For 3,121 reviews, this publication has graded:
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35% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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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:
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Positive: 1,691 out of 3121
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Mixed: 1,319 out of 3121
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Negative: 111 out of 3121
3121
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
A compilation of the most successful tracks from both halves of Keys would have made for a slightly stronger album. As is, though, it serves as a testament to both Keys’s strengths and weaknesses as a singer-songwriter—and her willingness to expand beyond the boundaries of genre constraints.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Dec 10, 2021
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On 30, she displays the confidence to share her boldest vocal, stylistic, and thematic interests.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 22, 2021
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While the two versions of “All Too Well” are the most obvious examples of that skill, it’s the editing over the entirety of Red that elevates it from an album that seemed destined to be remembered as a transitional work in Swift’s catalog into a confident, refined album that demands inclusion in the pop canon.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 17, 2021
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Raise the Roof could have emphasized the differences between its many musical differences, but instead, Plant and Krauss unify them.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 16, 2021
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A fully realized crystallization of her melodic instincts and the themes that she’s previously explored. She wrote most of the album in 2020, holed up alone in a Melbourne apartment while riding out the Covid-19 pandemic, and as such a sense of solitariness permeates its 10 songs.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 8, 2021
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If Lush presented a snapshot of a particular mindset, a woman trapped in a psychological limbo, Valentine captures the blurry nature of an inquiry still in progress.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 1, 2021
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Exemplifying the album’s lo-fi aesthetic, these songs juxtapose staccato beats and watery synths, highlighting Lange’s knack for constructing minimally psychedelic but seductively melodic soundscapes.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 25, 2021
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Though the War on Drugs may take a slightly more straightforward approach on I Don’t Live Here Anymore than they have in the past, they still find new ways to engage with complex arrangements. The result is a nimble balancing act of accessible pop-rock anthems and experimental soundscapes.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 25, 2021
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By stripping back the sonic density of her previous work and taking its sweet time to unfold, Blue Banisters further fleshes out Del Rey’s increasingly vivid personal world.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 21, 2021
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Sympathy for Life lacks the emotional vulnerability of 2016’s Human Performance and, despite some entrancing synths, the zany eclecticism of 2018’s Wide Awake! But the charm of A. Savage and Andrew Brown’s lackadaisical voices and chummy melodies haven’t lost a bit of their allure.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 19, 2021
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Lately reveals itself to be Hiatt’s most daring and experimental work to date. The songs’ relative lack of polish knocks down what few layers of pretense may have previously existed between the listener and the characteristically unvarnished inner thoughts that compose most of her lyrics.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 15, 2021
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When the album’s key thematic line appears toward the end of the song—“The objects we’re locked in, immobile and violent/Just fewer like that, fewer afraid”—it feels like the awakening that the band has been building toward all along.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 12, 2021
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All Day Gentle Hold is rife with expressive touches that point to Maine’s growing confidence, and the feeling of access to his innermost thoughts accentuates the album’s tenderness.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 11, 2021
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As a whole, Let Me Do One More is more punk than its predecessor, and like Australian punk-rockers Amyl and the Sniffers, Tudzin weaves the personal with the political and—in a way that’s as clever as it is uncomfortable—economics with love.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 30, 2021
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Guyton’s wide-ranging vocals have a way of investing even the weakest tracks on Remember Her Name with a freshness and power, sometimes belting an octave or two higher in a way that emphasizes the weight that her words carry.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 24, 2021
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Lil Nas’s expressions of anxiety and self-doubt are served with honesty and tenderness, as well as some awkwardness.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 20, 2021
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The album seamlessly blends the nightmarish and the romantic, interweaving our perennial hopes and the terrors we can’t shake off.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 9, 2021
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Musgraves’s follow-up, Star-Crossed, is just as effortlessly melodic and accessible. But it’s also more eclectic, far afield of modern radio tropes, either of the pop or country varieties.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 3, 2021
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With Donda, he’s crafted his most unforgiving self-portrait yet, one that, like the best works that plumb a person’s inner depths, winds up reflecting our collective imperfections.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 1, 2021
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If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is ultimately rather straightforward, reprising many of the themes—self-doubt, self-sabotage, self-empowerment—that have been central to Halsey’s past work.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 26, 2021
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For the most part, though, it’s the album’s more stylistically adventurous songs—like the propulsive “Easy to Sabotage” and “Reese,” which hits on a very particular sort of ‘70s-style jazz-inflected folk-rock also recently explored by the likes of Clairo and St. Vincent—that leave the greatest impression.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 23, 2021
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Screen Violence matches the urgency of its sound with the weight of its content. ... Four albums in, Chvrches have honed their pop craft and, by extension, their ability to transform hopelessness into inspiration.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 23, 2021
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On the whole, the 12 songs here are quieter, more meditative, and more grown-up than Lorde’s past efforts. But while Solar Power doesn’t traffic in the booming emotional catharsis of Melodrama, it doesn’t succumb to navel-gazing solipsism either.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 19, 2021
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The Horses and the Hounds proves that McMurtry’s nearly peerless ability to tear our hearts out with a good yarn hasn’t waned a bit.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 18, 2021
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Pressure Machine, stands as the band’s most sonically restrained effort to date. The hooks are still there, and songs like “Quiet Town” and “In the Car Outside” nod to the group’s early synth-driven sound, but the album’s 11 songs take their sweet time unfurling, luxuriating in subtle details like the swooning strings of the title track.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 13, 2021
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Ignota has demonstrated throughout her career that she can pen an evocative confession and seductively deliver a melodic line. But her more essential talent is an ability to simultaneously embody and channel a range of psychological and spiritual states. Sinner Get Ready is driven by a penetrative imagination, a preternatural sense of empathy, and an innate awareness of the paradoxical nature of human existence.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 5, 2021
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The album also nudges Eilish beyond the trip-hop and trap sounds that dominated her past work, resulting in a more sonically diverse set that allows the singer—whose downbeat vocals have often been compared to Lorde’s—to explore the more textured, melodic aspects of her voice.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jul 29, 2021
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- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jul 27, 2021
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Vince Staples is another microcosmic release from the rapper, his leisurely approach suggesting a newfound confidence.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jul 12, 2021
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The production is generally crisper and louder here than on the Go! Team’s earlier work, but it preserves their music’s signature noisy exuberance.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jun 30, 2021
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