For 764 reviews, this publication has graded:
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47% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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51% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.3 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 67
| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
10
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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 90
Whatever it was supposed to achieve originally, right now SMiLE sounds like a beautifully modulated, funny, sometimes unintentional meditation on a failed United States and counterculture, and the lost paradise, real or imagined, of Southern California, and the collapse and reinvention of the male ego. -
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Critic Score 90
When talking about an album as multilayered, thematically diverse, and sonically rich as OutKast's Stankonia, though, the best thing is to boil it down to its essentials, its influences, its approaches. You know, the uppercase conceptual stuff. This album, the acclaimed Atlanta duo's fourth and best, contains so many hummable hooks, so many snap-your-head beats, so many break-'em-out-and-talk-about-'em metaphors, that it's easy to get lost in the sauce. -
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Critic Score 90
Kanye is rapping and singing better and with more tenacity than he ever has on Fantasy, but also less often, wisely allowing others to speak for him-every single guest artist on this album senses the moment and rises to the occasion.- Posted Dec 7, 2010
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Critic Score 90
The voice you hear on "Love and Theft" is not that of the cocky young rock star who wrecked folk by simply strapping on an electric guitar, nor is it the vengeful and crotchety man who dripped Blood on the Tracks. This Dylan is older, wiser, and grousier, but sweeter, more sanguine if still unsettled too. -
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Critic Score 90
When Dizzee thinks very deeply--worrying about growing up, about those around him who won't grow up, about dying before he grows up--he sounds like, what else can we call it, the real thing. -
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Critic Score 90
Where Dre twists Prince remnants to his own astroboyish amorous ends, Big Boi holds up OutKast's P-Funk revival tent. -
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Critic Score 90
Original Pirate Material is England's first great hip-hop record mostly because it isn't a hip-hop record. It's hard to say exactly what it is. -
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Critic Score 90
Funeral is a remarkable record, hard to hear at first, then hard to stop hearing. -
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Critic Score 90
The resulting, mercifully final product is, as you might have suspected all along, fantastic, by turns triumphant, defiant, and gleefully crass. -
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Critic Score 90
Album number five dwarfs its predecessors because the members have started treating this group as the sun around which their musical projects must inevitably revolve, and the home to which they must return. -
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Critic Score 90
Like a great romance, it's consistently lovable even when stupid or frustrating, and its best moments are absolutely breathtaking. -
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Critic Score 90
The stupendous Destroyer's Rubies, recorded with a full, swaggering band, is maybe his best and certainly his least theoretical album. -
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Critic Score 90
Previous albums have never quite captured those onstage moments when the power they generate seems to catch them unawares, but on The Woods you can hear not only the deliberation in Weiss's eyes as she ponders the exact placement of beat and crash, or Brownstein's bedroom-mirror rock-star poses, but also the stunned grin Tucker can never contain after emitting her most gravity-defiant shrieks. -
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Critic Score 90
Ghost's Fishscale is the most creative album to come out of New York hiphop since his own 2000 Supreme Clientele. -
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Critic Score 90
Phrenology reveals pulsating growth--a surprising bump on our skulls that some didn't feel before, while others banged their grapes wishing for it. -
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Critic Score 90
this time, she has found a middle ground therein, an appropriately murky backdrop as she channels another of her early inspirations: Bob Dylan. Like vintage Bob, Shake pores over history's indignities with a fine-toothed comb.- Posted Feb 15, 2011
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Critic Score 90
Vernon seems torn between selling his lyrics and using his voice as just another emotional cue in the thick mix. But if you're looking for an album to get lost in, who knew a guy previously feted for stripped-down "realness" would provide the year's best?- Posted Jun 28, 2011
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Critic Score 90
Rook is great, with an emotional clarity and narrative acuity that makes it one of the year's most rewarding listens. -
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Critic Score 90
Each of these songs offers more exquisite details than I could earmark in twice this space, many of them literary, which the English prof's dropout son rightly claims as his calling. But secret brilliance is more likely to emerge from the sops to his hip-hop base.- Posted Jan 3, 2011
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Critic Score 90
The title track and "Waltz" bookend Extraordinary Machine. Both excel, set to Brion's signature command of crisp, idiomatic, Van Dyke Parks-influenced Hollywood symphonics. But the Elizondo-Kehew tracks top them. -
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Critic Score 90
A magnum opus four years in the making, We Love Life is, like This Is Hardcore's epic cold sweat, a disco-nnection record, well stocked with mis-shapes, mistakes, misfits. But Pulp's glamorama has never tingled so invitingly, thanks to the full-body massage administered by producer Scott Walker. -
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Critic Score 90
Fagen's triumph of rendering post–9-11 New York most recalls how perfectly Steely Dan caught LA on 1980's 'Gaucho.' -
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Critic Score 90
Blacklisted is soaked to the bone in rueful wit, luxurious miserablism, and morbid cold sweat—c&w virtues too often reduced to self-pity by lesser latter-day sweethearts of the rodeo. -
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Critic Score 90
Part of what makes Of Montreal notable is the quantity of things Barnes does impeccably. -
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Critic Score 90
Collins's way with a hook has blown up into a stack of tunes that stick, ranging from cranked-up faux-arena rock to spine-shaking rhythm and staccato bounce. -
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Critic Score 90
It remains to be seen if The Lady Killer will continue his hot streak, but it should-it's one of the best records of the year, and also his most commercial, and that's not an insult.- Posted Dec 8, 2010
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