For 5,910 reviews, this publication has graded:
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34% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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62% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.1 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 67
| Highest review score: | Magic | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest review score: | Know Your Enemy |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 3,628 out of 5910
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Mixed: 2,242 out of 5910
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Negative: 40 out of 5910
5910
music
reviews
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Waits' ravaged voice surrendered all pretensions to melody ages ago; his throat is now pure theater, a weapon of pictorial emphasis and raw honesty.- Rolling Stone
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A near-perfect balance of gutter grime and high-art aspiration, the Rick Rubin-produced By the Way continues the Peppers' slow-motion makeover.- Rolling Stone
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Despite the anger and bitterness, Hail to the Thief is more musically inviting than Radiohead's last two outings.- Rolling Stone
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A Mark is the first time he's let the musical intensity match the lyrics.- Rolling Stone
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A luxuriant union of black-ice electronics and chamber-pop instrumentation. [14 Oct 2004, p.98]- Rolling Stone
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The album isn't the romp it might have been had Lopes survived, but 3D solidly embodies black pop in a year in which it has lacked a center.- Rolling Stone
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Greendale has a tattered, buzzing, demolike sound, rude as any Young has put out.- Rolling Stone
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Most of the collaborators turn up only as backup vocalists or orchestra members, enabling Lightbody's heartbreaking ballads and sublime baritone to soar.- Rolling Stone
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Ten New Songs manages to sustain loss's fragile beauty like never before and might just be the Cohen's most exquisite ode yet to the midnight hour.- Rolling Stone
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Where the album truly shines though is in the way Armstrong gets the most of his vocalists.- Rolling Stone
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It feels like one big loft party, even when it veers into psychotic, dissonant No Wave by DNA and Mars.- Rolling Stone
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The album's wanton schizophonia results in such a switched-on pileup of styles that Groove Armada have earned their own rubric -- call it electrocrash, and consider it great.- Rolling Stone
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The ebb and flow of eighteen concise, contrasting cuts writes a story about Moby's beautifully conflicted interior world while giving the outside planet beats and tunes on which to groove.- Rolling Stone
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An earthy, moving psychedelia, eleven iridescent-country songs about surviving a blown mind and a broken heart.- Rolling Stone
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Somehow, the Primals' fury never seems misguided: This is one ball of aggression that hangs together, thanks to the band's smarts and funk.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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Let Go is an excellent rainy-afternoon album, full of gentle and melancholic beauty, with echoes of Love and the Beach Boys.- Rolling Stone
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Sing the Sorrow is not exactly a concept album, but it does have a singleness of dark purpose that builds in momentum as the disc progresses.- Rolling Stone
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In the 1977-79 half of Name, nearly every song beats the studio version. But the 1980-81 disc is the prize, as the Heads take their lofty concepts to the stage with a ten-piece band. [2 Sep 2004, p.147]- Rolling Stone
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Given one last chance to make an impact, Jay-Z has come up with one of the better albums of his career, though perhaps a shade lesser than his very best, Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint.- Rolling Stone
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Up! would be a knockout even if it were limited to its one disc of country music.... But the second, relentlessly kinetic pop disc is a revelation.- Rolling Stone
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On the evidence of this excellent debut, few people can challenge Skinner right now except himself.- Rolling Stone
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Yoshimi isn't the end-to-end triumph that was 1999's The Soft Bulletin.... But the production is equally ambitious, with burbling electrobeats underpinning sci-fi orchestrations that sound like the brainchild of Esquivel and the Orb.- Rolling Stone
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Iowa is not just the first great record of the nu-metal era - it's better than that.- Rolling Stone
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But if you go back to Up after hearing Reveal, you get the idea that this is the album they were trying to make then, and that this time they got all the way there and found a parking spot. The Eno-style keyboard textures have more room to breathe amid the largely acoustic guitars, with the arcane sound effects intricately woven into the songs.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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Kaplan and Hubley sing their most confessional, intimate lyrics ever, over whispery guitars, brushed percussion, vibes and organ drones. It's a spell of blissful, psychedelic make-out music... these songs are great - heartfelt, rugged, melodically sumptuous enough to keep unfolding after dozens of spins, full of folk-rock flesh and blood.- Rolling Stone
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If you want a vision of the future of hip-hop and techno, get this record.- Rolling Stone
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It's one of the best hard-rock CDs you'll hear this year, carrying on the shitkicking tradition of Hank Williams Jr., ZZ Top, Guns n' Roses and Bad Company.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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It is a rare, fine thing: the sound of the perfect A&R sales pitch turning into a real band.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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On the group's fourth proper album, a mightier Mouse refine their weirdness and become a pop band while grasping at dark truths that pop ordinarily denies.- Rolling Stone
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This is grandiose music from grandiose men, sweatlessly confident in the execution of their duties.- Rolling Stone
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So much of Tool's third full-length studio album makes so little sense at first. But that is one of Lateralus' most endearing qualities: It rolls out its pleasures and coherence slowly, even stubbornly.- Rolling Stone
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The Futureheads reclaim pop punk from the Warped Tour crowd -- and revive it in the process.- Rolling Stone
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The rugged guitar tunes resemble a cow-punk update of the Clash, and Earle's song-to-song perspective shifts dazzle. [2 Sep 2004, p.142]- Rolling Stone
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The Neptunes' brilliant, impertinent, full-body funk is, for the most part, what stays with you from Justified; their songs, spacious and shot through with ecstatic aaahs, outshine their neighbors on the album.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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It's an irresistible party: trashy, hedonistic and deeply weird.- Rolling Stone
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Eventually every song will kick in from a slightly different angle, including faux folk and cracked ballad.- Rolling Stone
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Wainwright's fanciful songs about love and faith place him in the rarefied company of Bjork and Brian Wilson, whose audacious Medulla and SMiLE his album most resembles.- Rolling Stone
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A far more refined and finessed record than its predecessor. [14 Oct 2004, p.96]- Rolling Stone
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Encore isn't as astonishing as The Marshall Mathers LP. Few albums by anyone ever will be. But in the time-honored manner of mature work, it showcases a phenomenally gifted musician and lyricist doing all the things he does best.- Rolling Stone
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He is, simply, better than any other MC in hip-hop except for Jay-Z.... The Marshall Mathers LP is a car-crash record: loud, wild, dangerous, out of control, grotesque, unsettling. It's also impossible to pull your ears away from.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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Thunder, Lightning, Strike was hailed as a pop masterpiece when it came out in the U.K. late last year, but clearing all the samples held up its U.S. release until now. Wait no longer.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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They come on like old-school greasers who've been around long enough to know how to savor a moment.- Rolling Stone
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Their riotous manifesto remains the same, but their musical dialect has expanded to include blues, soul and even traces of pristine Led Zeppelin-era metal.- Rolling Stone
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"Somewhere in a burst of glory/Sound becomes a song/I'm bound to tell a story/That's where I belong," Simon sings on the new album's opening track, and the comfort and command he displays throughout You're the One demonstrate that he's right.- Rolling Stone
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George throws a bit of himself into most of these tracks, reworking some of the beats and grooves, adding a few instrumental licks, even the odd vocal, but mostly he just programs a dynamic set that proves he's no dance music dilettante.- Rolling Stone
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The slow stuff might be a bit ponderous, but the first six or seven songs manage a rare trick: They're incandescent enough to jump out at you on the radio, yet are steeped in a type of introspective inquiry that was once integral to rock & roll, and has nearly vanished.- Rolling Stone
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Burnside and Co. play with a perfect recklessness, as though no one was listening.- Rolling Stone
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With its preponderance of loping beats and funk-infused grooves, the album does little to update the Stereos' sound, but no matter: The band sounds as vital as ever.- Rolling Stone
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The warm strumming and sparse beats make for an aching melancholy that stirs memories of Radiohead.- Rolling Stone
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Even in duets with [Wainwright and Boy George], Antony is the dominant voice of solitude and agonized waiting. [10 Feb 2005, p.84]- Rolling Stone
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LCD have managed to be both underground hitmakers and bona fide album artists as easily as Murphy splices guitar noise and machine thump.- Rolling Stone
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The Mars Volta's second album is an exhilarating transgression: concussive, nonlinear rhythms; mad-dog guitar algebra; bloody-nightmare suites sung in bilingual free verse. In short, the beastly spawn of Radiohead's OK Computer and Rush's 2112.- Rolling Stone
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The Kaiser Chiefs make you want to sing along with practically every song by the second chorus.- Rolling Stone
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Everything's OK is much more than OK -- it's one more righteous, red-hot reason to treasure this surviving genius of soul.- Rolling Stone
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Pretty in Black is virtually fuzz-free, highlighting the exquisite detail in the Raveonettes' gift for pastiche.- Rolling Stone
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A breakthrough for Weezer... Cuomo's songs are his most plaintive and brilliant since Pinkerton. [19 May 2005, p.74]- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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West is the producer Common has been waiting for all of his career: He makes Common both catchier and edgier at the same time.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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For a musician like Stevens, going too far and trying too hard is the point, the way to get beyond where a more austere songwriter could get with a more naturalistic pose. So the most pleasurable music here is the most ambitious.- Rolling Stone
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Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is the freshest-sounding McCartney album in years.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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There is an emphasis on keyboards, in pulse and architecture, that adds buoyancy and color to James' writing and flatters his keening, stratospheric tenor.- Rolling Stone
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The first thing that hits you about the songs is their intelligent design, from the metallic-Cars echo of "Bombs Below" to the son-of-Nirvana charge in "On All Fours." But without the hell-bent revolutionary zeal, Ahead of the Lions would sound like empty victory.- Rolling Stone
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What ultimately differentiates Blige's seventh studio album from previous discs is that its ballads truly matter.- Rolling Stone
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At every turn -- high-mountain balladry, brassy R&B, near-metallic blues rock -- Rosanne sings of coming through loss with a poise and confessional will that are utterly country and absolutely in the family tradition.- Rolling Stone
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A start-to-finish rush of invigorating riffs and pointed narratives that heightens with repeated exposure.- Rolling Stone
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The rap on Ben Harper's music up to this point has been that it's been too derivative. This could be the album where he finally transcends that. [23 Mar 2006, p.61]- Rolling Stone
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As on Musicology, the beats get pretty wicked here... But while 3121 is no funkier than Musicology, it does emphasize speedier tempos and, two nods to Zapp aside, more conventional sonics. [6 Apr 2006, p.60]- Rolling Stone
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This album is, above all, a textural triumph, a quantum bounce from the brittle jitter and insect-chatter fuzz of the band's 2001 Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP and 2003's full-length Fever to Tell. It's as if the Velvet Underground had gone from the black-crusted minimalism of their first album right to the pop bloom of their fourth, Loaded.- Rolling Stone
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Ghostface's emotionally charged stream-of-consciousness flow is as off-the-wall and amazing as it's ever been.- Rolling Stone
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His most jubilant disc since Born in the U.S.A. and more fun than a tribute to Pete Seeger has any right to be.- Rolling Stone
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As immediate and despairing as breaking news from Baghdad... Pearl Jam is also as big and brash in fuzz and backbone as Led Zeppelin's Presence. [4 May 2006, p.55]- Rolling Stone
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Stadium Arcadium has too many midtempo tracks and, in the manner of U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind, is more of a summation of the Peppers' career than a step forward. But the band is still capable of surprises.- Rolling Stone
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If you have a favorite Foghat album or can name a single member of Deep Purple, you will love Broken Boy Soldiers; fortunately, it doesn't end there. [18 May 2006, p.226]- Rolling Stone
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[It] embraces the depth and fury of classic rock while remaining true to the trio's Texas roots. [18 May 2006, p.226]- Rolling Stone
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Rather Ripped is an excellent record, one of the strongest to emerge from Sonic Youth's amazing late period.- Rolling Stone
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The Eraser is full of moments when you wait for the band to kick in, and it doesn't happen.- Rolling Stone
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[They] have honed the legendary mania of the early records into a tightened combustion that is part "Personality Crisis" but also packs the matured anxiety and tattered-Sixties classicism of Johansen's 1978 solo debut. [24 Aug 2006, p.90]- Rolling Stone
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A smart, breezy album that deftly fuses his love for old-school blues and R&B with his natural gift for sharp melodies and well-constructed songs. [21 Sep 2006, p.81]- Rolling Stone
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Twenty years after their debut, Yo La Tengo are in full command.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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