Resident Advisor's Scores

  • Music
For 1,107 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 75
Highest review score: 100 Biokinetics [Reissue]
Lowest review score: 36 Déjà-Vu
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 1 out of 1107
1107 music reviews
    • 75 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Its tackiness has transformed over time into a thing of beauty. A perfect reflection of the flora in your life, Mother Earth's Plantasia is garish, green and hopelessly sincere. It never fails to put a smile on your face or pull the sunshine into every room.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Tracks like "Hungry Child" and "No God" are huge, highly focussed anthems that would boss a festival stage. For all of the album's welcome contradictions, however, this focus does hold it back a little. ... But at the right time, in the right company or on the right dance floor, it's a powerful high that also has a message.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Gou's DJ-Kicks, though filled with some stretches of sleek club music, struggles to find an overall thread to hold it together. The personal angle is not enough. Each of these tunes may hold a special significance in Gou's life. But to the listener, they don't quite reveal the story.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 62 Critic Score
    As things stand, there's a sense that somewhere along the line Nordström lost the capacity to self-edit. ... Nordström is mad for attempting this project, but even in partial failure Dusk To Dawn is among the more ambitious dance albums ever dreamt up.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    There's a nagging feeling that the project uses such a vast grab-bag of references to mask a lack of clear, foundational ideas. That could be slightly unfair though. Moffa and Troxler wouldn't be the first artists to take up residence in a maze of their influences, and as muddled as things appear at times, on Lost Souls Of Saturn they do some pretty striking work.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Pale Bloom, like all of Davachi's work, has a transportive, mystical quality. It could be so easy for the composer to recede into the endless abyss of staid ambient music, but this album proves that she has little interest in doing so. The more she continues to challenge herself and her audience, the more rewarding her work becomes.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Sirens' darkness is matched by its delicacy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    It's not a splashy supergroup album, nor is it perfect. It's the work of two experienced producers producing sharp songs. Like all of Edgar and Stewart's work as J-E-T-S, Zoospa is impressive but surprisingly low-key.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album's mix of the everyday and the unfamiliar is deeply eerie, a world of sound in which it's possible to contemplate the disruptions of our own.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Going back to make a new album from sessions that had already been used could have ended up sounding overworked. Instead, Anoyo is the counterbalance to what has been done. These albums shouldn't be compared, but taken in together.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ecstatic Computation is marked by sudden breaks from predictability. Stylistic influences and sonic textures are varied, yet they're cohesive. The result is an album that's both provocative and blissful.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Ellison remains keen on confronting and articulating his inner quarrels in the name of taking weirdness to the masses, and in doing so writing a new chapter in the pantheon of great Afrofuturist music.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Through throat singing, traditionally performed as a dialogue between two women, Tagaq tells ancient stories of the lives of her people from a modern perspective, preserving tradition while helping it evolve.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Seven Steps Behind is too unfocused to be a slam dunk, but there's potential for something truly new here. In an era where club classics in the concert hall have lost their novelty, it's thrilling to hear orchestral instruments twisted like this.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Rave 'Till You Cry shows that, in the right hands, braindance is flexible enough to create nuanced, multilayered portraits with the unfiltered intimacy of a diary.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Though Spawn only features on about a third of the album, the AI's conceptual impact is key to Proto. ... The compositions elsewhere are dense and overwhelming.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fear In A Handful Of Dust is a very approachable Amon Tobin record. It is highly unconventional, full of alien timbres and strange logic. But, as was the case with much of his music in the past couple decades, you don't need to be in a specific kind of mood to enjoy it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Unlike the space disco of his past, Thomas's music now hangs together not with laser bursts but with silken thread.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Edge Of Everything, a harsh, relentless and evocative techno album, is an impeccable showcase of Temple's artistic voice.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Sonically, Take Off Mode is not as ambitious as Da Trak Genious. ... But among these standouts, many of the other tracks lack the chaotic charisma key to the DJ Nate sound. His apparent abandonment of footwork in recent years could be at the heart of the LP's uneven quality. But changing one's style doesn't mean losing the soul of the sound.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Serenitatem, the latest volume in RVNG Intl.'s FRKWYS series, harks back to Ojima's environmental music of the period. The delicate synthwork across the LP is uncluttered and unobtrusive.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    This album's been seven years in the making and it shows. Many of the songs, including most of the instrumentals, might've sounded fresh sometime back, but I find myself forgetting them as soon as they're played through.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    No Geography pushes right up to the line but doesn't cross it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Swinscoe has a knack for both producing lush orchestral movements and picking worthy collaborators. On To Believe, they are unfortunately not more than the sum of their parts.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    These tracks [with pop collaborations] amount to unremarkable radio fare and dilute the artistic voices of all involved. ... The instrumentals have more bite.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Agora is both a return to form and a leap into the abyss.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    An infinite number of sounds are now at his disposal, opening up vast new landscapes to be harnessed.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Ancestor Boy's world is one of filial love, of kinship through blood or spirit, of otherness and self-reliance.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    The State Between Us does, at times, attain a depth of its own, particularly when it's dealing in the sadness of separation Brexit engenders in roughly half of the population. But at other points it just seems to be saying, "Ooh, aren't we quirky?!"
    • 81 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    LateNightTales' 17 tracks are unsurprisingly tasteful, including many that are impossibly rare. But it's not an overly studied trainspotters' paradise. Many of the obscure songs should appeal to the fanbase drawn in by Shepherd's productions.