Tiny Mix Tapes' Scores

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For 2,889 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 42% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Lost Wisdom pt. 2
Lowest review score: 0 America's Sweetheart
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,804 out of 2889
  2. Mixed: 961 out of 2889
  3. Negative: 124 out of 2889
2889 music reviews
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Born Again in the Voltage
    This is remarkable music that proves the expansive possibilities present in one note. It feels symmetrical, but it’s not; it feels additive, but it’s not. Instead, Barbieri coaxes provocative, varied textures and melodies out of the continuous electric field generated by her synthesizer, and in doing so, she has made a drone record that feels very much alive.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dear Science,
    Dear Science is all the more satisfying for providing a sense that the next leap will be just as rewarding.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Grey Album
    Dangermouse's actions have breathed creative life back into a 35-year-old record while inventing a completely new work of hip-hop art.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Celestial Electric
    Ultimately, Celestial Electric could only have been made now, and it stands on its own merits. As the future sons and daughters of generations come to pass, the genius of Shawn Lee will be widely recognized. With AM up front, Lee is like The Funk Brothers of Motown.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breakup Song
    There are no weak tracks on Breakup Song, and the album unfolds at a natural pace. Just short enough to resist sagging at the middle, it also ends with a quartet of songs that are more radio-friendly than anything the band has ever done.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Days Are Gone
    This is frivolous, immaculate music.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Public Strain
    Public Strain feels stripped-down, simpler, and lolloping. It's not so eerie.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Childhood of a Leader [OST]
    It’s a terrifying and hypnotic listen.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Body
    That Body ends so softly is itself a brilliant resolution, even though its obvious contrast with its first notes is more clever than I care.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Sunset Tree
    This is a record that only Darnielle could pull off: in the hands of a less skilled writer and vocalist, it would fall flat or grate the nerves as so much hyperemotional posturing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Akron/Family & Angels Of Light
    This split album breaks new ground for Akron/Family while continuing to affirm Michael Gira as a reputable singer/songwriter.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cherish the Light Years
    Cherish the Light Years is a breathless, versatile record from front to back, always oscillating between extreme shades of dark and light.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Drifters/Love Is the Devil
    For those with autumn coursing through their veins, they’d do well to assuage their summer by keeping Dirty Beaches’ Drifters/Love is The Devil coursing through their headphones.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Raft
    Rafts may seem conceptually like a retrospective or statement of purpose, and it holds up nicely as a portrait, but it should also be considered a refinement, wading further away from readymade images of the tropics and into the depth of the traveler’s imagination.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gist Is
    Because they sound so assured in this sound and its deviations, and because they carry ideas to exciting ends, I want to believe.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Halcyon Digest
    Halcyon Digest might be an easy listen, but it takes effort to digest. Brief moments of transcendence break through the album's cracked, depressed facade, though even those are fleeting.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breaks in the Armor
    Breaks In the Armor ranks among the best Crooked Fingers albums.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hallelujah! I'm a Bum
    By the artist's own admission, Hallelujah! is an album that comes with an "expiration date," but the themes of civil disunity and political gamesmanship are likely to resonate with us long after the election results are settled, and Lucas' mixture of mordant wit and in-your-face rock will make this a record worth revisiting.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Eternals Deck
    In many ways, All Eternals Deck, his greatest work since 2005's The Sunset Tree, is the perfect final album, fixated on death, legacy, survival, and an uncertain future.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Out in the Storm
    Out in the Storm hones that truth; it wonders about it. “You ring me up/ I tell the truth,” goes “Fade,” and “You’ll have your truth/ I’ll have mine,” goes “Hear You.” Ten songs divulge it, which don’t have sections so much as well-portioned energies.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cancer4Cure
    Cancer 4 Cure is as hard and vital as anything El-P has ever released, and that's no light praise.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Queen of Hearts
    There is something shimmering, cold, and tender in these songs. There are also moments of rock vigor that are the flip side to folk’s gentleness (never gentility).
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Contact
    Contact is aggregated purge and celebration past the self, flesh seared back and stomp soldered to somnambulism.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Suburbs
    On The Suburbs, their third album, Arcade Fire sound more like a band than ever before.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Faith in Strangers
    Faith In Strangers amplifies human interaction with the elements and the fractured nature of our relationship with them; this might not be the most joyful depiction, but it has been impeccably well documented here.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rejoicer
    These are the giants' shoulders that Grooms have chosen to stand upon, and with Rejoicer they have done so excellently.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Will Happiness Find Me?
    In the moment of listening itself, the lo-fi complexities, interactions, and repetitions create a revelation
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    World Eater
    Taken as a whole, World Eater makes a strange kind of jumbled thematic sense.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Junior
    Junior is about as sturdy as a disco album can be, which is a remarkable achievement itself. One deliberately-paced decade in and Royksopp are showing no signs of creative fatigue or self-cannibalization.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alphabetical
    Somehow they straddle the line between fluff and absolutely essential hipness that few attempt, and even fewer succeed at.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nikki Nack
    The dance songs on here awaken muscles of yours that might have fallen asleep over the last few years.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Homesongs
    A stunning solo debut.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Careful
    The handful of atmospheric pieces on Careful don’t necessarily contribute but do nod to the filmic quality of Boy Harsher’s work. But where the adjective “cinematic” is usually an upsell these days of “boring,” Boy Harsher have a gift at conjuring visceral emotions with subtlety.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Laughter's Fifth
    Jayne is a lyricist with the cynical wit of a Stephen Malkmus, but rather than pointing that cynicism outward, he uses it to cut himself down a notch or two.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Apologies To The Queen Mary
    Wolf Parade do what they do better than anyone in recent memory.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Way Out
    By the time it comes to a close, The Books have taken us on a journey through space and time, and it's hard not to feel full, invigorated by a unique sort of listening experience that's perhaps best described by The Way Out's closing words: "And you're becoming the world and everyone in it."
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Devout
    This is an album of breath and sigh, baby’s gibberish and parent’s confession. It’s also a complex and layered meditation on fatherhood and family, rich in emotion, textured and capacious; it’s a long exhale--stately, calm, joyful.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Poison Season
    Poison Season is nothing if not willing to shrug off a few of Destroyer’s newest fans if that means staying true to what the band has done so well for the better part of two decades. More so than on Kaputt, all of the classic Destroyer motifs are on full display.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tragedy and Geometry
    The music in this album slowly shapes the surrounding substance of the listening space, building a reticulated, synth-orchestrated architecture with countless perspectives.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At Mount Zoomer
    It’s breathtaking, it’s assured, it’s a perfect finale, it LIVES UP TO THE HYPE.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All This I Do for Glory
    All the tracks here (note that it would be crude to say they were indistinguishable from one another, but keeping your eyes on the tracklisting might be a good idea) sound like they could have been made with an arsenal of sequencers and rippling arpeggiators, but it’s all the sound of one man surfing the crests of a series of pulses.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Embryonic
    What The Flaming Lips have accomplished with Embryonic is impossible to ignore: an ambitious double album in an age where the single is making a comeback, a collection of music that makes a 25-year-old band sound vital and new.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unknown Rooms: A Collection Of Acoustic Songs
    Unknown Rooms is entirely built on pure rests and negative space, the nerve-racking space of silence. Everything on the album sounds and feels distant, as if the sounds are emanating from the other end of a dark eternal hallway.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Common Era
    There's a great, brisk evening stroll quality here, drifting imperceptibly between wistful and paranoid.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Courage Of Others
    Yet despite its cryptic, apocalyptic themes, it’s more appropriate to say that Courage Of Others is a more formal, deliberate album than its predecessor, owing less to “take it easy” leanings and more to the prodigious prog-folk of E.L.P., Giles & McDonald, or the most minor-key offerings of Pentangle.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Latin
    The result is an absolute monster of a closing track that caps a seductively repeatable album, which speaks miles to the effort on Holy Fuck's strongest album to date.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Castlemania
    While Castlemania lacks the punchy, propulsive crowd-pleasers ("I Was Denied," "Block of Ice") that have lately been the band's stock and trade, the record glows with the unhinged, live-in-studio quality that translates so well to an Oh Sees live show.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These Stars
    The recordings all fit within a folk or blues tradition, but given the complex rhythmic layers, they may as well be post-rock songs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Silver Gymnasium
    Whether exploring a lost little town or his own lost soul, Will Sheff proves an excellent tour guide.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From All Purity
    From All Purity at once epitomizes Indian’s sound and represents a leap forward into new levels of intensity.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Overgrown
    Overgrown is a remarkable effort from an artist who continues to do things his own way, regardless of the consequences.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Plowing Into the Field of Love
    If Plowing Into the Field of Love is meant to convey anything, it’s the otherworldly passion of a world without control and without truth.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Love You
    Something about the gummy aesthetic of the viscera at work here keeps I Love You from sounding too awry when its elements seem to suffer from slight exhaustion, elasticity, endocrine peaks, biological decay.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get Lonely
    Goat devotees should be most satisfied with this addition to the collection, and the uninitiated could find worse places to start.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Movement
    The female overcoming time and space in the way that Herndon does with Movement is so frustrating and frightening.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    If You Knew Her
    The songs here are each separate, lonely or transcendent, self-absorbed and distinct, without the background, café-soundtrack quality of so many modern jazz singers: fleeting, melancholy, and dangerous creatures from Borges’ imaginary bestiary.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Engineers
    This album's exceptional, for as familiar and generic as it sounds, there is an autumnal sort of charm.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Drawing Restraint 9 OST
    An album that's inspiring in its ambition.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hungry Saw
    It’s not an incredibly remarkable record, but when a band is this consistent for this long, it’s hard to fault it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Graphic As A Star
    With Graphic As A Star, she’s delivered an intimate reading of a revered American poet and made it entirely her own, creating her most beguiling work yet in the process.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paddywhacking
    Friley has taken the sound of his debut EP--the four songs of which all appear on Paddywhack--and maintained that arresting, zombie barbershop quartet aesthetic, while also extending it into new developments, intervening piano lines and looped organ riffs, with which it blends in ways that never jar (your preserves).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Who's Your New Professor
    This is one lush, warm bit of earcandy that will not let you down.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Holding Hands With Jamie
    Holding Hands with Jaime is a remarkable debut album. It ticks off plenty of familiar noise-rock boxes, but Girl Band massages them into a whole that feels authentically their own.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Varcharz
    A much more serious, often less danceable, instrumental effort.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Demolished Thoughts
    In its own subtle way, Demolished Thoughts is a triumphant statement, one of power through peace, of love through fear.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Islah
    Islah is one of the more exciting major label rap debuts in recent years, and one positive to being a Gates fan is that you’ll most certainly never get tired with him.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    House of Woo
    For Pickering, electronic music is as powerful as any supernatural promise, and on House of Woo, he demonstrates his dedication to the beat with a most persuasive degree of conviction.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem [Live]
    The diversity of the material provides Galás with an opportunity to showcase the full range of her vocal talents.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Field of Reeds
    Field of Reeds may initially come across as inhumanely taut, straining, and indistinct to begin with, but this is the sound of precociousness finally arriving at a purpose.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dolphins
    It's the sound of restless, searching energy channeled into a bare-bones context, surging against its boundaries by sheer compositional rigor.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Channel Orange
    Ocean's work is almost as good as those he references; his lyrics are almost uniformly terrific, sensual, specific, and unpredictable.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Quarantine
    It's conflicted, ambivalent, complex.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ys
    No album will ever move you quite like it, and if it weren't for a slight misstep, it would be perfect in almost every way.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Friend Opportunity
    Deerhoof may be more serious this time around, but the music’s still very imaginative and fun.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The World as Power
    The Word As Power might only have one trick, but it’s one that resonates deeply.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Honeys
    The non-stop purging of masculinist bile can be exhausting, but that can and should be considered a measure of success, a sign that, despite whatever growth has been exhibited, success hasn’t changed Pissed Jeans.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ephorize
    Ephorize is cupcakKe’s most polished statement both sonically and conceptually.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stygian Stride
    The eponymous Stygian Stride LP might come from a period of psychological and technical excavation, but the music stands on its own in the halls of modern electronic music and psychedelia.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I, I
    It’s comprised largely of several years of demos and “field recordings” and collected samples and experiments and improvisations. Perhaps that’s why it feels so novel at the precipice of a new decade; after 10(+) years of failed political experiments and improvisations, here’s a new songbook stripped of the arrogance and pretense of capitalist evangelism.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Psi
    The borrowing of in-house trap elements is neither crass nor exploitative: it is rather a seeming extension of the communicative nature of patten’s project.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    And They Turned Not When They Went
    A hymn to improvisational specificity... a melancholy erotics of noise.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Molina And Johnson
    Molina and Johnson manages to sound as good as the backstory: two friends crossing paths in winter, making an album that reflects the contemplative spirit of the season.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sky Blue Sky
    While the elders will rejoice this sober, satisfied, and craftily subdued effort, the younglings of the bunch, with their abbreviated attention spans, iPod shuffles, and demand for instant gratification, will declare the album a boring and lethargic affair.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dog Whistle
    When I listen to this, when it hits me when I’m living or trying to be with others, or trying to be with myself, or trying, it is all I need.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Promise
    In the end, the artificial pop of The Promise makes it, as a whole, a more realistic album.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Luck In The Valley
    Luck in the Valley expands on his previous palette and culminates the sounds that have been gracefully flowing from his fingers for the past decade as a solo artist.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Constellations
    Constellations is a work of exquisite beauty, coming from a group that grows by leaps and bounds with every release.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    For The Season
    They continue with their dark, shambling, lo-fi, black-magic psychedelia, but whereas much of their previous work had either sounded like direct covers or noisy filler, they've gained a great deal of control over their sound for this one.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Honor Found In Decay
    By forging a path from hardcore punk through sludge and doom metal and influencing many others along the way, Neurosis have worn their influences on their sleeves, yet have still managed to evolve by sounding more intensely like themselves.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Narcissist II [Mixtape]
    Blunt has proven himself to be a master participant in this aesthetic float-game, and The Narcissist II is his demented billet-doux to the gratification that continues to elude.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flight Of The Conchords
    This album is a nice collection of songs for our fans.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grassed Inn
    By making concessions to clarity, Blank Realm have only amplified their inherent weirdness. As such, this thing is a fucking kick in the pants.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jackie Lynn
    Clean and expertly rendered, it will be interesting to hear what Haley Fohr’s musical world will next inhabit, though for now, Jackie Lynn has left her mark.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Milk Man
    The album is most similar to Apple O', but while Apple O' seemed to have a somewhat lethargic quality, Milk Man sounds fresh and fully inviting. And it's a lot better.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ocean Roar
    Elverum has never sounded more comfortable as a producer of volume and viscosity.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unfold
    As ever with free-improv records, the level of control is remarkable.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rhyton
    With no pretense and few frills, Rhyton have created an excellent document of tripped-out modern instrumental rock, drawn from open minds and extraordinary musicianship.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Another Day On Earth
    It is, like so many other pop albums, the kind of thing that grows on you and ferments into an incredible entity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Le Noise
    Chalk it up to Lanois, near-death experiences, or the wisdom of youth. No matter the cause, this is the Neil Young to embrace.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Together Through Life
    Dylan shirks responsibility; he puts the onus on us. Fortunately, the impetus the album provides is all we need in order to define its brilliance.
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