review score: | Maroon |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 4,234 out of 6014
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Mixed: 1,627 out of 6014
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Negative: 153 out of 6014
6014
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
Honey suffers when its producers smooth out their rougher edges to accommodate Katy’s chart-star status.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Apr 29, 2016
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Essential listening... but only if you're of that particular breed of misfit who grills their cornflakes before adding milk, in order to make breakfast that bit blacker an experience. [1 Apr 2006, p.41]- New Musical Express (NME)
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Drizzy’s candid lyrics about battered egos and insecure relationships were refreshing early on in his career, but the persona is wearing thin as he recalls how rich his melancholy has made.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Oct 14, 2013
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Laura Marling, six years Emmy’s junior, sounds far more worldly wise, and there’s a sense of naivety, rather than innocence, that stops the album being as Joni Mitchell as it thinks it is.- New Musical Express (NME)
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'Gemstones' sees Adam go much deeper into cabaret territory. [22 Jan 2005, p.51]- New Musical Express (NME)
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It's the sound of a band once introspective but alive, now lost, depressed and completely unavailable.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Nov 17, 2014
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Someone needs to tell Wainwright there's a huge difference between 'epic' and 'over-egged'.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Collections is a confident and professional album, not all that different to 'Acolyte'. And it's not different enough.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Jan 28, 2013
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The slow, dusky familiarity and lack of dynamics make for more of a groundhog day than transcendence into any fifth dimension.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Albarn's best work has cheek, wit and a smart-alecky desire to shake things up. All this reverence doesn't really suit him.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Mar 26, 2012
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Your appreciation for this fascinating, frustrating album will ultimately depend on your tolerance for Doseone's unique voice – a strangled croon that threatens to turn milk.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Jul 18, 2012
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That surprising lack of offensiveness, though, isn't replaced with anything to particularly excite, leaving it a tasteful aural curtain of an album without much of a view beyond.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Luck has its moments, but in terms of defining a way forward for Vek, chance would be a fine thing.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Jun 9, 2014
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It’s interesting from a certain geeky perspective, but it's never quite as satisfying or substantial as you want it to be.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Nov 4, 2014
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Rick Rubin’s final Primal Scream-gone-hip-hop remix of ‘A Light That Never Comes’ saves Recharged from disaster, but you might need resuscitating after this lot.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Nov 19, 2013
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After the ubiquitous presence of '80s-indebted music last year, a follow-up with little stylistic deviation isn't a thrilling proposition: Take Me Over steals a hook from fellow Australians Men At Work, adds ooh-ooh backing vocals and just about gets away with it.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Feb 7, 2011
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You know those people who moon out of train windows, in love with their own picturesque melancholy? Fionn Regan's third album is like that.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Dec 2, 2011
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- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Mar 10, 2014
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It's as dreamy and atmospheric as you might expect, but the truth is that only a handful of Jónsi's 15 tunes here really work without the context of some CGI tigers.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Mar 20, 2012
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Flamboyance and melancholy in equal measure, then, but 'White Noise' mainly leaves you cold.- New Musical Express (NME)
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- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Nov 16, 2012
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It just feels like, once again, Coldplay have done the selfless thing and gone out to protect EMI's share price, and at the end of it remain peering off the edge of a cliff edge, wishing they had the courage to jump.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Oct 24, 2011
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Ultimately, too many of these tunes are rehearsal room grooves in search of a hook.- New Musical Express (NME)
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With two songs playing out at over nine minutes long, one feels that a decent edit would change things from somnambulant to plain dreamy.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Apr 27, 2011
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London quartet Good Shoes offer little to get flustered over with this sometimes dire, but mostly mediocre second album.- New Musical Express (NME)
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It's solid enough, but given the imagination they once possessed, it sounds like UNKLE are trying too hard.- New Musical Express (NME)
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The Calexico-ish 'The Lady Is Risen' shows he can get close to a folky barnstormer, but on closer inspection the barn appears to be a set prop that might blow down in a stiff wind.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Sep 30, 2013
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The beats here are as staggering as ever, but of an indulgent 19 tracks, none sound like they were good enough to give to anybody else.- New Musical Express (NME)
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- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Apr 3, 2012
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Sadly, such pop bluster is largely missing from this debut album, which is over-long and obsessed with pained R&B choruses--precisely the reasons we all went off American rap in the first place.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Sep 15, 2011
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It quickly loses its appeal and gives way to the feeling that this is a just reasonable thrash metal record.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Oct 23, 2012
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Sadly, a lack of focus in melody and structure means it's not quite as atmospheric as Mick seems to think.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted May 4, 2011
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Kelly shows how easy it is to keep it simple, melodious and un-synthesised; and on these occasions, Kelly's lyrics come to the fore.... when he shelves his obsession with opening your legs and opens his mind, that he is capable of making thought-provoking material.- New Musical Express (NME)
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A rather mousey, introspective record, awash with the wishy-washy sounds of shoegazing, and yet not without its precise, audacious moments.- New Musical Express (NME)
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It's best treated as a curio in the Smashing Pumpkins' legacy; and for those who grew up on 'Today', '1979' and 'Ava Adore', you're better left with your memories.- New Musical Express (NME)
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It's a great shame that this album's component parts don't raise the whole above 'nice to know they're still around' status.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Mar 20, 2012
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Does a new generation of music lovers really need a third solo album from [Malkmus] which includes songs that house guitar wig-outs and last up to eight minutes? Not really. [28 May 2005, p.64]- New Musical Express (NME)
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The Uglysuit, whose country-prog-post-rock-indie-orchestral ramblings recall, variously, Wilco, Bright Eyes, The Shins, Elbow, Ryan Adams, My Morning Jacket and the soundtrack for every emotionally self-indulgent US drama ever made. Yet, hearing the warm country musings of ‘Chicago’ or the aching two-note piano motif of 'And We Became Sunshine’, it’s hard not to settle into the seduction.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Perhaps it was the pressure of following breakthrough hit ‘C’mon C’mon’, or some serious Jack White payback voodoo, but now, where should have roared a gutsy, triumphant comeback squeaks a patchy, mediocre-in-places record.- New Musical Express (NME)
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On their third album, the trio largely abandon the Latin influences of earlier outings for a medium-haul flight back to the more two-dimensional sounds of Canadian indie-rock.- New Musical Express (NME)
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What's missing is any emotional contrast to stop all that cleverness from sounding overwhelming.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Apr 16, 2012
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[Their] penchant for pastiche has evolved... into full-blown plagiarism. [9 Oct 2004, p.57]- New Musical Express (NME)
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The LP toes a line between eclecticism and kitchen sink, but the one thing he hasn't chucked in here is a little focus.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Feb 15, 2012
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Her voice--treated and autotuned to within an inch of its life throughout--still sounds like that of the Mouseketeer who brought us '...Baby One More Time’, with every breathy “Mmmm… yeah!” and all the oh-so-naughty lyrics, such as the ones above, sounding forced and unconvincing. Of course, on a large number of the tracks here she has the solidly cool-sounding (no doubt expensive) backdrop of futur’n’b pop.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Konk is the sound of a band in disarray, unsuccessfully attempting to hold things together.- New Musical Express (NME)
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It is a one-trick album and they spunk away their best song, the incantatory ‘Shame On The Soul’, right at the start, but the aforementioned trick is, at least, an affecting, and very occasionally gorgeous, one.- New Musical Express (NME)
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It remains a 1980s Johnny Cash album and it wasn’t until Rick Rubin got hold of him 10 years later that he came in from the cold.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Mar 31, 2014
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While there are blips in all areas of life - the possible existence of Bigfoot, the rich and strange wildlife of Madagascar - few things cast more suspicion upon the whole survival-of-fittest concept than the continuing career of Everclear.- New Musical Express (NME)
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With a bit of luck, Broken Records won’t be afraid to indulge themselves a little more in the future, because it would be a minor tragedy to see such a worldly band opt to wallow in mediocrity- New Musical Express (NME)
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The problem is simply the songs: route-one, four-chord grunge adrenaline hits that have none of the haunting and eerie dissonance that set them apart from bands like Wavves, and the rest of US indie’s surplus of breezy slacker-rockers last time around.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Mar 31, 2014
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Bragg and The Blokes' delivery sounds just as dated as the social traditions they lampoon.- New Musical Express (NME)
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- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Mar 4, 2015
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The very fact long-time collaborator Rick Rubin is at the helm is proof enough that while the production is mostly immaculate, I'm With You is an exercise in how a multi-million selling rock behemoth plays it safe.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Sep 6, 2011
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- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted May 2, 2011
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The frame is there, there's just not enough meat on the muscles of their Euro-jitter-pop.- New Musical Express (NME)
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The actual music on this album is excellent--the sort of Canadian indie beloved of people who live in cities yet dress like the Unabomber....A hole is kicked in the side of it by Carey Mercer’s berserk singing however.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Truly this is music for life's uncomplicated moments. [15 Jul 2006, p.39]- New Musical Express (NME)
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Nearly everything Robbie Williams writes is some kind of confessional and here it doesn't quite come off. There just isn't the sufficient depth of him in it to make it work.- New Musical Express (NME)
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For the most part it's clear that the New Zealanders have lost what sense of direction or purpose they had left. [7 Oct 2006, p.39]- New Musical Express (NME)
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Full of sombre, skeletal and obliquely confessional songs, it's a crafted collection with ruminations on sex and loss. [5 Feb 2005, p.50]- New Musical Express (NME)
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Their attempts to assimilate their record collections often fall between two stools--unlikely to do the business on a dancefloor or spirit you away at home through the power of its sequencing.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted May 5, 2014
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- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Aug 18, 2014
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There are four or five genuinely decent songs on here - but ultimately, as a whole it just feels a little too worthy, a little too overwrought, and a little too formulaic to be worth the 64 minutes and 32 seconds of your life.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Good moments include the drama-packed ‘Just Another Night’ and the fun pop of ‘On A Roll’, but neither resembles the formulaic trash cluttering the rest of the record.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Oct 28, 2013
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Only the LP’s soaring ‘Intro’ hints at greatness, and despite the raw talent on display, the dose is diluted and the sum total falls short.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Apr 2, 2013
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It’s not awful, just bland, and lacks the bite that electro-pop records need to be lifted out of the purgatory that is mediocrity.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Oct 14, 2013
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Within And Without hangs oppressively, saved only by fleeting moments of clarity like the title track's stabbing outro, or the jump-rope glitter that opens 'Before'.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Jul 11, 2011
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The album itself reveals she’s also got a penchant for exhuming the sickly-sweet memory of Minnie Riperton’s ‘Loving You’ and setting it to 17 different slow jamz drenched in studio gloss.- New Musical Express (NME)
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'Dumb Luck' will numb the pain for an hour, but you'll be buggered if you can remember anything about it afterwards.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Not quite Animal Collective or Stereolab, but at times sounding like an Ibiza chill-out album, there are hot flushes of brilliance here but they are few and far between.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Destined for the 'obscure, kinda interesting' slot come end-of-year list time.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Sep 24, 2012
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They do their best to distance themselves from Actual Sabbath, but too often it’s by slouching through their Satanic netherworld, Dio’s cabaret bludgeoned down by lurching riffs and over-egged orchestration.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Asiatisch, however, is even more pretentious [than two previous EPs], pairing instrumental UK grime with Asian flourishes to explore the relationship between the west and China.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted May 5, 2014
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Sound[s] pretty much the same as they did a decade ago. [19 Mar 2005, p.59]- New Musical Express (NME)
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While their love of premeditated spontaneity might be admirable in jazzier quarters, in reality it means that almost every song on their debut is marred by sudden changes in time signature, key and genre.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Oct 10, 2011
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'Quixotic' is doomed to be a record that has dinner parties nodding in mute agreement at its quality. Albeit half a decade ago.- New Musical Express (NME)
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It's frustrating to see them pissing around like South Park's Matt and Trey, when they can produce something as genuinely affecting and pure pop as 'Stay Forever'.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Despite the presence of ex-Razorlight man Andy Burrows on drums and extra songwriting oomph, their latest offering feels like another exercise in anonymity.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Mar 3, 2014
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Yet it’s also a record that’s in denial of things like the atomic bomb, IBM, the internet and the fucking millennium. And that really is the true spirit of nihilism, no matter how well you dress it up in your parents’ rags.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Musically, Madness still trade in pub singalongs powered by ska rhythms and music-hall jollity--but the jollity feels forced, and Suggs’ tired vocals suggest a man going through the motions.- New Musical Express (NME)
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Ultimately, the pop sheen Adams applies on The Voyager is at odds with Lewis' songs. By always opting for directness, he's failed to let her do justice, musically, to the darkness of her inspiration.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Jul 28, 2014
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It's guiltily satisfying in a bearded, nodding sort of way, but there's little to grab on to in such an ironic hall of mirrors.- New Musical Express (NME)
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After 64 minutes of the same, it all starts to feel like a bit of a grind.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Dec 16, 2014
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Where the first four records (and particularly the Matador releases) sounded like a band fighting for their lives – or at least pretty keen to make you listen – this is the sound of a band struggling to muster the energy to go on.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Apr 21, 2011
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At least 40 per cent of 'The Spine' is really rather charming. [3 Jul 2004, p.65]- New Musical Express (NME)
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At their best the Young Knives can write as good a pop song as anyone in the country, but this is a disappointing second effort ironically weighed down by the English eccentricities that once helped them stand out from the pack.- New Musical Express (NME)
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It shows range, sure, but it feels so disparate that it's just baffling. Worse, none of these poses and personae actually feel convincing.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Apr 10, 2012
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Unlike Cash, the ego on display here still sounds like it's got the whip hand on the talent and you never really start to like him. [4 Mar 2006, p.31]- New Musical Express (NME)
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Not, by any means, a disaster. More a cruel glimpse of a talent that occasionally blazes but is frustratingly inconsistent.- New Musical Express (NME)
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While they’ve never been terribly fashionable, they’ve always used that to their advantage, projecting a underdog siege mentality whilst simultaneously selling out arenas. Concrete Love, however, is nothing to beat their own drum about.- New Musical Express (NME)
- Posted Aug 29, 2014
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In the end, whether it's a cynical bid for the mainstream or an experiment gone wrong, Riot barely registers as a minor disturbance.- New Musical Express (NME)
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