For 764 reviews, this publication has graded:
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47% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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50% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 5.1 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 68
Highest review score: | The Naked Truth | |
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Lowest review score: | God Says No |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 517 out of 764
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Mixed: 199 out of 764
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Negative: 48 out of 764
764
music
reviews
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- Critic Score
The Gaslight Anthem's profound affection for and commitment to their forebears are just as present as they were before, but only here does the band sound as eager to bury as to praise them.- Village Voice
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While Str8 Killa is every bit as consistent as his first two tapes, there's a sense that Gibbs has hit his ceiling, both artistically and in what he can hope to accomplish without a record deal.- Village Voice
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It's got a few clunkers and slow spots, and, especially given the depressive tempos Johnson's so fond of, it's inadvisable to ingest in one sitting. But surprisingly Guitar is packed at least as solid as his last set, and it's less conventional to boot.- Village Voice
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She can still sound strained and thin, and often strays into a pitch that drives some people crazy; but she's learned how to make words sound like what they mean.- Village Voice
- Posted Nov 24, 2010
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I increasingly doubt I'll crank much of whatever comes next from this self-enamored rascal nearing the limits of his gig, but he's had his uses: He's vexed all the right sticklers and coined ample catchy hooks during the commercial breaks.- Village Voice
- Posted Dec 22, 2010
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He's the smartest guy in the room and bent on walking into rooms where nobody wants to listen to him [...] These are the juxtapositions that make Kaputt-and all of Bejar's music-smart and worthwhile.- Village Voice
- Posted Jan 25, 2011
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What makes this record better than Accelerate is the feeling that R.E.M. have figured out how to be R.E.M. again--how to affect the signature balance of folky and punky that's inspired bands far less worshipful than Pearl Jam or the Decemberists.- Village Voice
- Posted Mar 15, 2011
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Screws aspires to the high-end pop of Lowe's Pure Pop for Now People or the Flamin Groovies' mid-'70s work, and gets there more often than not.- Village Voice
- Posted Mar 31, 2011
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That's Black Up's predicament: It wants to be experienced viscerally, but it's being stripped of life by over-intellectualization.- Village Voice
- Posted Jul 5, 2011
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Chief, like Church's other work, walks the line between hard Southern boogie and softie singer-songster sap, but with plenty of chug.- Village Voice
- Posted Aug 9, 2011
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Overall the album is a triumph of collective will and creativity, but not every track fits every performer perfectly.- Village Voice
- Posted Sep 1, 2011
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The result is a collection of songs where the choppy, dreamy prog of "Glass Tambourine" can exist within a few tracks of the pogo-inducing "Short Version" and still come off as a cohesive, energy-rush-inducing whole.- Village Voice
- Posted Sep 14, 2011
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Throughout Maroon, though, producer Don Was mercifully dispenses with mawkishness in favor of a theatrical approach tailored for arena consumption.- Village Voice
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While it's tempting to write it off as but one more retro paste-up, Swayzak's uncanny sense of texture, timbre, and space justifies an approach that otherwise seems like a drift toward Alzheimer's.- Village Voice
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Beautifully engineered, Circus sounds chocolaty and recombinant even when it doth protest the Enlightened Guy angle too much.- Village Voice
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The Id suffers from the conundrum of all post-breakout second albums. You're disappointed either because the songs are not enough like the first one or because they're too much like the first but not quite as good.- Village Voice
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Many of the lyrics on Party Music amount to no more than slogans, maxims, opinions.- Village Voice
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Every track is a pure battle, with searing bursts of abrasion chopping at lava flows of insane density.- Village Voice
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Compared to the patchwork G-funk on Dead Man Walkin, Tha Last Meal is a sonic wonderworld. Dr. Dre and Timbaland gussy up Snoop's drag with their unique shuffles, making his descent into even deeper banality irrelevant.- Village Voice
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I Can't Stop works as return to form, as proof that Green's groove, voice, and riffs are largely intact. But Green gets tied down when production's slathered on a bit too thick, as if every Hi Rhythm soul lick must be utilized to substantiate the comeback.- Village Voice
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Beatles-style tunes crank out with steady snares, blaring power riffs, and languid keyboard interjections, but feel mundane.- Village Voice
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These scuzzy Voidoids are as immature as Blink-182 were; they just have hipper ways of hiding it—like pretending punk and new wave were the same thing.- Village Voice
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To really care about this album you have to be able to get into the pure hard sounds of the dance-track percussion and the way Michael tends to garnish them with his voice.- Village Voice
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Conspiracy of One? It's fine. Is there anything here as cute as "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)"? No: Like with Ixnay on the Hombre, their follow-up to the megahit Smash, this follow-up to the even more megahit Americana finds them in dance-with-the-girl-what-brung-you mode--more punk, less pop.- Village Voice
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Elvis makes you suffer for the good stuff with leaden conceits, overwrought hysterics, a useless reprise. And then he makes it all up to yoo-oo-oou.- Village Voice
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What lots of people loved about "Push" isn't much in evidence here, but neither is what lots of people hated about it.- Village Voice
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Maladroit picks up where the Green Album slacked off, relying on the same chunky sonics that set "Hash Pipe" apart from Weezer's earlier, more lithe singles.- Village Voice
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Anchored by predigested melodic hooks, Nelly's songs seem composed with the sole intention of ending up as your next ringtone. [Combined review of both discs]- Village Voice
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Ten New Songs is all introspection, closer in sound to a technologically updated Songs From a Room.- Village Voice
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The best tunes here have that boys'-club vibe of the best early-to-mid-'70s hard-rock bands, dead-on and nailed.- Village Voice
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Hamilton's vocals are occasionally plotted now with pronounced melodies, which is nice. But his strikingly affectless, prep-school delivery is abandoned in favor of a gritty, generic bark.- Village Voice
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Anchored by predigested melodic hooks, Nelly's songs seem composed with the sole intention of ending up as your next ringtone. [Combined review of both discs]- Village Voice
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It makes sense that, of the improvised songs, the rockers turned out best.- Village Voice
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Still waiting for the next Lo Fidelity Allstars album? Wish there were more Stereo MC's-like stuff in car ads? Wondering where great songwriting teams like Gallagher/Gallagher have gone? Then Kasabian were made for you! They offer all the same thrills of the aforementioned artists, and they sound like Primal Scream, too!- Village Voice
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Good Charlotte have hooks for days and the fun, gloomy Life and Death sounds like a moody missing link between Fountains of Wayne and Thrice.- Village Voice
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Hand-clappable tunes and delicious cover design aside, sharp narrative-driven writing has been what saves the band from being merely annoying or silly or cute; too bad Fold Your Hands Child entirely abandons the vivid narrative vignette model.- Village Voice
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Nearly everything on Fashionably Late has a pristinely modulated solemnity, a refined, literal-minded perfection.... In a sense, Fashionably Late is too good--too enamored of the aesthetic straight and narrow, of reverse sentimentality--for its own good.- Village Voice
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And while Holmes can't be faulted for applying cut-and-paste to mood and drama as well as sounds and beats, his tracks' lack of freshness still adds up to an ambitious letdown.- Village Voice
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Up against the carefully realized Wide Awake, Digital Ash is a mess, and not just sonically.- Village Voice
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A handsome channel 13 complimentary tote bag of an album that polishes his image as the fantasy rebellious son who hangs at socialist bookstores and swipes your Gram Parsons records.- Village Voice
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One problem though: Mia peaks too soon. That opener is by far the strongest song. The rest is by turns meditative, breezy, intimate, and snoozy.- Village Voice
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Edwards's lapses are largely counteracted by her sturdy melodies, her hard-hitting session drummers, and, mostly, her voice, which conveys acres of chin-up melancholy without even rolling up its heart-bedecked sleeves.- Village Voice
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Impeccably made, hedonistic, lovelorn, catchy, compelling. But spiritual, messianic, visionary? Not by a long shot.- Village Voice
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Nicely mimics the timbre of Tony Visconti-ville circa '71-'74.- Village Voice
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It's zany, antiseptic kitsch, like the soundtrack to the ultimate Old Navy commercial.- Village Voice
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Their most monotonous album ever.... It sounds beatific in paradise, or soundtracking vegan Thai cuisine and organic sunflower seed muffins.- Village Voice
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Sure, the electrifying attack of Zen Arcade and New Day Rising is a distant memory. But Body of Song closes with two guitar anthems oversized enough to point back to Mould's best work in Sugar.- Village Voice
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Yeah, Jacked contains a few shadowy rewrites of Here for the Party tunes, but the players this time are more in sync with the star--the music is louder, beerier.- Village Voice
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Adams mines American Beauty and Workingman's Dead respectably, but his attempts at early-'70s Neil Young piano ballads come off as tear-stained love letters to himself, and hardly distinguish him as the guy who dropped out of high school to become Paul Westerberg.- Village Voice
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The Breakthrough improves on 2003's Diddy-helmed misfire Love & Life but lacks the character of 1999's eclectic Mary.- Village Voice
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First Impressions of Earth is the sound of the Strokes taking a formal, technical, and emotional leap forward, but leaving the tunes behind.- Village Voice
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I'd call it "psych-drone-sludge" except it's more tuneful and lively than those words imply.- Village Voice
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Neither disjointed embarrassment of riches à la The Beatles nor conceptual magnum opus like The Wall, Stadium Arcadium is two hours of sometimes middling, sometimes masterful, mostly pleasurable mainstream rock.- Village Voice
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This is a definite step up from the all-pall-and-no-pulse feel that made Espers' 2004 self-titled album too stuffy.- Village Voice
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In terms of sheer intensity of sound, it's as if the Comets of old have been miniaturized and are looking up at you from inside a Grateful Dead lunch box.- Village Voice
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Information ultimately suffers from the same hollowness that weakened Guero, but it's bolder at its best and less derivative of previous victories.- Village Voice
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Even though his arrangements and slum-beautiful tracks are sublime, his vocal abilities leave much to be desired.- Village Voice
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As with most things Trail of Dead, it's bloated where it thinks it's profound.- Village Voice
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Doctor's Advocate isn't really all that dire, especially if you can get past the constant--and constantly labored--airing of, shall we say, grievances.- Village Voice
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As it was on 2003's O, Damien Rice's songs are so naked emotionally that even listening is akin to eavesdropping on a bad breakup.- Village Voice
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[It] doesn't pack the out-of-nowhere melodic turns that enlivened Runners.- Village Voice
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While Mercer's writing is still more satisfying than that of his peers, filler tunes like "Pam Berry" and "Black Wave" are a far cry from the tenacious stuff that made Chutes the subject of lavish hyperbole.- Village Voice
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[Fridmann's] atmospheric flourishes have always been heavy handed, but here they muddle tightly conceived pop tunes that would've sounded better scrappy.- Village Voice
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Imagine the cheerful fatalism of "Float On" without the hooks, which is bizarre: Hooks would seem to be Marr's specialty.- Village Voice
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Wheat's scrappy though sometimes endearing fourth album is clearly a stylistic protest against their only major-label release, 2003's bland, vexed, much-delayed-by-Sony Per Second, Per Second, Per Second . . . Every Second.- Village Voice
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Good Girl never settles on a sound, and Rihanna vacillates between aping Gretchen Wilson, Ashanti, Gwen Stefani, and Pink. Nonetheless, she often sounds every bit like the superstar she clearly intends to be.- Village Voice
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It's all very outsized and uppity, falling right in line with the current dictum in dance music that every song must be able to be mashed up with both Kanye West and this week's indie-rock star.- Village Voice
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They've become lapidary masters. The trouble is, who's listening and learning?- Village Voice
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It's basically a minimalist record that coasts on one's predilection for NINoise.- Village Voice
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Too Old to Die Young is a fully plugged-in affair that expands on the muscular sighs of its predecessor and ups the rhythmic ante.- Village Voice
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The Mobb Deep don sounds beyond frayed, barely restraining his byzantine gangster paranoia while scratching out his own self-convinced logic evoking both grief and menace.- Village Voice
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A little too sitting-on-the-dock-of-the-bay for Chris Breezy–trained earbuds, perhaps, Here I Stand is pure grown-man bidness.- Village Voice
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The result is impressive genre prowess--especially when he invites Austin unknown Deon Davis (a/k/a Element 7d) to contribute some post-rap boogie on 'Crystal Lite,' or rips off Wham’s 'Everything She Wants' on 'I Choose You'--but Pants might still be flexing prematurely.- Village Voice
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The patchwork of styles thrown around here distracts you from the album's strengths.- Village Voice
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¿Cómo Te Llama? is best when the songs seem to shake and quaver within their candy-coated shells; fittingly, that’s when they’re at their Strokes-iest.- Village Voice
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Through headphones or computer speakers, Caleb's echoey vocals just don't ring credible. Their Black-Crowes-go-new-wave choruses are exciting enough, but they feel unearned after tiresome, oversung verses.- Village Voice
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As a consequence of his preoccupation with acting and "lyricism," Luda neglects to do what he does best: make fun music.- Village Voice
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You are way, way better off not projecting any kind of emotional subtext onto this record.- Village Voice
- Posted Jun 24, 2011
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Left unasked is the question of whether you needed that-the bondage theme, the 10-octave tantrum, the synth war, all of that-but don't expect the rest of her new album, Bionic, to inquire, either.- Village Voice
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It's profoundly self-serious, expertly workmanlike, occasionally transcendent, but lacking that childlike volatility, that glorious willingness to look and sound ridiculous. It's rare that so much nonetheless leaves you wanting more.- Village Voice
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Williams's record is brisk, clocking in under 40 minutes. But it takes far more risks, dabbling in Animal Collective–ish psych pastiche on "Baseball Cards," Kurt Fauxbain dummy posturing on the riotous "Idiot," and Phil Spector homage not once but twice-on the magical "Da Doo Run Run"–lifting "Mickey Mouse" and, less impressively, with a rip of the "Be My Baby" beat on "When Will You Come."- Village Voice
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Her lyrics are a tricky thing-their literalism is both their greatest strength and a crippling weakness.- Village Voice
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Though the record is more believably grown than his main band's overblown 2006 Bruce ode Sam's Town, it's still a bit heartbreaking to see such a lovable peacock purposefully fading his colors.- Village Voice
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The result comes across like the score to a film that never quite stays in focus, except for a bit of Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone in the second movement.- Village Voice
Posted Dec 22, 2010 -
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Gorgeously produced by the Syndicate, many of these tracks are piano-driven, mid-tempo dirges that take a while to get rolling; occasionally, as on "Be Invited," they just circle the block.- Village Voice
- Posted Mar 2, 2011
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The idea of ascension, both literally and figuratively, is the album's prevailing motif, and it's the tracks that focus most intensely on this theme that are the strongest.- Village Voice
- Posted Mar 31, 2011
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The repugnant misogynistic bullshit on Goblin sort of cancels any goodwill I have toward the guy. Particularly because it feels more like search engine optimization; Tyler makes no bones about his desire to hit the pop charts, and on too much of Goblin, he's doing it in the tawdriest way possible.- Village Voice
- Posted May 10, 2011
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For as overblown as Born is clearly intended to be, it's very difficult to love it for its nature--its gentler moments are more rewarding.- Village Voice
- Posted May 25, 2011
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It's cocky, it's manufactured, it's too reliant on industry pal-downs, ugh, it's inorganic. Then again, it's perfectly of a moment where "All I Do Is Win" is the must-have self-fulfilling prophecy, and Planet Pit sounds like it's winning. And even if it isn't, well, it all but tells you to go ahead and groan.- Village Voice
- Posted Jun 28, 2011
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