Spin's Scores
- Music
For 4,260 reviews, this publication has graded:
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50% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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47% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.6 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: | To Pimp A Butterfly | |
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Lowest review score: | They Were Wrong, So We Drowned |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 3,058 out of 4260
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Mixed: 1,147 out of 4260
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Negative: 55 out of 4260
4260
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
It’s a commendable effort, with Cole putting himself in a creative territory to respond to critics, peers and progeny. His messages are timely despite the fact that they continue, rather than conclude, a larger conversation.- Spin
- Posted Apr 23, 2018
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- Spin
- Posted Apr 18, 2018
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- Critic Score
Invasion of Privacy is a cohesive piece of work that demands to be heard in full, from front to back, side to side, on the pole and on the stove.- Spin
- Posted Apr 17, 2018
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- Critic Score
“Outer Acid” remains uncanny in its mix of blissful keys and menacing acid squiggles and “Spy” diffuses some dubby harmonica into Heard’s atmospheres. “Inner Acid” returns to the squelchy acid house Heard made back in the ‘80s and the knocking beat and bells of “Nodyahed” suggest that he can still make a dancefloor quake.- Spin
- Posted Apr 16, 2018
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- Critic Score
By balancing on the tightrope between meme and icon, between relatable and aspirational, Ephorize emerges sounding remarkably human.- Spin
- Posted Apr 11, 2018
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- Critic Score
The richness of the music occasions her best vocal performances to date. The arrangements are airy with distance and light, but their architecture is boldly drawn: the basslines thick and taut, the arpeggios whirring and spangled, the guitars unfurling in a glossy neon cursive.- Spin
- Posted Apr 11, 2018
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- Critic Score
Freer of their influences, Hop Along have produced a stunning batch of songs--each of them like a small world of its own, continuously unfolding.- Spin
- Posted Apr 6, 2018
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- Critic Score
Here’s hoping The Tree Of Forgiveness is not either an incidental or deliberate farewell. If it must be, at least it’s both a suitably goofy celebration of his career and a dignified capstone.- Spin
- Posted Apr 5, 2018
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Kinetic and thrilling as the uptempo blasts are, where Your Queen shines is on the slower pieces, revealing that Hutchings can purr, murmur and wax lyrical as well.- Spin
- Posted Apr 2, 2018
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Where she once had a compelling songwriting portfolio, here she has a compelling mood. That mood’s best described as “content.” ... It’s not a belting voice, but it’s a remarkable instrument, capable of imbuing with winsome empathy songs.- Spin
- Posted Mar 30, 2018
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McMahon’s most transcendent statement yet. ... Freedom rings as both immediate and timeless, intensely personal and easily understood. ... Freedom exalts in subtlety. It offers powerfully economical songwriting.- Spin
- Posted Mar 29, 2018
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- Critic Score
These are well-loved songs that Ndegeocello loves a little bit more, singing them with a rich, warm tone (she’s never sounded better) and backed by a band who know how to anticipate every bob and weave she might make. It’s one of her best.- Spin
- Posted Mar 22, 2018
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- Spin
- Posted Mar 20, 2018
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- Critic Score
The Breeders’ there/not there qualities are such that unacquainted listeners will imagine what the band sounds like and they’d be right. Expedient and necessary, All Nerve is what we need now, next week, in 2023.- Spin
- Posted Mar 20, 2018
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Though firmly planted on the dancefloor, Record is for sunshine and joy the way 2008 masterpiece Out of the Woods was for moody rain and 2010 chamber-pop charmer Love and Its Opposite for snug wood paneling. But for all its color and vim, it’s also a brave, grave survey--emotionally if not always factually autobiographical--of Thorn’s relationship to London, her family, and her own heart.- Spin
- Posted Mar 19, 2018
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Less deadpan and more florid than its predecessor, Now Only is heartrending in new, different ways. Sonically, the record doesn’t stray far from Mount Eerie’s elemental standard operating procedures, where meandering, nylon-strung acoustic strum or heavy metal thunder underlie Elverum’s streams of consciousness.- Spin
- Posted Mar 19, 2018
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- Critic Score
There’s something more filigreed at work: a thoughtfulness about the band’s mannered chaos as though they’ve come out on the far end of some mass realization.- Spin
- Posted Mar 19, 2018
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- Critic Score
It’s Georgia Maq’s raw-edged vocals you’ll remember, and the consistency of the musical canvas opens space for her to work. Her lyrics articulate human entanglements with a lack of sentimentality that belies how much she cares, and like Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan, she has a gift for evoking shame hand-in-hand with fury.- Spin
- Posted Mar 19, 2018
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- Critic Score
In dealing with the inevitable change that loss engenders, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat and Dan Deacon have crafted a memorable and eclectic record.- Spin
- Posted Mar 9, 2018
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- Critic Score
Utopia contains several solid entries into Byrne’s pop songwriting canon, but few revelations. Whimsical and surprisingly optimistic, it finds him following several different impulses at once.- Spin
- Posted Mar 8, 2018
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- Critic Score
Though Will Yip has already spawned a modern alt-rock empire from the modest Philly suburb of Conshohocken, Time & Space is the album that’s been waiting for him all his life.- Spin
- Posted Mar 1, 2018
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- Critic Score
At times, that there’s as much “subversive” pop music as there is music that is supposedly being subverted, not all of it as deep as advertised. Poem, thankfully, is far more thoughtful about it than most.- Spin
- Posted Feb 28, 2018
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For all the deft, varied professionalism on display here, Lamar’s omnipresence on Black Panther: The Album might be its most compelling feature.- Spin
- Posted Feb 20, 2018
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- Critic Score
Despite the resourcefulness of Kronos’ contributions, though, Anderson is Landfall’s most crucial actor and its saving grace; the humility, naturalism, and humor of her recitations justify the scale of the project.- Spin
- Posted Feb 15, 2018
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- Critic Score
The way What a Time to Be Alive zooms by, there are songs you might blink and miss if McCaughan weren’t writing some of the most sharply worded lyrics of his career.- Spin
- Posted Feb 15, 2018
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- Critic Score
Despite such surface gloss, it’s clear Franz Ferdinand are still finding their creative footing without McCarthy. The taut arrangements present on previous albums can occasionally give way to moody repetition (“The Academy Award”) or sluggish tempos (“Slow Don’t Kill Me Slow”), robbing the record of immediacy. This is a small quibble, however.- Spin
- Posted Feb 15, 2018
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- Critic Score
Greenwood’s previous PTA scores provided feral atmosphere first and foremost, or in Inherent Vice’s case, a convex take on classic Hollywood film noir incidental music. Phantom Thread’s score, on the other hand, feels like another main character or storytelling voice in the film. Greenwood’s abilities have never served one of Anderson’s films better, or proved so integral to its power.- Spin
- Posted Feb 5, 2018
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- Critic Score
Besides restoring the muscle lacking on the emaciated An Object, the opening trio on Snares presents No Age as everything they’ve been (gritty, propulsive, atmospheric, a motorcycle taking on a sandstorm head-on) and the immediately accessible rawk band they’ve never been.- Spin
- Posted Jan 26, 2018
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The new album’s particular saving grace is its self-loathing streak, the sense that scales have fallen from eyes and that Stay Gold’s nebulous disaffection has soured to regret.- Spin
- Posted Jan 22, 2018
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- Critic Score
You’ll discover plenty of laconic beauty wherever you drop into The House, and it glimmers with the songful club music that made its predecessor great for getting ready to go out. But a profusion of digital-pastoral vocal settings makes it unlikely to displace Pool from constant shuffle rotation.- Spin
- Posted Jan 16, 2018
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