Pitchfork's Scores
- Music
For 11,990 reviews, this publication has graded:
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41% higher than the average critic
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6% same as the average critic
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53% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.9 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: | Sign O' the Times [Deluxe Edition] | |
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Lowest review score: | nyc ghosts & flowers |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 9,807 out of 11990
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Mixed: 1,876 out of 11990
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Negative: 307 out of 11990
11990
music
reviews
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- Critic Score
The material on 77-81 is clearly a big bang, informing not just everything the band did after, but a lot of what other bands did, too.- Pitchfork
- Posted Mar 15, 2021
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Carrie & Lowell Live--while highlighting the starkest, saddest songs Stevens has ever written--reflects that side of his personality like no other release. This juxtaposition makes it a compelling listen and a fitting companion to a deep, multifaceted record.- Pitchfork
- Posted May 30, 2017
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At every point, you hear a band going somewhere new, hurtling towards a forever-receding spot in the consciousness.- Pitchfork
- Posted Dec 2, 2019
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Renaissance is a commanding prescription to be perceived again, without judgment. Listening to the album, you can feel the synapses coming back together one by one, basking in the unfamiliar sensation of feeling good, if only for its hour-long duration.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 1, 2022
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The softer turns on Black Rainbows feel nearest to Rae’s earlier material, but those, too, subvert expectations.- Pitchfork
- Posted Sep 14, 2023
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At turns both acerbic and unguarded, GREY Area feels like the grand culmination of everything Simz has been puzzling out to this point. She’s a preternaturally gifted lyricist, a prodigy who recorded her first raps at nine and released her earliest tapes in her teens; it simply took a while for her to apply that acuity to her songcraft.- Pitchfork
- Posted Mar 7, 2019
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The truth about the 2021 manifestation of Let It Be is that Martin and his engineer Sam Okell haven’t really cracked the code either. It still feels like the awkward, intermittently exciting, sometimes deeply-moving collection of misfit toys it has always been. ... So much of the material included on the extra discs—the rehearsals, the outtakes, and the jams—is uncomfortable and fascinating. You see and hear their future together and then you feel it slipping away.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 18, 2021
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Temporal displacement and imagistic writing make Here in the Pitch feel vaporous at first, but it soon becomes its own transfixing language, a magnet that makes your internal compass go haywire.- Pitchfork
- Posted May 2, 2024
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Where many concept albums run a high risk of being pompous, cryptic, and self-important, Monáe keeps things playful, lively, and accessible. It's a delicate balancing act, but Monáe and her band pull it off, resulting in an eccentric breakthrough that transcends its novelty.- Pitchfork
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Baroness convince their disparate influences to gel beautifully without lapsing into the homogeneity (or self-indulgent drudgery) that remains a common defect of long, proggy albums. The second half is noticeably quieter and spookier than the more bombastic first half, easing down gently into more melodic and even acoustic fare.- Pitchfork
- Posted Jun 25, 2019
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For those who may think four CDs and three DVDs are too much, consider this: for an album that is all about contradictions, excess and mess, more of everything is most certainly a good thing.- Pitchfork
- Posted Dec 7, 2015
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Blue Weekend always nails the vibe, they nail everything, but often in a way that sounds micromanaged.- Pitchfork
- Posted Jun 17, 2021
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A collection of bratty rocker-chick anthems and soul-searching ballads that could slot into the soundtrack of any classic high school flick, from 10 Things I Hate About You to this year’s ludicrous queer sex comedy Bottoms.- Pitchfork
- Posted Sep 11, 2023
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The Strokes are not deities. Nor are they "brilliant," "awe-inspiring," or "genius." They're a rock band, plain and simple. And if you go into this record expecting nothing more than that, you'll probably be pretty pleased.- Pitchfork
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We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service is all just beats, rhymes, and life. Nothing about this feels like a legacy cash-in; it feels like a legit A Tribe Called Quest album.- Pitchfork
- Posted Nov 17, 2016
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SOS is a clear document of how extensively SZA has sharpened her songwriting since the exquisite CTRL, how she’s become an even more exacting lyricist and imaginative musician. While placing herself firmly in the tradition of R&B, she’s forcefully blasé about genre tropes.- Pitchfork
- Posted Dec 8, 2022
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If Willner doesn't hit at least some of your pleasure centers, well, forget your ears-- your nerve endings might actually be dead. Even three months in, it's a safe bet that From Here We Go Sublime will wind up 2007's most luxuriant record.- Pitchfork
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Summerteeth looms ominously in Wilco’s catalog, marking a point where he [Tweedy] knows it all could have gone wrong. He now sounds like a man who understands pop music will save his life. That quality makes the bonus material on this drinking-age-anniversary all the more potent.- Pitchfork
- Posted Nov 6, 2020
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Illinois is huge, a staggering collection of impeccably arranged American tribute songs.- Pitchfork
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This record is a return to the spare folk of Seven Swans, but with a decade's worth of honing and exploration packed into it. It already feels like his most classic and pure effort.- Pitchfork
- Posted Mar 30, 2015
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It’s hard to imagine a more vocally versatile pair than Lal and Mike, whose interplay adds depth to all of these moods.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 11, 2017
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On Jimmy Lee, Saadiq shout-sings, whispers, and croons with new abandon. It feels like a refutation of his old reserve, and it also represents a welcome stretch from Saadiq before he takes his sound all the way back to his beginnings.- Pitchfork
- Posted Sep 19, 2019
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The album has the particular aliveness of music being created and torn from a group at this very moment--tempered, but with the wild-paced abandon that comes with being caged and then free.- Pitchfork
- Posted Jan 20, 2015
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9th Wonder evolves with Rapsody here, perhaps out of necessity, as her raps continue to expand in force and scope. Alongside Eric G, Nottz, and Khrysis, the other in-house producers at his label, Wonder assists her in reaching new places.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 27, 2019
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An exhaustive presentation of Mitchell’s process in this era. Some of the recordings are so good that it’s difficult to understand how they sat in the vaults for this long. Others are brilliant, but close enough to the released versions that anyone with less than a scholarly interest in Mitchell would be better served by the official albums.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 17, 2023
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Her music never sounds alone. The record glows with this strange self-sufficiency, an instinct to push forward against bad odds.- Pitchfork
- Posted Jun 22, 2020
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Newbury conceived them specifically as a trilogy examining his own romantic past as well as the country's contentious history, and 40 years later, they sound just as imaginative, evocative, and emotional as ever.- Pitchfork
- Posted Jun 21, 2011
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It’s easy to class 1989 as an artistically lesser entry in Swift’s catalog, however counterintuitive to its success, but these songs are wildly durable. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) isn’t plastered with a debutante smile like its predecessor—but it certainly hasn’t lost its luster.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 30, 2023
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This is an extraordinarily assured first offering from a young artist capable of surprising at every turn. The result is not so much a foreboding portrait of a forgotten, boom-and-bust city, but an invitation to a place and people unduly ignored—and an introduction to an artist who won’t be.- Pitchfork
- Posted Nov 17, 2020
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New York, New York is a significant artifact. The music and photographs capture the formative moments of punk and new wave, before those genres had been thoroughly defined.- Pitchfork
- Posted Nov 11, 2015
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