For 4,544 reviews, this publication has graded:
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64% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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34% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.5 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 74
Highest review score: | The Life Of Pablo | |
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Lowest review score: | Graffiti |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 3,663 out of 4544
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Mixed: 771 out of 4544
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Negative: 110 out of 4544
4544
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
No amount of perma-teenage angst can dim PWR BTTM’s light, and by owning the hard work it takes to love yourself and others, particularly as a queer person, they celebrate the beauty and value of our lives.- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 12, 2017
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None of these songs rank among DeMarco’s best melodies, but like the winning Salad Days bedroom-pop exercise “Let My Baby Stay,” they meld vocal style, lyric, and arrangement into something that feels authentic.- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 10, 2017
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- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 10, 2017
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Compassion may feel especially timely, but music this passionately realized will always be worth revisiting.- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 5, 2017
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“The Sun Still Shines,” suggests that Palmer and Ka-Spel should have really focused their energies on composing interstitial music for a stage production.- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 5, 2017
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- Critic Score
He [Greg Dulli] can still hit that sweet spot of come-hither crooning, but the production hides much of his more agitated wails in the mix. The vocals are therefore no longer the dominant element of the music.- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 5, 2017
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- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 5, 2017
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Slowdive is not a quantum-leap record, nor does it slavishly replicate past successes. Rather it’s another collection of thoughtfully written songs, filled with evident joy for the band’s reformation.- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 5, 2017
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Even with its lumbering back end, this is a return to form for Black Lips, who’ve once again found a middle ground between the manic, abrasive rock of their earliest records and the more clean-cut punk of 2014’s Underneath The Rainbow.- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 5, 2017
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It has moments of populist ambition (the soaring chorus of the lead single, “Slip Away,” for example) and self-consciously arty experimentation (“Choir”), and it’s a credit to Hadreas and producer Blake Mills that its 13 tracks sound as seamless and cohesive as they do.- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 5, 2017
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- The A.V. Club
- Posted May 1, 2017
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A record so good it answers its own title question and makes you eager to ask it again.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 28, 2017
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It’s unmistakably a New Year album, and a decent one at that, but it doesn’t do much to distinguish itself.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 28, 2017
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Async gives the sensation of being inside an art installation, where everything you’re supposed to be thinking is spelled out for you on little white gallery cards. Async works far better when Sakamoto lets the music mirror that existential ambiguity.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 28, 2017
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By zeroing in on a more human theme, he has found a way to open up, creating an album that’s easier to listen to than its predecessors while still being dazzlingly difficult to perform.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 28, 2017
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By the time “Aphrodite” grinds to a close, his group slowing intuitively in lockstep while he unleashes lightning bursts of noise, Moore has made a convincing case that this marks a new beginning.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 28, 2017
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Pleasure isn’t all novelty. It’s a demanding record expressing demanding emotions.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 28, 2017
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All of this isn’t to say that the album is bad--Albarn’s dialed in, and the guests are meticulously curated--but rather that it seems dwarfed by its role as part of a larger concept, the music mostly valuable for its possible real-world applications in videos, on tours, as action figures and video games, and all of the other manufactured, disposable pop culture ephemera for which Gorillaz was designed.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 28, 2017
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Charly Bliss has made a record as alive and irrepressible as anything I’ve heard in years.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 21, 2017
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- Critic Score
Despite a little sagging in the middle third, Electric Lines is a fine club-friendly album to spend the summer with.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 21, 2017
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He’s been doing that for years now, but on his 21st record, he again accomplishes that goal in his own inimitable style, still mining the uncommon depths and winning melodies within his own bizarre parameters.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 21, 2017
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Death Song confirms there’s no end to the kinds of hurt and frustration that can be channeled into its cathartic music.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 21, 2017
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- Critic Score
Voigt certainly hasn’t lost touch with electronic music, though Narkopop reclaims the sound of it that is most unmistakably his, while also giving it more variance in tone.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 21, 2017
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- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 21, 2017
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Lamar trusts every idea to stand on its own. When you’re making art this substantial, vital, and virtuosic, there’s no need to wrap a tidy bow around it.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 17, 2017
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He’s delivered a batch of songs that feel relentlessly focus-tested in an attempt to win back his female fan base, but that have, in the process, sanded away the edges that gave him personality in the first place.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 14, 2017
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- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 14, 2017
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Like every Little Dragon album, Season High contains several new entries into the band’s essential catalog, but as a whole, it fails to fulfill its potential.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 14, 2017
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It’s the whole package that matters here, and taken together, The World’s Best American Band has the elements of one of the year’s best rock albums.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 10, 2017
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It is as purely individual a statement as the English producer has released yet. Happily, it’s also his most approachable, with the producer sounding more euphoric than he has in a long time.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 10, 2017
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- Critic Score
In just under a half hour, the band displays a musical confidence rare for a joyfully ragged garage-pop debut.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 7, 2017
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- Critic Score
The music barely hangs together at times, but the potential for the roller-coaster to go flying off the tracks is, as always, part of the fun.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 7, 2017
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If the skittering fluctuation of Ghersi’s past releases gained him a cult following, then the open-hearted ballads sprinkled throughout Arca should earn him his well-deserved breakthrough.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 7, 2017
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- Critic Score
In the immediate, Whiteout Conditions might leave you a little cold.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 7, 2017
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- Critic Score
The raw passion of Future Island’s past work still dominates, but with more complexity in the arrangements, and more push and pull in the ongoing dialogue between the voice and the instruments behind it.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 7, 2017
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Pure Comedy excels when Tillman trains his observant side-eye on smaller targets as well.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 7, 2017
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He’s still reaching to the golden age for inspiration, but updating it so thoroughly that we’re reminded why we considered it golden in the first place.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Apr 7, 2017
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- Critic Score
It sounds instead much more like an artist stepping back into his old pocket with great relief and delivering the verses he feared he’d never be allowed to. He’s packing even more words in and rapping harder than ever, like his life depended on it.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 31, 2017
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At a time when it’s once more trendy to declare that rock music is dying, there’s a band like Pile putting lie to that hyperbole and still pushing the form to its outermost limits.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 31, 2017
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For every track that maintains an admirable speed-thrash spirit (“Walk With Me,” “Raining Blood”) there’s another that sounds more silly than rocking, like the cheesy posturing of “Here I Go Again,” a dark metal song as imagined by Roger Corman.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 31, 2017
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Too much of Silver Eye keeps something back. But if “Zodiac Black” signals the next step in the evolution of Goldfrapp, maybe that reluctance will eventually prove to be worth it.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 31, 2017
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- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 31, 2017
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On these songs [“Playing Harp For The Fishes,” “Short Elevated Period,” and “Diamonds In Cups”], Silver/Lead strikes the perfect balance of moody intrigue and saw-toothed aggression. Unfortunately, the rest of the album isn’t calibrated quite as precisely, which makes for an uneven listening experience.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 31, 2017
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Emperor Of Sand is both progressive and regressive, as Mastodon takes two different parts of its past and slaps them together. And while it occasionally works, more often than not Mastodon just sounds confused.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 31, 2017
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Dylan has grown into that role, whether through divine inspiration or sheer repetition. He’s musically simpatico with his veteran touring band, and like Joni Mitchell on her later records, his voice has deepened, developed an appealing smokiness.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 31, 2017
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Heartless proves, Pallbearer is more than capable of making those old moves feel fresh.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 24, 2017
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Pain is the crux of Elverum’s career, and without resorting to any of his brutally stark instrumentation, he offers his most sobering full-length to date, and likely of all time.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 24, 2017
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We All Want The Same Things finds resonant common ground in the idea that shared imperfections bring people together.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 24, 2017
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More Life is light, often weightless. Despite its playlist tag, it is unmistakably a Drake album--it even has a Blueprint highball closer like each of its predecessors--and as an album, it is probably Drake’s worst. But as a collection of totally atomized songs and ideas, it’s up there with anything he’s released.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 24, 2017
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Now two LPs and four EPs deep, Droog projects are broadcasts from a smoke-filled, permanent-midnight club, his verses spit with the off-the-cuff ease of a dude feeling it that night. At this point, he’s already got one thing Nas never had: consistency.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 20, 2017
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Millport might in large part be an homage or a genre project, but at least it’s a sharp and sophisticated one.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 17, 2017
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At its core, the album captures the difficulty of losing loved ones without losing faith. With You’re Not As _____ As You Think, Boucher has made a record that serves as a companion through those ups and downs of the grieving process, offering companionship and a helping hand, when such things aren’t always a given.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 17, 2017
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- Critic Score
Pleasant sonic wallpaper that unfortunately doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 17, 2017
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Spoon is a master of hooky songwriting, but Hot Thoughts seems so bent on undermining it that the band undersells itself. Maybe Hot Thoughts is an apt title after all--it’s got great ideas, but the execution is lacking.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 17, 2017
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While [“Name For You” is] a decidedly summery affair, it deals with serious ideas, admonishing those with antiquated notions who might try to stand in his daughters’ way while cruising through the infectious melodies. This dynamic is the engine that powers Heartworms, with subject matter frequently much heavier than the psychedelia-tinged pop its bathed in.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 10, 2017
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Even with some outstanding singles, the album as a whole finds the group somewhere between its comfort zone and a confident next step, with many of the songs bleeding forgettably into one another.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 10, 2017
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Everybody Works is a record about small, personal moments, like riding the bus or balancing work and art--as the title track expertly does--and that’s what makes it all cohere. It’s simply effective. In other words: It works.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 10, 2017
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Her steady output has produced some of her generation’s finest records, and her sixth, Semper Femina, is among her most affecting to date.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 10, 2017
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- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 10, 2017
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There are moments where he falters, often lacking hooks to make a track resonate beyond its runtime, but those failings exist in flashes. What sticks with you is a sense of joy that surmounts all the anger and angst.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 7, 2017
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Although it’s uniformly beautiful, the rest of the album doesn’t leave nearly as deep an impression, with McIlwain occasionally indulging more experimental tangents (the pastoral ambient sketch of “Chatter,” the staticky drone of “Tropopause”) but mostly never pushing past his usual mode of lush, lightly skipping intelligent dance music.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 3, 2017
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While an album of ’80s-styled pop played by a band with a penchant for fretboard theatrics could be thrilling, VOIDS stumbles more than it should.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 3, 2017
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Though it lacks its predecessor’s immediate accessibility, it benefits from an aesthetic texture that’s grander, darker, and more satisfying, if only for the sense that memoirs don’t have to be confessional; they can tell a life’s story through tone and structure in addition to words. A good gimmick, it goes to show, has the power to transcend itself.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 3, 2017
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Last Place is the work of a reenergized band that’s clearly benefited from its extended downtime, even if its overarching mood hardly reflects it.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 3, 2017
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World Eater represents a true stylistic leap. It’s a mammoth collection of songs that carve out a unique niche between apocalyptic anxiety and brief, cathartic bursts of ecstasy--a feeling that should resonate with just about everybody these days.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Mar 3, 2017
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In the eight songs that compose the record, there’s not a second that feels extraneous, making for 28 minutes of uncompromising and effortless genre-bending. It’s a stunning record, apparently for all parties involved.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 28, 2017
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Forget doesn’t mean that Xiu Xiu has ignored its past; actually, it’s a project that fans are more likely to remember.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 24, 2017
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If Sick Scenes doesn’t necessarily cohere as a whole, the individual songs are strong enough that it also doesn’t really matter.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 24, 2017
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Heartbreak can be overwhelming, inspiring, and exhausting, and with Dirty Projectors, Longstreth has birthed an album that strives to not only reflect that, but to mimic it, too.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 24, 2017
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The Incessant serves as a demarcation point for both Sutter and Meat Wave. It’s the sound of a band fighting through the darkness in order to find something new and sounding emboldened by the process.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 17, 2017
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Mostly though, Adams seems possessed by the same spirit that gets into his pal Taylor Swift when she’s hurt. He sounds like he’s savoring how full of life his music is, no matter what it took to make it so. He hasn’t just turned misery into art; he’s turned it into joy.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 17, 2017
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In sum, Zombies On Broadway compiles some worthwhile ruminations and life lessons, but McMahon needs to search a little harder for compelling ways to package them.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 13, 2017
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On Northern Passages, their 10th studio album, The Sadies cut 11 fresh paths through well-trodden territory. Because band-leading brothers Dallas and Travis Good have made adaptability their defining characteristic, they’re best served when bigger personalities take the helm.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 10, 2017
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The Scandinavian city is so much more than doom and gloom. Communions remind us that there’s more, and of the optimistic quality of a great pop song. After all, they made an entire album of the stuff.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 7, 2017
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Getting these skills to jell means moving further away from the Surfer Blood that fans may be accustomed to, but Snowdonia hints at a rewarding payoff.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 3, 2017
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- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 3, 2017
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While The Menzingers’ best work has always been about grappling with personality flaws in the interest of becoming a better person, After The Party only offers surface-level reflections, to the detriment of the band itself.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Feb 3, 2017
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On Culture the band stakes a claim as the most important rap group to come out of Atlanta since Outkast. That it even seems fathomable is proof of the album’s success.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 30, 2017
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Fred Thomas has proven to be quite an effective and relevant artist in the present.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 30, 2017
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Life Without Sound is the next logical step in Cloud Nothings’ upward trajectory.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 27, 2017
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Japandroids have always sought love and adventure in equal measure, and they get both on Near To The Wild Heart Of Life.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 27, 2017
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It shows that Crutchfield has always been a star. Tourist In This Town is just the coming-out party.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 27, 2017
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Basinski’s work, like all ambient music, provides for endless, unresolved interpretation by its design--even when it tries to force its meaning on you.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 20, 2017
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These songs would never be mistaken for any other band—by that same token, it’s often so obtuse it feels like it’s not meant for anyone but its creators.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 20, 2017
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On Hang, Foxygen hits its stride, a well-oiled machine confident in its surfeit of songwriting abilities and wieldy powers.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 20, 2017
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- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 20, 2017
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Although AFI (The Blood Album) doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it doesn’t need to: The record illustrates that the members of AFI are deeply committed to forward motion, and remain as fired up now as they were 25 years ago.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 20, 2017
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Despite its ridiculous lyrical moments, Forever advances the trend of mashing together disparate styles in metal and hardcore.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 13, 2017
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The result is the most eclectic, multidimensional, and ambitious album of The xx’s young career.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 13, 2017
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Unfortunately, about half of the album’s 12 tracks could be described as comfortable, safe songwriting without the exploration that makes the band shine.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 6, 2017
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Three albums deep, Killer Mike and El-P sound as hungry as ever, and the world is still full of Caesars with ripe throats.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 3, 2017
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Even with its moments of flawed excess, Not The Actual Events is so full of new ideas compared to the relatively “this again?” nature of Hesitation Marks or The Slip that it deserves its place in the NIN catalog.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 3, 2017
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His assessment is astute; whether used as sonic wallpaper or the soundtrack for a lengthy meditation, Reflection is the kind of album useful for getting ideas percolating and nourishing interior worlds.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Jan 3, 2017
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Telefone is a unique project that points to even greater things for Noname in the future.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Dec 22, 2016
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To Hodgy’s credit, several of the tracks on Fireplace do manage to break free of vague personal change into songs that are resonant for their tension.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Dec 19, 2016
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While Abendrot doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it follows in emo’s tradition of skewing toward prog, if not in sound then at least in ideology.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Dec 5, 2016
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He is Donald Glover, a man who can perform and write comedy, act in drama, and drop a truly wonderful album on short notice with all the influences and instructions spelled out.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Dec 2, 2016
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There is the sense here that he’s trying to get away from himself, to grasp at problems that loom larger than those in his personal life. It feels necessary, if not particularly memorable.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Dec 2, 2016
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Because the main suites were written with a blind listen in mind and because it is so well-executed, the audio makes for an epic, vivid two-and-a-half-hour event that will enchant anyone new to Bush’s music.- The A.V. Club
- Posted Dec 2, 2016
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