Uncut's Scores

  • Music
For 11,029 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 72
Score distribution:
11029 music reviews
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The songs are very much of their time, reflecting shifts in popular taste and featuring numerous covers. [Dec 2017, p.43]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Valentine is typically sturdy--piquant observation and low-key philosophy played against an impeccable musical backdrop. [Aug 2012, p.80]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    This set is a good primer for Cooder’s soundtrack work.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    True, this may have benefited from the inclusion of, say, 2013's "Lucinda Byre," but the man's unerring ability to quietly lift the heart with melody as he foes in "Rumer" and "Josephine" is ultimately the more valuable sensation to hang on to. [Nov 2017, p.30]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Just about every song's a banger, but pay particular attention to the jagged metal shredding of "Persuasion Architect"; then contrast with the outstanding country rocker "Twins". [Aug 2023, p.29]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    While this Dublin quintet's latest stops short of total reinvention, the changes are marked - John Congleton brings the darkly spangled, alt.rock power, and textured synths do a lot of the melodic lifting. [Feb 2023, p.32]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One small quibble, though: while it’s great to have documentation of the band’s early live sound (and in many ways the versions of the songs from Bleach are superior thanks to the sprightly energy), you don’t really get a sense of the sheer ferocity and electricity Nirvana generated in a tiny, cramped college bar.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An aquatic, slow-moving work, rich with melancholic atmosphere. [Oct 2017, p.35]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The sound of a major talent gone major league. [Apr 2003, p.105]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    For all its muddied textures and sideways lurches, it is a magnificently engaging and expansive work. [Jul 2003, p.112]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There are many wise, deceptively simple insights on this wonderful album. [Jun 2015, p.82]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This expertly wrought debut is an impressive platform for twentysomething polymath Heloise Letissier. [Apr 2016, p.71]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Beautiful, weird and wasted, Songs For Judy never lets us forget it. [Jan 2019, p.28]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stylistically promiscuous and consistently inventive, Martin remains a maestro of multiple mutant genres, many of his own making. [Oct 2021, p.25]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Sniffers sometimes sound limited by their studiously low-brow, lo-fi aesthetic. Even so, Comfort To Me offers a mostly exhilarating mix of headbanging riffs, profane wit and gutter-punk attitude. [Oct 2021, p.24]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    if Shannon Lay's solo expression has been a steady blooming across three albums, Geist represents its full-blown folkish splendour. [Nov 2021, p.29]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She has crooned before, but the freight of intimate emotion here, letting low notes waver within the ferally alive arrangement, is masterful. Ending an album of looking back, this is the new prime of Chrissie Hynde. [Oct 2023, p.22]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The xx have expanded their horizons without sacrificing any of the emotional intimacy that makes them one of the most compelling acts around. [Feb 2017, p.22]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Too often the crossover strategy mires these songs in the most banal cliches of dream pop and arena grunge. [Sep 2018, p.29]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Helplessness Blues is as passionately desolate as anything on Closer, the record which documented Ian Curtis' romantic guilt and existential confusion. [Jun 2011, p.74]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Confirms System Of A Down as one of the most innovative bands in modern rock. [Jun 2005, p.110]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Edan's punch and broad vision distinguish him from the rest of the pack. [Jun 2005, p.110]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Purple is a formidable show of power and resilience, the band--with the help of produce Dave Fridmann--achieving its most consistently thrilling fusion of metal, southern rock and the edgier end of '90s alt.rock. [Jan 2016, p.72]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These elegant, cosmic soul-jazz excursions are a fine fit for Sumney's extraordinary voice. [Oct 2017, p.40]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    As with all of Le Bon's projects, the claustrophobic, wonderfully awkward whole is very much her own. [Mar 2022, p.31]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    By turns darker and more challenging than 2003's dazzling Electric Version. [Oct 2005, p.96]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Benji is brutally sad, which may prove a deal-breaker for anyone who appreciated the comparatively light Among the Leaves, but it never feels gratuitous or exploitative. [Mar 2014, p.84]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Running over with ideas. [Nov 2006, p.128]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    While what was lost with Smith is immeasurable, what he left was amazing, and New Moon is an appropriately spectacular monument. [Jun 2007, p.112]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Interplanetary Class Classics smears Saoudi's nihilistic euphoria across throbbing new-wave and singalong Glitter Band boogie. [Apr 2017, p.35]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In melding ethereal production with clarion narratives, Korkejian has created a beautifully dynamic work. [Jun 2019, p.24]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is a record that genuinely sounds like nothing you have heard before. If you can rise to its portentous challenge... The Drift will prove to be a frightening, bewitching and rewarding experience. [Jun 2006, p.96]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The fifth album to feature Kentucky's Joan Shelley has an immensely welcoming ease that was absent in 2014 anxious solo breakthrough, Electric Ursa.... A major talent. [Oct 2015, p.83]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A hugely enjoyable, idiosyncratic ride. [Sep 2023, p.37]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Refines their grandiose panoramics via electronic gurgles and glitches. [Jul 2003, p.111]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Compared to so many noisemongers, TOD understand that restraint enables unleashed firepower to be exhilarating and awesome. [Apr 2002, p.111]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Streetcore negotiates a resolution between the ethnocentric beats that hallmarked the two previous Mescaleros albums and the classic Clash sound that remained pivotal to Joe's live performances. [Nov 2003, p.110]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With martial trumpets, cheap-sounding Farfisa organs and raspy baritone saxes, there are certainly nods toward Ethiopiques legends like Mulatu Astatke or the Wallas Band, tracks like "Rite Of The Ancients" and "Golden Dunes" add a rugged garage rock, and riff-based funk of "Black Venom" has a breakbeat that's just begging to be sampled by a bright hip hop producer. [Nov 2010, p.83]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Even as Atrocity Exhibition plumbs depths, Brown remains a savvy operator. [Dec 2016, p.25]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An impressive deepening of Marling's explorations, and a timely testament to change as a positive force. [Apr 2017, p.24]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Pinning this endlessly complex songwriter’s work down to a single tagline or meaning is unwise. His songs are not always easy, they’re not always straightforward, but 10 albums in, they’re mounting up to create one of the most impressive bodies of work of the century so far. [Sep 2022, p.16]
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It is, at 78 tracks, quite a meal. But fine work lies within. [May 2011, p.96]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    [A] hugely satisfying album. [Jul 2016, p.66]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Each song is so confident and perfectly formed, unravelling with cascading flurries. Orcutt is so confident and comfortable in his own skin that he has become a maser oif phrasing and economy. [Jun 2023, p.35]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is Clark, now in his 72nd year, as the rumpled poet of American folk-blues, imparting these semi-brisk, string-driven tales with his own unique brand of sad, funny, dry wisdom.
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Both sonically and lyrically, it's an album that is explicitly, thrillingly transgressive and is already an early contender for one of the albums of the year. [Mar 2018, p.33]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It is not only Wild Beats' finest album to date, but one of the best you're likely to hear all year. [Jun 2011, p.90]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To devotees, however, it sounds very much like a second masterpiece: a different kind of epic to "Ys," and one with enough hooks and charms to ensnare at least a few Newsom agnostics. [Apr 2010, p.82]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ba Power feels like another dramatic leap forward and a further landmark in the integration of African tribal rhythms and western rock'n'roll. [May 2015, p.85]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    As ever, you wish they'd stretch out and jam a bit more in the studio, but this might just be the most satisfying CRB set since 2012's Big Moon Ritual. [Sep 2017, p.37]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Childers is blessed with a timeless voice and an ear for the plurality of mountain music, these songs roaming between bluegrass, folk, straight-up country and R&B. [Sep 2019, p.26]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's by some ways the finest of the three iterations. [Oct 2020, p.36]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Here are nine songs that confidently mix Station To Station piano, Beach Boys harmonies, Kosmische guitar and even free jazz. [Jun 2021, p.31]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Infectious, silly and even a little dangerous again. Through it all — even on the two quieter tracks, which stick outa little awkwardly among the Killing Joke fuzz — Brett Anderson is the consummate guide, vocally at his peak. [Oct 2022, p.34]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is as much a celebration of collaboration, camaraderie and community as it is a noted personal evolution. [Jan 2023, p.17]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The band sounds re-energised by an idea of the city, the marketplace, pop ambition. [May 2005, p.102]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    While I’m not sure Veckatimest is the huge improvement on Yellow House that some blogs claim it to be, it’s unquestionably a lovely record and it deserves to be heard on land, sea, indoors and out.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What felt like daydream ideas in maturation then have been shaped into trly rounded songs now.[ Jul 2018, p.30]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It’s a fantastic album, containing poppy firecrackers like “Jackie Down The Line” and moments of timeless, mature lament such as “The Couple Across the Way”. [May 2022, p.28]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This new 23-track compilation, cherry-picking the back catalogue from 1989's "Box Elder" through to 1999's "Terror Twilight," might help resolve the band's final enigma. [Apr 2010, p.102]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Still, as a whole, Bitte Orca feels nothing less than a modern equivalent to Talking Heads' Fear Of Music or Scritti's Cupid & Psyche 85 –art-rock with intellectual rigour, borderless curiosity, and no fear of the mainstream. Pop, by any other name.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A finely crafted record, whose artfulness is mediated by informality. [Oct 2014, p.69]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There is zero sense on Amadjar that this band in any way playing to an international audience; on the contrary, this music feels hermetic in its focus, guitars picking out bluesy motifs, voices rising together in mournful chorus, all tethered by a simple drum rhythm that approximates the lollop of a camel making its way across the dunes. [Oct 2019, p.32]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In this live setting, fascinatingly, the brutality to which the songs are subjected only serves to underscore their poignancy. [Dec 2005, p.100]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Great by Smith's standards. Practically genius by everybody else's. [Feb 2004, p.74]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's a departure from previous Lanegan solo LPs... This time, Lanegan is looser, open to both experimentation and, once more, full-on rock. [Sep 2004, p.96]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Classic Objects is, on its face, Jenny Hval's most straightforward work: her songs flirt with conventional verse-chorus structure, her lyrics are clear nd direct, drawn from life. Closer listening, though, reveals Hval interrogating those experiences. [Apr 2022, p.29]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's a record that manages to sound deeply affectionate without being sentimental. [Jun 2013, p.70]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album's musical tone is well judged, with Hiatt equally versed in flinty roots-rock and urban country songs. [May 2020, p.26]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    More mellifluous than menacing despite its formidable display of power, Life Metal may be the richest work in the band's 21-year-mission to reconfigure Tony Iommi-worthy riffage into a soundtrack for mindful meditation. [May 2019, p.34]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    On The Spur, Shelley captures the ache and the sweetness, the loss and the love, the coming and going of it all, with greater scale and skill than ever before.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is also a brave, compelling record that stands shoulder to shoulder with the Manics’ best.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Best of all, perhaps, the skill and imagination she displays in her arrangements suggest that there's a lot of scope for adventure in the future of a musician who found her groove but seems unlikely to get stuck in it. [Nov 2017, p.34]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Phosphorescent has followed 2010's country-rock homage Here's To Taking It easy with an equally magnificent beast, mixing country jams with claustrophobic electronica and mournful Mariachi horns to create a beautiful but discomforting album. [Apr 2013, p.74]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sounding like a highly-evolved amalgam of their entire output--with added surprises--the beauty of this 12th album lies in its head-spinning diversity. [Oct 2006, p.134]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    They sound not beaten but energised by the spectre of society's destruction, off the chain and high on a cocktail of primal garage punk, astral jazz, pitch-black blues and psych ragas both damned and divine. [Nov 2015, p.77]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It was a landmark in prog rock. [Dec 2016, p.47]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bowie’s Berlin is more about a state of mind, a population and its thinking than an actual place. Brian Eno and his intellectual playfulness; Robert Fripp’s alien guitar; Tony Visconti’s embrace of meaningful technology. Between them they gave Bowie the materials to build a city larger and more magnificent than anywhere you could hope to find on a map. [Nov 2017, p.44]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The routine comparisons with Terry Riley/Steve Reich/Michael Nyman all apply, but there's something more mystical and elemental at work, too, with echoes of the Third Ear Band and Comus. [Oct 2018, p.27]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Striking enough on their own merits, free of embellishments, all the more powerful for the immediacy of the moment. Simplicity is the key here. [Jan 2020, p.26]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There are many timeless, brilliant moments. [Mar 2020, p.45]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A set of well-crafted songs that resemble PJ Harvey's collaborations with John Parish, but which mainly recall various stages of David Bowie's career. [Oct 2020, p.29]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A 75-minute intuitively guided rhythmic meditation, all five musicians playing from deep inside the music. [May 2021, p.30]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    72 minutes of creeping contemplation and subdued drama. [Jul 2021, p.31]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terrific collection. [Mar 2022, p.49]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It’s the Phenomenal Handclap Band’s Daniel Collás, as producer, who brings Jackson’s long-lost creations to life. The eight tracks here, written during the Scott-Heron era, re-emerge more relevant than ever, courtesy of a strong backing band. [Jul 2022, p.26]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The sextet's second effort is both an expression of their anarcho-punk fury and a declarartion of straight-edge commitment, but it's also a radical redrawing of hardcore's boundaries, that reanimates the genre with an aggressively intelligent jolt. [Nov 2008, p.96]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    If the music and lyrics are both impressive, though, it's the interaction between them that makes Stumpwork such a triumph. They work together and against each other, pushing and pulling, fighting arrhythmically or slipping into step as the moment demands. [Nov 2022, p.38]
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tomberlin's second long-player seems to semi-consciously urge you to move along – nothing to hear here. Yet it creates its own slow-burning allure on repeated listens. [Jun 2022, p.34]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Airing Of Grievances is one of the smartest, most joyous records in an age, channelling the spirit of other too-clever-by-half suburban punks from The Replacements to Nirvana and adding a dash of felllow New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen's eye for detail. [MAr 2009, p.87]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Intermittently funny and never depressing, this confirms him among America's greats. [May 2005, p.108]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In short, it needs a rigorous editor. [Feb 2005, p.94]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Spare, beautiful, outstanding. [Jul 2003, p.128]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An album that pores over the passing and the past with such defiant, deadpan nobility. [Feb 2012, p.78]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    As always they are best when singing of brief encounters and regret. [Jun 2023, p.36]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Finn’s writing is sharper than ever, the various narratives driven less by the wordy exposition of yore than acute observation, devastating detail, by turns exclamatory, epigrammatic and grainily authentic.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Much here, like the outstanding "Silhouettes (I, II & III)," sits elegantly in a progressive tradition that draws on Teo Macero's collage work on In A Silent Way, David Axelrod's string arrangements, and Four Tet's own "Thirtysixtwentyfive." [Dec 2015, p.71]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    As ever, Case finds room for expansive manoeuvres in the gap between her lusty, orthodox pop choruses and droll, deadpan voice. Still a singer-songwriter like no other. [Jul 2018, p.24]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Margaret's melodies are often submerged, but her approach is not entirely ambient. [Aug 2023, p.34]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Overall, it's a long, strange ride, and Joshua judges ruefully. [May 2017, p.18]
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