The Independent (UK)'s Scores
- Music
For 2,192 reviews, this publication has graded:
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47% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: | Radical Optimism | |
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Lowest review score: | Donda |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 1,175 out of 2192
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Mixed: 988 out of 2192
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Negative: 29 out of 2192
2192
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
They’re still sculpted from the same small portfolio of sounds--basically, buzzing distorted guitar riffs and harmony chants borne along on pummelling drum barrages--which tends to impose too narrow an emotional range on the album. It’s like being hectored loudly by a bore.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 14, 2017
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Perhaps reflecting the three years spent touring after their marvellous Music In Exile album, the excellent Resistance finds Malian desert-rockers Songhoy Blues forging firmer bonds between their native modes and Western styles.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 14, 2017
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- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 14, 2017
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- Critic Score
There’s nothing particularly Nashville about Jason Isbell’s new album--no cowboy hats or keening steel guitars--but it does possess, in spades, the kind of blue-collar concerns that have traditionally furnished country music’s backbone.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 14, 2017
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Throughout this intensely poetic, introspective album, currents of guilt, regret and resolution battle in quiet turbulence, the group’s trademark harmonies and acoustic folk settings augmented with additional sonic strata.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 14, 2017
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It’s pleasant enough, though listeners may experience a twinge or two of deja vu.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 7, 2017
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They’re best when they work together, with the charming simplicity of the island-flavoured “Feel About You” and beach-strolling “Red Sun” contrasting nicely with the tart, twitchy urgency of “Too Far Gone”.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 7, 2017
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There are glosses on former glories--“Jamaica Moon” is a patois adaptation of “Havana Moon”, while “Lady B. Goode” involves gender-realignment of Chuck’s signature song--but they’re vastly outweighed by tranches of sloppy filler.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 7, 2017
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Muhly’s sweeping orchestral vista mid-section dominates “Pluto”; and Stevens’ furtive, autotuned description of “Saturn” as a “melancholy creature, paranoid secret” is rudely interrupted halfway through by a brash, bustling beat barging its way in like Donald Trump at a photoshoot. The “oracle ghost” “Venus”, meanwhile, is treated in more recognisably Sufjan style, in its exhumation of a youthful indiscretion at a summer camp, characteristically stirred into a wider lyrical compass.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 7, 2017
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Her dance-pop here is identical to everyone else’s, which leaves Perry clutching at the single-entendre raciness of “Bon Appetit” (“Got me spread like a buffet / Bon appetit, boy”) and curdled imagery like “my love’s the bullet with your name on it” to secure a soupcon of bogus outrage.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 7, 2017
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The title track draws on gospel traditions to confront police killings--“Not everybody that’s brown can get the fuck on the ground”--while in “Overtime” and “Believe”, Booker expresses the desire for faith and direction in a rootless world.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 1, 2017
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It’s indicative of the taste for extemporisation--elsewhere reflected in the funeral lamentation “Bullets In The Street And Blood”, which yokes an explicit message to a desultory instrumental drift--which renders this album less compelling than 2012’s Landing On A Hundred.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 1, 2017
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On her best album in years, Thea Gilmore darts back and forth between sharp, intelligent pieces on dark themes--depression, loneliness, murder--and more positive songs about love and hope.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 1, 2017
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Relaxer is effectively Alt-J’s folk album: still studious and tending towards complexity, but here tempered by a rootedness that snags emotions more directly.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 1, 2017
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He just sounds like a grumpy geriatric for whom age has brought little of the reflective wisdom of Leonard Cohen.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 1, 2017
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“Shine On Me” sounds like a George Harrison out-take, while the kitschy-corny “Livin’ In Sin” (“Your touch is electrical/I’m so susceptible”) recalls The Beach Boys circa 15 Big Ones. But there are threads of sly invention woven throughout, most notably the unusual alliance of dobro slide and Bacharach horns that lifts “Wildest Dreams”.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 1, 2017
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Overall, the album offers a surprisingly successful transformation that somehow enables one to hear this most familiar of material as if through new ears, a remarkable achievement in itself.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted Jun 1, 2017
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Ingenious arrangements illuminate the songs, notably the blissful synth solo reaffirming life and love in “All Of Me Wants All Of You”, and the 12 minutes of keening sounds, like the moaning of whales, appended to “Blue Bucket Of Gold”.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 30, 2017
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It’s an engrossing set throughout, leading one through the subdued swirls of “Dawn Chorus” to the climax of “The Uncertainty Principle”, another work whose throbbing organ and cavernous twang owe a distinct debt to Can.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 25, 2017
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Realised here in more expressive interpretations, and interspersed with poems read by her daughter, the actress Gabrielle Drake, these songs are full of acute observations, deft allusions and metaphors, and the subtlest of emotional revelations, wielded with an English restraint redolent with the aromas of freshly-mowed lawns and cucumber sandwiches.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 24, 2017
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It’s a remarkable departure for Amidon, who also eschews his usual traditional repertoire in favour of original material, albeit haunted by similar hints of fate, animism and violence; though the overriding impression is best summed up in a phrase about “haphazard words found in drifting conversation”.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 24, 2017
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With Different Days, though, they seem to have settled into a sort of not-quite-mainstream indie-rock tinted with neo-psychedelic touches.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 24, 2017
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At their best, on the barroom piano rocker “Dirty Water”, there’s a brazen, Stones-y charm to the tart, offbeat guitar twitch and raunchy slide guitar; while societal decline is dealt a simple slap in the punchy rocker “Death & Destruction”.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 19, 2017
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With Modern Kosmology, long-time Manchester folktronic siren Jane Weaver has made her most completely realised album yet, albeit by dispensing with folk music almost entirely, in favour of more forceful Krautrock and psychedelic influences.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 17, 2017
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It’s an odd album, split between full-on dancefloor stompers like the euphoric summer romance anthem “Love You To The Sky” and less successful stabs at political commentary such as “Lousy Sum Of Nothing”, an overly simplistic bout of finger-wagging about how “the world has lost its loving” in respect of the refugee crisis.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 17, 2017
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Styles has opened himself up, as best he can, to his audience, and by gathering a solid team around him to help achieve that he’s created an immersive, well-produced collection of songs that isn’t trying to prove anything in particular to anyone.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 11, 2017
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Genders’ broad northern tones lend an apt rootedness to ethereal observations like “There’s a truth behind illusion, shining there--it’s only light”; and his subtle, detailed arrangements likewise form the most natural bed for them.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 11, 2017
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So although Cave’s adept grasp of vocal expression, from aching melancholy to erupting hysteria, guides the narratives of these songs, this is not simply a singer backed by a band, it’s a unit striving for collective expression, by whatever means possible.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 10, 2017
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The results are looser and less formal than might be expected, more imbued with soulful swing, slipping back and forth between the modes and incorporating ecstatic gospel-style call and response passages against a patinated backdrop of shakers, percussion, swooping synths and droning organ.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 10, 2017
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The first of two albums planned for 2017, From A Room: Vol. 1 builds on the success of Chris Stapleton’s Grammy-winning debut Traveller, through a similar blend of country songwriting smarts and soulful engagement.- The Independent (UK)
- Posted May 10, 2017
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