Paste Magazine's Scores

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For 4,077 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 67% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 30% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 76
Highest review score: 100 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [50th Anniversary Edition Deluxe Version]
Lowest review score: 10 Songs From Black Mountain
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,641 out of 4077
  2. Mixed: 400 out of 4077
  3. Negative: 36 out of 4077
4077 music reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 92 Critic Score
    Fade
    Fade is just 10 distinctive, beautiful songs in 45 minutes meant to show their languid new peers (Real Estate, Beach House, Grizzly Bear, what have you) who's boss. It shouldn't work. It's to that roaring 20-year streak's goodwill that it does.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    With DAMN., Kendrick Lamar plays by the rules and then sets the rule book on fire, and continues one of the most impressive run of albums of any artist in recent memory.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    You Are Not Alone
    The production is bright and clear, and the arrangements showcase the star.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Titanic Rising
    Titanic Rising doesn’t feel blissfully adrift. Instead, it feels like Mering knows exactly where she’s going.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Courage Of Others
    This unrelenting but beautiful melancholy forms the glut of Courage. Beauty is key here, especially with a song like “Bring Down,” where an otherwise depressing dirge is given liftoff by Smith’s sweet harmony and a twittering flute.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Ghost Notes
    After all these years, the members of Veruca Salt are like sparks banging into each other, their notes and beats still giving off heavy heat. And ultimately, that is what makes Ghost Notes work.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Spike Field
    The masterful Spike Field, isn’t just interested in mere questions: It aspires to tear apart time, inspect each shorn fabric and sew up each of its distant stretches to create a new, shimmering collage of the future-past. Within its intricately textured synth patterns, off-tune piano lines and yearning mezzo-soprano are tellings of intimate histories.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Divers
    This is an album of remarkable consistency and sparkling beauty. If her music hasn’t clicked for you yet, listen to this record until it does.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The ArchAndroid
    The ArchAndroid is a fully immersive, theatrical experience. It's a near-perfect R&B album; hell, it's a fantastic hip-hop, psychedelic, neo-soul, dance and orchestral album too.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    King of the Beach
    The album is saturated with high poly-harmonies, finger-snaps and hand claps, but the Charles Atlas-invoking title communicates Wavves' real agenda--"nyah-nyah" pop sucker-punches, sunny smiles so forced they come off as sneers, intense self-deprecation as psychic body armor.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Merriweather Post Pavilion
    Nine albums and eight years in, it’s time to stop trying to figure out what the hell Animal Collective--vocalist/guitarist Avey Tare, percussionist/vocalist Panda Bear and knob-twiddler Geologist--is, and just enjoy the orgasmic rush of danceable rock.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Gist Is
    Seeing a band carry on the complexities of long-form songs, especially when giving their entire selves up to the process while they’re at it, is the boldest a debut can be.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Shaking the Habitual
    It shouldn’t work--they went all or nothing. They got all.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Monitor
    "The enemy is everywhere" is The Monitor's twice-invoked refrain, the central thesis of an album that's both uncompromisingly bleak and impossible to ignore.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Live At Reading
    The official release of Nirvana’s headlining performance at the 1992 Reading Festival feels at once indescribable and quaint.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Lost at Last, Vol. 1
    It’s all supported by a through-line of warm, cozy production that imbues the album with a pleasant nostalgia, the kind we’ve come to expect from Slim and his reworking of dug-in American genres like folk, country, and blues.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Ooz
    This is not an album to absorb in desperate moments, but rather an artfully brooding, grime-y thing that stands as a terribly unique and nightmarish account of what it could sound like to spiral out of control.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Mean Everything To Nothing
    The young band has learned a great secret: It’s possible to make a massive, commercial, go-for-the-gusto Rock Record while still holding on to dark idiosyncrasies and seriousness of purpose.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Electric Lady
    What could be unwieldy becomes a vast patchwork of influences buoying empowerment.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Plum
    Wand’s many talents are given full plumage on Plum. It will be interesting to see in what directions the band surveys in future albums. For now, this is about as interesting a new rock record you could hope to listen to.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Under Great White Northern Lights [Live]
    Jack and Meg careen from riff to riff, idea to idea, clinging for dear life as they dig their spurs into the mythical rodeo beast of rock ’n’ roll. Their lean guitar-and-drums approach allows them to turn on a dime, following any stormy muse they please.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Blue Lights On The Runway
    Their new record Blue Lights On The Runway has the potential to turn X1 into a stateside #1.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Goes Missing
    What Kelly has summoned is a shot of the good stuff from the wellspring of material everyone has to work with, and in the process he’s produced one of the best albums of 2015.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    I Killed Your Dog
    I Killed Your Dog dazzles with its musicality, but its emotion is what takes it to the next level.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Django Django
    Everything combines to enrich, enliven and add texture to the band's wild aesthetic, which is unlike anything else you're going to experience this year.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Camp
    No song seems out of place and every single one will be your favorite the moment you listen to it because of extremely quotable songs.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Hitchhiker
    If we could go back to a time where we had never heard these songs before, Hitchhiker would more than stand on its own as a brilliant piece of performance art. Stripped of the subsequent mythology or knowledge of what these songs would eventually become, each performance remains beautiful in its own right.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Nobody Knows You
    This album is pure, 10-bandaided-finger combustibility--the notes need room to breathe, like a freshly uncorked keg of moonshine, each pluck of each string hitching a ride on the cool, Allegheny mountain breeze.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Roxy: Tonight's the Night Live
    They are, as you might expect, meatier and with more snap than the recorded versions, yet still lean and taut. There are no extended solos or long, drawn out moments of vamping. The band treats the show like a good club gig: playing their hearts out and encouraging the very vocal audience to join them in the fun.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Witness
    Booker’s music emerges as defiant, insightful and both intimately and communally self-actualizing.
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