For 2,075 reviews, this publication has graded:
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55% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: | Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1 | |
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Lowest review score: | Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 1,597 out of 2075
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Mixed: 443 out of 2075
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Negative: 35 out of 2075
2075
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
It plays like a sweet-toothed sparring session, one punch after the next of joyful high-pitched barking.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 27, 2013
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- Critic Score
None of [the guest vocals] disrupt Drake’s effortless triumph over mainstream rap excess.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 27, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 24, 2013
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- Critic Score
The best parts of Mechanical Bull, its sixth album, come when that exhaustion seeps into the songwriting and playing.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 23, 2013
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- Critic Score
With repetition and fractures, tiny noises amid stark silences, Factory Floor generates extraordinary propulsion in its dark, empty spaces.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 23, 2013
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- Critic Score
The Malian singer Rokia Traoré has a gentle voice with a steely core, one that’s revealed more clearly than ever on Beautiful Africa.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 23, 2013
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- Critic Score
Insecurity, guilt, confusion and doggedness--set to winsome melodies or gnarled guitar chords and run through battered equipment--were the makings of some of the best indie-rock of the early 1990s. On Defend Yourself, Sebadoh’s first studio album since 1999, Lou Barlow still has them all.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 23, 2013
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- Critic Score
Volcano Choir puts Mr. Vernon’s voice and words up front and builds something like songs around them, often with crescendos marching toward full-scale choruses--enough to make the often inscrutable lyrics sound passionate enough to be worth puzzling out.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 23, 2013
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- Critic Score
The synthesizers gleam with artificial precision; so, at first, do the vocals, chopped into perfectly pitched samples over a majestic beat and swirling major chords. But then a human factor kicks in.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 23, 2013
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- Critic Score
A few times on the competent but wearisome Crash My Party he sounds dutifully twangy, but those moments are exceptions.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 18, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 18, 2013
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- Critic Score
What’s striking is how unambitious most of the rest of the album is, especially the half that’s produced by Mr. Thicke with his longtime production partner Pro-Jay.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 18, 2013
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- Critic Score
Don’t see True as the album in which dance music imports the sounds of the American heartland into the club in hopes of digging up new audiences, or even new ideas; see it as the one in which country takes its place front and center in global pop.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 18, 2013
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- Critic Score
You sense that he’s walked past those doors, revising his ideas, waiting, looking for something. He’s found it. Listen through his astonishing new album, Dream River, and you will hear, lined up neatly, his trademarks.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 18, 2013
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- Critic Score
Something’s always looming and buzzing--or burbling, or clattering, or tapping, or ratcheting, or blipping, or quavering--near the foreground throughout MGMT’s third album, MGMT. It makes the album both testing and, eventually, rewarding.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 16, 2013
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- Critic Score
The words are working hard here, and the music is, too, but Mr. Urban is gliding through, barely quaking at all.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 11, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 9, 2013
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- Critic Score
The songs are still sullen, smart and cleverly constructed. But too often on AM, Arctic Monkeys sound less like amalgamators than like imitators.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 9, 2013
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- Critic Score
It’s possible to like this record in theory while imagining one that’s 50 percent more enjoyable.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 9, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 5, 2013
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- Critic Score
Her fourth album in three years, confirms her steadiness as a singer-songwriter of gothic intention, drawn to romantic fatalism and beautiful ruin.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 3, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 3, 2013
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- Critic Score
The melodies are forthright, the arrangements are hand played, and Ms. Case’s voice is open and robust, with the richness of prime Linda Ronstadt and Patsy Cline.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 3, 2013
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- Critic Score
All together, that makes Hall of Fame beautiful more often than it’s interesting, because Big Sean’s ear is working smarter than his mouth.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 26, 2013
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- Critic Score
They’re love songs about persistence, and that’s embedded in the sound of the record; you don’t need a lyric sheet to hear it.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 19, 2013
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- Critic Score
Made Up Mind is another strong effort from the group headed by Ms. Tedeschi and her husband, the virtuoso blues guitarist Derek Trucks, though not quite as enlivening as its 2011 debut, “Revelator.”- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 19, 2013
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- Critic Score
Hero Brother stands very much alone as an artistic statement, calmly ravishing and emotionally centered.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 19, 2013
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- Critic Score
K. Michelle’s aiming for the sweaty pathos of Mary J. Blige, and sometimes, as on “Sometimes” and “Damn,” she comes close. What she’s missing is restraint.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 15, 2013
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- Critic Score
Following through on both the gleaming productions of 1980s pop and the evocative murk of the short-lived trendlet called witch house, Diana creates larger-than-life soundscapes where private musings can flourish.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 13, 2013
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- Critic Score
Whether he’s singing about his mother’s advice or the eternal blues staple, woman trouble, Mr. Guy hits home.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 12, 2013
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- Critic Score
Paracosm sounds warmer, more enveloping; precisely because it’s so much more spacious, it’s cozier.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 12, 2013
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- Critic Score
You’re not hearing traditional technique, but you are hearing an excellent musician’s physical and emotional connection to her instrument. You’re inside the connection, basically. These are real noisy love songs.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 7, 2013
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- Critic Score
Every word hits hard. The quicker beat turns his lethargy into something of a strategy, and he sounds like no one but himself.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 6, 2013
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- Critic Score
The album is slightly parched in places, especially when Mr. Durkan seems to be singing with his eyes rolled, but mostly the juxtaposition of gloom and urgency holds firm.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 6, 2013
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- Critic Score
For Ms. Grey, angst, melody and a hip-hop backbone are a promising combination.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 25, 2013
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- Critic Score
The end-zone dance that is “Bugatti” is far more in keeping with hip-hop’s prevailing mood, and half of this album tries to match it but falls short. But most of the rest of Trials & Tribulations is far darker and more reflective.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 22, 2013
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- Critic Score
For each solid purchase on a strong lyric there’s a mess somewhere else; for nearly every powerful accretion of sound there’s a nearly unbearable one. The record’s volatility both saves and mars it.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 17, 2013
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- Critic Score
The guitar work is explosive and vibrant, and Mr. Randolph’s band is accustomed to turning a congregation into a howling audience (and vice versa). At times it’s easy to forget that this isn’t a live recording, which seems like the point.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 16, 2013
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- Critic Score
The Blessed Unrest is all shoulder-drooping heft, and her musical choices are vexing.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 16, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 15, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 11, 2013
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- Critic Score
Her fifth, is one of the most convincing R&B albums of the year, even if it does a very thin job of being convincing about Ciara herself.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 10, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 9, 2013
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- Critic Score
She keeps her sentiments tuneful and directs most of the self-help advice at herself, staying sisterly rather than preachy.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 9, 2013
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- Critic Score
The tracks, mostly in minor keys, are bass heavy, unhurried and unexpectedly thoughtful. Sonically as well as verbally, they set aside hip-hop swagger to contemplate how the present reconfigures the past.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 9, 2013
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- Critic Score
Though Timbaland’s productions always hold some sly surprises, “Magna Carta ... Holy Grail” comes across largely as a transitional album, as if Jay-Z has tired of pop but hasn’t found a reliable alternative.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 5, 2013
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- Critic Score
The record is awkward and seriously pretentious at times, but you can’t miss the heat of its ambition.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 1, 2013
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- Critic Score
The first four songs are striking, stirringly beautiful techno numbers.... The album’s second half emphasizes ambience and texture, making for songs that are slow, contemplative and nourishing.- The New York Times
- Posted Jul 1, 2013
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- Critic Score
An album that’s simultaneously playful, down-home, innovative and devotional.- The New York Times
- Posted Jun 28, 2013
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- Critic Score
The guitar playing is explosive but focused, and the cohesion within the band is unshakable. However dense or spaced out this music gets, there’s no question that it sounds alive.- The New York Times
- Posted Jun 28, 2013
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- Critic Score
As a whole, One True Vine is as introspective and diffident as a gospel album can be.- The New York Times
- Posted Jun 24, 2013
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- Critic Score
This is a clangorous album in every way, full of brick-dense synths and abusive drums, and it often succeeds by blind force. But elsewhere the duo--Nathaniel Motte and Sean Foreman--are much slier and much more successful.- The New York Times
- Posted Jun 18, 2013
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- Critic Score
No one is expecting Mr. West to turn into a latter-day Public Enemy, making political statements as a full-time mission. He, and we, are rightly fascinated by the limelight, by the culture of consumption and by Mr. West’s endlessly contradictory reactions to all that attention. But now that he’s transfigured his music, his words await an upgrade to match.- The New York Times
- Posted Jun 17, 2013
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- Critic Score
Apocalypse is bolder and clearer, less blissed-out and more grippingly immediate than [2011's The Golden Age of Apocalypse].- The New York Times
- Posted Jun 10, 2013
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- Critic Score
Those songs rise above the story line, but probably wouldn’t have existed without characters to sing them--reason enough for a rock songwriter to venture into a musical.- The New York Times
- Posted Jun 4, 2013
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- Critic Score
Mr. Homme’s new songs are as strong as anything in that extensive catalog.- The New York Times
- Posted Jun 3, 2013
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- Critic Score
This time, the National utterly refuses to buttonhole listeners; the music calmly awaits attention, but amply repays it.- The New York Times
- Posted May 20, 2013
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- Critic Score
Boy, those throbs are deep; boy, those screams are wrenching; boy, those patterns are sustained.- The New York Times
- Posted May 16, 2013
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- Critic Score
At the heart of all is Talib Kweli’s impressively nimble rapping, with its rat-a-tat cadence and intricate rhyme-play.... But this album also falls prey to facile cosmopolitanism.- The New York Times
- Posted May 13, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted May 13, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted May 13, 2013
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- Critic Score
The songs on Re-Mit, his 30th studio album with his band the Fall, resemble a row of unevenly smashed windows, or patches of broken concrete in a street--unsightly ruptures within a familiar context, potentially more shapely and interesting the closer you look, but perhaps not.- The New York Times
- Posted May 13, 2013
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- Critic Score
This is tangled funk with a higher calling, furious mainly in its focus.- The New York Times
- Posted May 9, 2013
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- Critic Score
The Time album always sounds neater and cozier than the songs it echoes. Yet behind the album’s considerable calculation, there’s a glimpse of a kindly heart.- The New York Times
- Posted May 6, 2013
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- Critic Score
This four-woman English band has rekindled the post-punk of the late 1970s, with music that’s stark and overpowering.- The New York Times
- Posted May 1, 2013
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- Critic Score
The results are mostly dismal, making for the sort of album that reinforces faith in big, lumbering institutions that understand starmaking.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 30, 2013
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- Critic Score
Ngoni Ba was already remarkable for its plucked, pointillist modal grooves, and on Jama Ko, its passionate defense of Malian culture makes the music even sharper.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 29, 2013
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- Critic Score
The songs ponder mortality and devotion, love and family, searching for peace of mind and finding it, no doubt temporarily, in the folky benediction of “What Shall Be (Shall Be Enough).”- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 29, 2013
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- Critic Score
The arrangements are bold but often misplaced, cluttering and distracting from the songs instead of illuminating them; the characters get lost in their costumes.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 29, 2013
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Her songs move from yearning and questioning to seizing an insight and turning it into an incantation.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 29, 2013
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He is not ashamed to bleat out inane proclamations and this album benefits from his shamelessness. It’s frequently catchy and almost always compellingly energetic.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 24, 2013
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It ranks at or near the top of vexing choices made by once-platinum artists, full of lazy, half-baked pablum that does more harm to Snoop Lion than good for others.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 24, 2013
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The songs ponder affection and honesty, desire and independence, rightly confident that their modesty makes them all the more approachable.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 23, 2013
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The wry premise behind "SOS in Bel Air"--distress signals emitting from privileged enclaves--could easily be applied to the album.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 22, 2013
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It’s a take-it-or-leave-it album that’s willing to be inert or annoying. But its obsessiveness brings its own rewards.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 15, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 8, 2013
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[Guitarist Taylor] York is Ms. Williams’s collaborator throughout most of Paramore, and they have pushed the band beyond pop-punk without abandoning momentum or the big, catchy chorus.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 8, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 2, 2013
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[Dan Auerbach] helped Bombino make a spacious, centered record, one that stretches to appeal to Western listeners--like the nomads, known for their circular dancing, who temporarily inhabit the fields of Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tenn., every June--without strain or clutter or hipness overload.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 1, 2013
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- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 1, 2013
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- Critic Score
The new album is a little less pointed [than his debut], and a good deal less surprising. But Mr. Bradley, once again wailing against the convincing grit of the Menahan Street Band, sounds bolstered by all the touring he has done over the last two years.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 1, 2013
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The craftsmanship is painstaking and impressive: layer upon layer of glossy keyboards, reverberant guitars and choirlike backing vocals (although Mr. Tedder applies too much obvious Auto-Tune to his leads). But these crystal-palace productions are proud showcases for unctuous, sometimes oddly morbid lyrics.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 26, 2013
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The electronics are there, however, and they lift the album’s better songs out of the sad-sack zone.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 25, 2013
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This duo’s dark, lonely, roots-minded indie rock is affecting, all the more for its sparseness.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 25, 2013
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Chvrches makes prickly early-’80s synth-pop that recalls fellow revivalists Robyn and La Roux.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 25, 2013
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It’s less manic, less experimental, less unpredictable and, oddly, less consistent.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 25, 2013
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There’s not likely to be a more earthy feeling and backward-sounding country album released on a major label this year.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 20, 2013
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Ms. Musgraves has a sweet character to her sound, which allows her to deliver a cynic’s wisdom in the voice of an inquisitive child.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 20, 2013
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The scriptural cadence and mythic gravity of Mr. Houck’s lyrics, here and elsewhere, manage not to overburden his emotional payload.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 18, 2013
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Its 10th full-length album in two decades as a band, the band pulls back from that intensity but adds layers of depth and surprise.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 18, 2013
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In songs about getting swept up by infatuation the music sounds like a suddenly shared, irresistible impulse.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 18, 2013
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Ben Shemie sings admonitions--“These same visions/It takes years for things to change”--that could be comments on the band’s fascination with modular structure or just testimony to its calm obstinacy.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 18, 2013
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There’s a distinct band lurking here and there, although it may never escape Nine Inch Nails’ shadow.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 18, 2013
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He’s mulling over cosmic, metaphysical thoughts: about time and space, good and evil, love and death, all in music that certifies every uncertainty.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 18, 2013
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What About Now suggests a few paths for progress, and an ambivalence about committing to any one of them, all under a comfort-zone haze of undifferentiated, low-ambition, lightly rootsy hard rock.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 11, 2013
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With lush, glimmering keyboards and electronics, lean indie-rock guitars or Robert Glasper’s limpid jazz piano the songs tease and insinuate. Their meanderings lead somewhere.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 26, 2013
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The songs don’t prize catchiness; they’re too busy tweaking and interweaving, toying with texture and momentum.... Yet at the same time, there’s sheer exhilaration in the profusion of rhythms.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 25, 2013
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Her music is roots-rock with an Appalachian foundation, in arrangements that rise alongside her forthright alto or let it hold its own nearly unaccompanied.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 25, 2013
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The key is that the melodies are hearty ones in cheerful major keys. They could almost be Celtic pipe tunes, if they weren’t set on stun. It’s a merry onslaught.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 25, 2013
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It’s less confessional, less bleakly vulnerable than he has been on past albums.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 25, 2013
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