The Quietus' Scores

  • Music
For 2,107 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:
2107 music reviews
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    When it comes to Kosmische classics, this is an essential. If you don't have this in your record collection, you're doing yourself a massive disservice.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It’s music to seek out when some respite from all the blurred lines in this very busy world is desperately sought. In taking our hand but never gripping too tight, Holmes taps into something that even the best Late Night Tales compilations sometimes neglect: the pure self-therapy of total escapism.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Here augmented by three additional CDs of b-sides, Peel Sessions, alternate mixes and a live recording from Manchester’s Russell Club, the original album still sounds like nothing else from the time, as if a line is drawn on the sand and the full potential of what punk had to offer is finally realized. Indeed, Metal Box is still so far ahead of the curve that if it was getting its inaugural release now and it’d still be daring other bands to catch up.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Led Zeppelin III is where the band's dynamic and musical range really comes together and, for this writer at least, the most satisfying of the three.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Despite its lyrical limitations, Led Zeppelin remains an astonishing calling card.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    At brief points Lamar does err on the side of self-indulgence, but for the most part his grandiosity is matched by his talent. A worthy follow up to its platinum-selling predecessor, To Pimp A Butterfly stands as a fearless and uncompromising manifestation of Lamar's desire to push the culture of rap forwards--a crusade that's as much in his blood as the city of Compton.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Much more the clenched fist than Gish, their second effort saw an increase in intensity, ballast, grit, ambition and sheer scale.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With Tunes, 2011 to 2019, a collection of songs released originally in EP form over the last eight years, sequenced by Burial himself and released to commemorate Hyperdub’s fifteenth anniversary, we are able to make cohesive sense of how Burial’s aesthetic grew more expansive and conceptually concise while mirroring our evolution through a decaying society.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    It's so lean and spare sonically that it feels like a dash of cold water to the face after the cacophonous, dense To Pimp A Butterfly; it's so light on its feet that it makes Good Kid, M.A.A.D City feel ponderous in comparison. It does this while also staking its claim to being Kendrick's most philosophically profound album to date.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This is an incredibly sexy album and the grooves contained within it are deep and wide.... The companion disc in this package offers an intriguing insight in the creation of Led Zeppelin II and one that highlights both the production skills of Jimmy Page and the musical contributions of his cohorts.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It is a huge pleasure and a relief that this comeback is so good, so strong.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The demos themselves, while manna for nerds like oneself, are for the most part hardly revelatory.... a singular album in both intent and execution, and the most satisfying expression of Dulli's dark, dark heart. The grunge era's answer to Millie Jackson's Caught Up, it remains a triumph, an album whose impact is no less powerfully felt 21 years on.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is an album significantly more than what it seems to be, at first, on the surface. To some, it will sound like just another melodic punk album with a predilection for pop--an angry retort at the grievances of being in your twenties--but it’s the kind of record that will stir and inspire you during moments of existential crisis.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Much has been made of these vocals, and they certainly do stand out on the recording. That said, any serious listener has heard both precedents and antecedents (Leon Thomas, AMM, about half of both the Nonesuch Explorer and ESP-Disk catalogs) for Coltrane's approach.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If the first [issue] had sonic charms which seem extemporary, this one is somewhere between the sublunary murk of the earlier bootlegs, the original band-approved TeePee records version of 2003 and a brighter, modern-sounding studio demo, but it's not glaringly distinct.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The highs here hedonistically bounce around big beats, and the ease in which Rosalía can rap coolly about her status and influence is just as easy as you get wrapped up in it. ... Sadly, Rosalía does not find a way to organise her many ideas well. The tracklist’s brisk changes in energy and awkward hard endings deny any chance of momentum-building.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Her phrases heave through a cycle of breathy registers, then crash into a wail of the song’s title. Those repetitions, moored by no predictable structure, are hypnotic, intoxicating, and the lyrics heighten the sense of time being distended. ... Desire avoids feeling derivative by crossing so many wires, drawing from a more adventurous time in pop and placing innately familiar elements in new contexts.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Life's Rich Pageant rather sweetly gathers the emotions and carries them back to the time.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What was perfection has become even more perfect.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The reach of these records [Loveless and Isn't Anything] makes bands yet to form sound hopelessly out-of-date.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This a sensitively curated survey of Czukay’s many-splendoured oeuvre, and it makes a good case for Czukay as the OG granddaddy of modern German music.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    There'll never be another band like them. And if this is really it and they leave Blur to the history books, then it's a perfect way to remember this unique, occasionally annoying, but genuinely quite amazing band.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Taylor is also creating epic pop from this mess, and the soundworld she has built with her producer, Johan Kalberg, is her lyrical support system. ... The uneasy stuff is louder this time around – beefier, darker – but Taylor has twisted it to become a solid component of her strength.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sonically, there isn’t the same sense of startling reinvention with the stately sound of You Want It Darker, although it’s undeniably grander, lusher, more beautiful than its forbears; its melancholy mixture of string laments, orchestral flourishes and sombre choirs virtually compel you to bow your head in hushed reverence.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Channel Orange is a staggering step upwards from Nostalgia.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Simply put: this is the artistic culmination of the last five years in the world of Adam 'Nergal' Darski and with integrity and quality like this, in combination with his uncanny ability to position his band on solely his terms, it's a match made in heaven. Or hell.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Cluster had rewritten the linguistics of modern sound and then turned away without any further heed. Somewhere, someone would always be playing live in der Fabrik from here on.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Where in the past, Cave used artistic practice to escape "whatever it was that was pursuing me," on Carnage, he and Warren Ellis confront it head on. The result is a record that sometimes collapses under the weight of that task, but is nonetheless a remarkable demonstration of their artistic power.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At moments, Byrne is rhapsodic, her vocals soaring above the fluttering electronics of ‘Summer Glass’. Later, she stares down the darkness, as on the deceptively gentle ‘Lightning Comes Up From The Ground’ or on closer ‘Death Is The Diamond’.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In another rapper's hands the concepts might have been overcooked or the messages too self-righteous, but Kendrick manages to achieve scale while remaining firmly grounded on two feet.