For 3,114 reviews, this publication has graded:
-
35% higher than the average critic
-
3% same as the average critic
-
62% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.7 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 65
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 1,684 out of 3114
-
Mixed: 1,319 out of 3114
-
Negative: 111 out of 3114
3114
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
-
- Critic Score
For every few colorless duds defined by their embrace of contemporary R&B, such as the overly smooth “Kissing Strangers” or the brassy “Big,” there’s a creative cut or two, like the suave “Margiela.”- Slant Magazine
- Posted Feb 12, 2024
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
There’s a tension in Wolfe’s music between a tendency to overdramatize or cloak her pain in gothic imagery and a genuine yearning to be heard and understood. While the former can feel facile, She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She more often manages to arrive at the latter. Wolfe’s songs might avoid specific details about her actual life, but the sturm und drang coursing through them is potent and deeply felt.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Feb 6, 2024
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Challenging, startling, and deeply powerful, this rallying closer confirms what the previous nine songs already suggested: that Carlisle is a singular artist and that Critterland is a worthy addition to the canon of country-folk classics.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jan 26, 2024
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Whether Wall of Eyes is a last stop for the Smile or merely a layover to some yet-undefined place, it’s an undeniably mesmerizing trip.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jan 24, 2024
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
On her sixth studio album, What an Enormous Room, she pulls back on the eccentric, stadium-ready rock of 2021’s Thirstier in favor the kind of introspective dirges that characterized her early work. As a result, the album offers slightly less in the way of hooks but homes in further on themes of anxious attachment and personal growth.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jan 23, 2024
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
As on past albums like 2017’s The Far Field, the quieter passages here are projected with too much force to either serve as a contrast to the songs’ more bombastic sections or fully convey the import of the lyrics. This grows especially tiring on tracks like “The Fight” and “Corner of My Eye,” which are synth-pop equivalents of stadium power ballads. Were the music itself able to match the downbeat undertones of Herring’s words, it might pack a bigger punch.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jan 22, 2024
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Tucker and Brownstein deserve credit for continuing to take risks and experiment with Sleater-Kinney’s established sound, resulting in another solid effort in an unexpectedly fruitful late period.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jan 16, 2024
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
These songs may diverge from the ones that made Green Day a household name, but three decades later, they continue to strike a balance between teen spirit and maturity.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jan 16, 2024
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
While the lyrics offer a precious few glimmers of defiance, Hackman’s production choices, featuring mostly instruments played by the musician herself, have the verve to suggest not only an artistic resurgence, but a personal one.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jan 11, 2024
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Tracks like “Balloons” and “Afro Futurism” feature some of the fiercest political critiques and nimbly performed rapping of Warner’s career. Her delivery is poised yet casual, her charmingly nasal voice full of weariness and vulnerability.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Dec 14, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Despite some catchy moments, there’s almost nothing about Pink Friday 2 that makes it stand out from the current slate of pop and rap music. Unlike its predecessor, the album doesn’t leave much of an impression, and certainly won’t reshape the hip-hop landscape.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Dec 12, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Without the distractions and clashing frequencies of a full band, one can better appreciate how the album has been cut together, with subtle musical segues, clever editing, and consideration for overlapping lyrical themes.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Dec 7, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
In the end, this is a dramatically uneven project that demonstrates its creators’ unwillingness to grow up and, more damningly, their inability to conceive of a concept and see it through.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Dec 5, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The First Time features some of his weakest hooks to date and a slew of songs that are so unsatisfyingly short so as to feel half-finished.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 30, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
While the “Bright Side” mixes bring out the album’s more dynamic range, the lyrics lack the edge of Gabriel’s early music. The earnest perspectives of songs like “Love Can Heal” and “Live and Let Live” are apparent right from their titles, with the latter in particular succumbing to cliché. And the more subdued “Dark Side” mixes only highlight those flaws. i/o is heartfelt and meticulously crafted, but its impact is muted by its splintered presentation.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 30, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Quaranta makes for an often frustrating experience, where tracks will circle around a topic with some level of pathos but seem incapable of ever reaching their full potential.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 20, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album presents a trio that’s getting back on their feet and figuring out how to be a unit again. It’s a feeling that’s echoed in the re-issue’s 11-song “warts-and-all rehearsal” recorded during a live taping of the television series Party of Five in 1999.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 17, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
To her credit, Parton still manages to make Rockstar sound and feel like a Dolly Parton album, thanks in large part to her distinctive twang. She and producer Kent Wells make some subtle changes to these songs, like a richer and deeper piano tone on Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” and denser lead guitar on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” though more inventive arrangements would have distinguished these versions from the originals.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 14, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album’s satisfying and detail-rich production choices, courtesy of co-producers like Greg Kurstin and Mura Masa, achieve a tonal cohesion throughout.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 13, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
So while the album may play it a little safe, it also smartly plays to its creator’s strengths.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 13, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Stapleton knows that his vocals don’t need to be forceful to make an impact, a point driven home on the beautiful closer “Mountains of My Mind,” on which his intimate voice is paired with just an acoustic guitar. But while tracks like that are evidence of Stapleton’s singing and storytelling abilities, more often than not, the songs on Higher struggle to take off.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 9, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Aside from the disco-fied “Motorbike,” inspired by Jack Cardiff’s 1968 drama The Girl on a Motorcycle, most of Zig takes few such risks. As a result, Poppy has become what she’s successfully evaded up to this point: predictable.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 3, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
With Phone Orphans, Veirs exposes her creative process and, in doing so, maps out the rich topography of her psyche.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 1, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Despite the fact that Robed in Rareness runs about the length of an episode of your average sitcom, its songs are so vaporous that one may have a difficult time remembering them. Put bluntly, the album underscores just how much Shabazz Palaces is running on fumes.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 31, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album’s first half remains stronger overall, but it’s the latter half that more fully justifies the re-recording. The five new “From the Vault” tracks are all solid, though they don’t function as a true thematic and aesthetic extension of the album in the way that the additions to Red (Taylor’s Version) did.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 30, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Songs like “Re-entering” and “World on Fire” in particular feel like nothing more than wandering sketches. Still, Hval and Volden’s modus operandi has been to push barriers, regularly tickling some pleasure point you didn’t know you needed, while perhaps neglecting the one you thought you did.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 23, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It doesn’t exactly reinvent the pop-punk wheel—it also could’ve stood to lose about half a dozen songs—but its brightest, most exhilarating spots are a welcome reminder of what made the trio so iconic in the first place.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 23, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
As high-energy and catchy as most of Hackney Diamonds is, though, the album also showcases a few tracks that suggest that the Stones might be better off embracing their age rather than asserting their eternal youthfulness (“I’m too old for dying and too young to lose,” Jagger declares on “Depending on You”).- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 19, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
What Something to Give Each Other lacks in poignancy, though, is made up for by the joy with which it embraces queer pleasure.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 12, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Water Made Us is an undeniably human album, authentic and sincere in its navigation and preservation of love, all told through the lens of Woods’s own experience.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 12, 2023
- Read full review