The Quietus' Scores

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For 2,114 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 61% higher than the average critic
  • 7% same as the average critic
  • 32% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 76
Highest review score: 100 Gentlemen At 21 [Deluxe Edition]
Lowest review score: 0 Lulu
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,867 out of 2114
  2. Mixed: 228 out of 2114
  3. Negative: 19 out of 2114
2114 music reviews
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Scacco Matto
    Senni presents not so much a cohesive album here, but rather a series of studies on a form, like Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas. But not like Scarlatti’s sonatas. More like Marc-André Hamelin’s revisionist Omaggios to Scarlatti. Senni produces music with alternating measures of respect and irreverence. But the results lack emotion. Scacco Matto’s production values are modern and bright. But they don’t move me to move.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Three
    Each track here has a distinct and complementary topography. Places to explore, spend time in, and marvel at. The Necks remain at the top of their game.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Don of Diamond Dreams
    The Don Of Diamond Dreams feels imbued with a sense that alternative realities – different ways of telling stories, different mythologies to reflect our true nature – are always within our reach, if only we’re able to fully embrace our own imaginations.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    100% Yes
    Melt Yourself Down combine a pan-global cannon of jazz, afrobeat, and western pop to arrive at a truly thrilling kind of party music. Some parts may be garish, others recall the Klaxons a tad too potently, and some moments are more forgettable than others, but in essence 100% YES is the purest of escapist experiences. The most fun you can have without taking your daily exercise.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Birthmarks
    Birthmarks is a deft exploration of selfhood and becoming, and a marked step-up from an artist whose trajectory has promised a release that could stop you in your tracks.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It Is What It Is
    Fortunately, It Is What It Is takes the listener’s needs into consideration by counteracting giddy one-liners heightened by energetic accompaniments with introspective ruminations coupled woven into sultry arrangements. In adjusting to the shifting sonic plains, the listener is presented with a gloriously rewarding stretch of tonal stability in the record’s third act.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Insomnia
    Insomnia is generally solid, with more peaks than troughs. All things considered, it probably isn’t groundbreaking, and doesn’t feel as vital or captivating as Dave’s Psychodrama or Headie One’s Music X Road. But it’s a welcome addition to the artists’ respective back catalogues.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Heaven to a Tortured Mind
    On Heaven To A Tortured Mind, Tumor harnesses his relentless curiosity to test the boundaries of rock and noise – and reinvents what we expect from both in the process.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rakka
    With Rakka, Vladislav Delay has created an arresting album of sheer punishing density that encapsulates the ecological pressures of a land that is brutal and unforgiving at the best of times, but occasionally encompass moments of estranged beauty.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Suddenly
    The narrative and sonic stylings of these songs have the aesthetic qualities of intimate music, but Snaith’s anonymous intonations, sometimes bathed in layers of muddy distortion, hold the listener at a frustrating distance. Like the album’s artwork it advertises transparency, but delivers only more obscurity.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Every Bad
    It’d be easy to assume the reason Every Bad sounds so vital is because its raw, agitated songs are the perfect soundtrack for these blighted times, built to be played while the world’s never-ending dumpster fire burns hotter and hotter. But it’s also got a slicker, more muscular sound than 2016’s home-recorded Rice, Pasta And Other Fillers.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fountain
    While challenging intellectually, Fountain is also nothing less than a pleasing listen, like a delicate wine that opens over time.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Night Chancers
    Even with each powerful stride forwards in his career, it never seems Baxter will quite escape the shadowing of his late father, Ian. Yet, perhaps it is this paternal context, this very partial eclipsing that leaves Baxter’s work with a great style of its own. After all, a light emanating from shade will always appear brighter than one already doused in daylight.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    England Is a Garden
    England is a Garden is a beautiful and well-worked project. The five years wait it induced is retrospectively more than worth it as it is one of the most thoughtful and listenable albums the band have unleashed for quite a stretch of time.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rose Golden Doorways
    The album sounds like the process of ripping away at one’s own humanity in search of some kind of core; the music is colossal, destructive and all-consuming. ... Extraordinary, turbulent album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Separation of Being
    Partly through technology, of course, but owing much to the composer’s own ingenuity, A Separation Of Being was made by just one person and an acoustic sideman, and makes densely assembled music sound feather-light and, yes, joyful.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Names of North End Women
    Rather than simply throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, together, the pair throw a lot, all while investing time and a marked sense of freedom to what each track could eventually become.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Everything Is Beautiful
    Everything is Beautiful/Everything Sucks is a fun album that allows Frasqueri to show both sides of her personality. ... The main problem with Everything is Beautiful/Everything Sucks is that it doesn’t contain anything as devastating as ‘G.O.A.T.’, ‘Tomboy’ or ‘Kitana’. The songs never quite hit the same vein of intensity, catchiness and lyrical abstraction. There are moments when it comes close.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Everything Sucks
    Everything is Beautiful/Everything Sucks is a fun album that allows Frasqueri to show both sides of her personality. ... The main problem with Everything is Beautiful/Everything Sucks is that it doesn’t contain anything as devastating as ‘G.O.A.T.’, ‘Tomboy’ or ‘Kitana’. The songs never quite hit the same vein of intensity, catchiness and lyrical abstraction. There are moments when it comes close.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Molocular Meditation
    The music is cryptic, otherworldly, and uncanny. The dislocation of Smith’s voice from The Fall is jarring and thrilling at times.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Loom
    Loom is a brave and raw document from the frontlines of grief, exhibiting the full range of its manifestations beyond sadness – its vacancy, rage and disorientation, delivered with a sweet disposition, enchanting you into a greater and richer awareness of what lies beneath, revealing deep beauty in the collision of exhilarating creativity and inevitable doom.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Salvador
    Navarrete is a versatile artist, and Salvador is a rare thing: an emotionally candid, melancholic album full of bangers.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Companion Rises
    Companion Rises is the sound of rattling shackles and tension not resolved but placated. The narrator rooted on earth by their surroundings still has a poetic awareness of the ethereal and the far-flung. Companion Rises is Ben Chasny’s valiant attempt to cast himself skyward.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grave of a Dog
    Tthe album plays out like a mood swing of rage, despair, and an ennui that threatens to consume. It’s in that ebb and flow that Sightless Pit as a trio have found their balance. There is space for softness and melancholy. The organic is allowed to creep amongst the distorted or the electronic. Noise is only meant as a temporary shock to the system, not as a punishment to be endured.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Aux Pieds de la Nuit
    Ultimately, this is a rather gorgeous and engrossing collection, that borrows stealthily from a rich history of sound effect and soundtrack to build a tender poem to the night time. It’s all big plate reverbs and shuffling drums.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Slow Rush
    For those that need a bit of background music The Slow Rush is a competent record, but it’s impossible to actively listen to it for a prolonged period of time without despairing. At least now that this is out, there probably won’t be another one for a few years.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Suite for Max Brown
    It’s an album that if you take it at face value will delight, but if you stick around and penetrate its surface, you’ll find one of the most transfixing albums in recent years.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Miss Anthropocene
    Miss Anthropocene is a Kanye West of a listening experience. Strengthened by listening less hard and chilling out. Weakened by due diligence and the artist’s cerebral disconnect between what she's great at making and who she believes she is.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Big Exercise
    Only a few acts have really transcended local industry mores and enlightened amateurism to make something of truly wider, lasting appeal. And maybe none more so than The Homesick with this record, which should surely sneak through the gates of classic pop heaven.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Massive Oscillations
    The creation of an ever restless and fecund talent, Massive Oscillations is a beautifully bold and powerful album that should bring Wacław Zimpel to the attention of a wider and deserved audience.
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