cokemachineglow's Scores
- Music
For 1,772 reviews, this publication has graded:
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51% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.8 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: | Art Angels | |
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Lowest review score: | Rain In England |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 1,444 out of 1772
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Mixed: 270 out of 1772
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Negative: 58 out of 1772
1772
music
reviews
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- cokemachineglow
- Posted Dec 24, 2015
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Art Angels is the kind of album that simultaneously captures its era, is made all the better for it (this 35-year-old Beatles fan would’ve given her nothing but bad advice), and obsolesces it overnight.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Dec 10, 2015
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This is Beach Slang’s core problem: they are constantly telling, never showing.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Nov 17, 2015
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While B’lieve I’m Goin’ Down, at least as far as its words are concerned, is more interesting than it appears on the first few spins, that’s not quite enough to make it a memorable listen.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Nov 2, 2015
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If He Dies is not only the best iteration of Moumneh’s sound to date, it’s also the clearest showing of his motivations.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 6, 2015
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Faith in the Future disappoints in its lackluster melodies and overall vibe. The highlights here are the more ambitious songs.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 2, 2015
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The result is a nearly anonymous album of stellar pop music, one where it seems all the attention was placed not on positioning Carly Rae as a cultural force, but on making sure Emotion makes you smile.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Aug 13, 2015
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A modern pop echo chamber, In Colour pushes the pleasure principle with ease, intelligence, grace, and a myriad of reflections that become one spectrum. RIYL: anything.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jul 14, 2015
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Who Me? is another quirky entry in Wauters’s unique discography. But it’s also his most honest, delicate effort to date--two good qualities for a musician with so much natural charisma to explore.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jul 14, 2015
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Freedom Tower is a Blues Explosion record, no doubt, and in that sense it’s not for everyone.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 12, 2015
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It draws a subtle focus and then recedes from the record without resolve. Its tensions remain. If Sufjan is a perfectionist, he is now perfecting the art of stumbling, creating melodies that writhe with uncertainty and voices that echo back on themselves.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Mar 30, 2015
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Rather, it is not a rap album; it is the absolute rap album. There is craft here (and in fact this is the most musical mainstream rap record since Aquemini) but just enough room for it.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Mar 25, 2015
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Ryan Adams, is up there with his best work because while it doesn’t have a lot of sweat on it, it’s a record that feels clearly considered enough, and carefully produced to maximize Adams’s strengths.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Nov 7, 2014
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Even at its most seemingly ascetic, The Moon Rang Like a Bell is among the most generous, tender, radiant albums you’ll hear all year. It just wants your ears.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Nov 7, 2014
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She continues to prove herself anyway, again and again: here throughout twenty songs, and throughout thirty-five years and beyond.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Nov 7, 2014
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Aside from its musical merits--like, it’s really beautiful--the City Wrecker EP is interesting in a typical kind of meta-Krug way.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 13, 2014
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- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 13, 2014
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Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is actually pretty good, and sometimes it’s great, but it is quiet, sounding very much like it sprung from the Internet ether to politely ask for thirty minutes of your attention.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 13, 2014
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The tone is set: They Want My Soul gives pleasures immediate and unlocked, a freshly bitten peach dribbling sweet nectar down your chin.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Sep 10, 2014
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My Everything is so concerned with making a palatable pop singer, it has watered down its subject to the point of tastelessness. It is pop music Bud Light.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Sep 10, 2014
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It’s melodramatic, yes, but the layers to the narrator of Home, Like Noplace Is There are vast. This guy cycles through a series of emotions, each feeling valid, each feeling like an appropriate result of confusion in the wake of a huge loss.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Sep 3, 2014
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It’s a fun and somewhat liberating thing to listen to, a horribly frustrating thing to try writing about.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Sep 3, 2014
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It’s in the songs that teeter on the edge, where the twang feels like the last button pressed before an apocalypse, that Shrink Dust becomes special.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Sep 3, 2014
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Burn Your Fire stands against records that damage and internalise by sticking to their convictions, instead of meta-analysing and working out where the lines are drawn.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jul 28, 2014
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It’s the most welcome of dinosaurs: a top to bottom summertime rock album that sounds equally great on a car radio or in teenage bedroom.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jul 22, 2014
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There’s nothing knee-jerk about it; just the inexorable sounds of ideas beautiful and terrible unfurling. It’s a careful, masterful record.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jul 22, 2014
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To Be Kind is as vital and unsettling as anything they’ve ever done, and displays a mastery of their craft that seems almost automatic at this point.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jun 4, 2014
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A simple record to listen to under the sun that has a couple of knowing winks about going steady and treating your pals right, but nothing you need worry about.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 7, 2014
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The music Real Estate make is so melodic and plentiful that it could capture any feeling it wanted to--Atlas just transposes their sound into the evening.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 7, 2014
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It is familiar. It is, despite whatever priggishness keeps some publications from printing the band’s name in full, safe.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 7, 2014
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Christmas Island shoots you down and makes loathing the same thing as self-loathing. But it’s also inspiring to listen to.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 7, 2014
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Despite a couple of weaker links, Somewhere Else is extremely well put-together, and spilling over with appealing melodies, wit, and truth.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Apr 9, 2014
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Despite its big, dumb rock ‘n’ roll template and primary color lyrics, albums like Lost in the Dream can be as restorative of faith in old metaphors and storytelling tropes- cokemachineglow
- Posted Mar 28, 2014
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- cokemachineglow
- Posted Mar 25, 2014
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People have finally started to give this band its due attention, and with Future Islands’s virtually unmatched ability to make such a wide variety of lived experience sound unwaveringly electrifying, it’s no wonder why.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Mar 25, 2014
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This is a break-up album, a cohesive work embodying a singular mood, and Nadler, like any great artist, sets the scene with such careful, immersive depth that it can be difficult to the seams in her work until you explore every inch.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Mar 18, 2014
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The Beets’ simplicity was one of their strengths, but N.A.P. is the sound of Wauters realizing that in music, as in life, complexity brings richness, and often greater rewards.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Mar 11, 2014
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Her writing on Real Hair sacrifices none of Major Arcana’s verve or crystalline observations in spite of being notably denser, with Dupuis layering syllable over syllable, image over image, until these songs should burst apart.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 27, 2014
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Transgender Dysphoria Blues isn’t a perfect record, but goddamn if it isn’t an important one, and more worthy of your time than ninety-percent of the more fashionable sounds coming out of whatever Bushwick loft party the Times scopes this weekend.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 27, 2014
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The charms of Harlem River are hard to explain, as this record thrives on a certain groove, a certain verve, that makes it an overall pleasure to listen to.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 27, 2014
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It’s the music here, not the sharp-toothed lyricism, which sets the record so far apart from the rest of the field.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 4, 2014
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Throughout, as ever, it’s Stewart’s voice that grounds the music in something recognizably human, his inexhaustibly elastic voice capable of so much but never able to be anything less than beautiful.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 3, 2014
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It comes into the world jubilantly, then spends the next forty minutes kicking and screaming against your ideas of what you can landscape it against. It dies with a characteristically quick whimper. No cheap shots against Explosions in the Sky, I promise, but that’s not pretty. It is beautiful.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jan 16, 2014
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Hynes expands his melancholy pop palette just slightly enough on Cupid Deluxe to create an album at once slickly cohesive and subtly textured.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Dec 10, 2013
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The finest songs here are as solid as any other rock music you’ll find in 2013.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Nov 14, 2013
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Surfing Strange is a tight and coherent little album whose greatest strength lies in its youthful energy and sense of the ups and downs of the early twenties--the lows of uncertainty and malaise, and the highs of excitement and anticipation.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Nov 14, 2013
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It’s an interesting, intermittently excellent album from a skilled group that could still use a little help in getting out of their own way.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Nov 14, 2013
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It wavers back and forth between showcasing the band’s strengths and having fun in the moment, more like a live show than a unified statement.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Nov 4, 2013
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The saving grace of Uncanney Valley is its resolute tenderness, an emotion the band never coaxed out of their twenty-something gloom.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 28, 2013
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While Lightning Bolt may fall somewhat shy of that goal ["the Best Album"], it is a more than solid effort to satisfy the legions of fanboys born between ’77 and ’84, and a convincing argument for their continued existence.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 28, 2013
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- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 22, 2013
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Run Fast has many moments of darkness, but ultimately it’s a celebration: of growing up, of surviving, of wading through shit and coming out the other side.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 22, 2013
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The Worse Things Get is powerful and assured, and in making true of its promise--to fight harder, and to love one’s self in the face of adversity--it pulls off one of the hardest feats there is.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 22, 2013
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You’d think that an album with somewhat conventional music that eschews a conventional sense of arc, narrative or otherwise, would come off awkward or ineffectual, but with Stitches there is aesthetic, textural immediacy and, even more importantly, immaculate craftmanship to help it make an impact from the very first listen.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Oct 22, 2013
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Ejimiwe’s nervous energy makes Some Say I So I Say Light exhilarating, whether it’s a lucid dream or a sleep-deprived reality, and fills it with moments that you might mistake for codas.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Sep 25, 2013
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A relatively safe debut where much of the takeaway is the salivating at Grande’s potential.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Sep 25, 2013
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It’s subtly more adventurous, and certainly scarier, in the way that even mundane things are always scarier in dreams, filtered through a disordered mind, revealing painful truths in unexpected places.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Sep 25, 2013
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- cokemachineglow
- Posted Sep 17, 2013
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It’s an earnest and worthy effort to prove that this band can matter without the PMRC stickering its album cover.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Sep 17, 2013
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Her confessionalism hits harder with the muscle of her band behind her words.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Aug 30, 2013
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An Object scales back the ambitious and ostensibly ambient sound of Everything in Between (2010), but it remains gloomily meditative.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Aug 30, 2013
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Her progression in two short years, from the sonic scarcity of Tragedy to the evocative symphonic grandeur of Loud City Song, hints at a vision we are only beginning to see the full range of.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Aug 26, 2013
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Sleeker but no less cartoony than her debut, it mixes freestyle house into her signature sound and comes off richer than anything she’s done before.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Aug 23, 2013
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Even though it’s as proficient as the Dodos have always been, albeit in subtler ways, there’s nothing about this record that feels arbitrary. It’s an album that feels like honesty, or at least a very well done facsimile of it.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Aug 22, 2013
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To the un-jaded, yes, boring, but to these well-worn ears, Lower Plenty drop some serious knowledge.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Aug 13, 2013
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Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You is a triumphantly together record, focused and witty and emotional and present in the way that only someone rediscovering his life’s work can be.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Aug 1, 2013
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Obsidian makes for a totally immersive plunge and, depending on where you are with your own head when you listen, either a welcome gulp of fresh air in recognition or a chance to hold your breath and dive deeply into life’s darker materials until you have to come back up again.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jul 23, 2013
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If this album works, it’s because of moments like “Landslide”: those that cut through the density of an artist in flux, one susceptible to myriad influences, managerial grumblings, and producer cues, overeager to pass off his work as undeniably unique.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jul 17, 2013
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As a record standing almost entirely on nostalgia, sure, it gives schmaltzy ’70s dance music a fine, not-sacrilegious update and sets it to a pleasant neon glow, but it’s a trip through history that’s almost more educational than immersive.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jul 12, 2013
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The record attempts to fuse dance music and complexity, but doesn’t quite reconcile the two; instead, its mindless thrills butt up against impenetrable baths of sound.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jul 8, 2013
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Soft Will is the perfect summer record, hazy and ill-defined and hard to remember but oh-so-euphoric.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jul 8, 2013
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While originality may not be high up on Blank Realm’s list of virtues, there’s something engaging about a record this wonderfully crafted and this genuine in its own personal zeitgeist.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jun 27, 2013
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There’s a central and important paradox at work here, something that elevates the record above what might otherwise be emo-aspirations of gushy earnestness. Singer Devon Welsh makes himself the first target of an incisive analysis.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jun 24, 2013
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Personal Record doesn’t always have the focus and sense of place that made Last Summer great, but it’s pop music on a grander scale, both in sound and theme.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jun 21, 2013
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Yeezus is ultimately most repugnant in how it heedlessly collapses all the value dichotomies that Kanye has mined so fruitfully over the years into one bottomless cesspool of narcissism.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jun 21, 2013
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Together these four pieces create a single, near-breathless listening experience, robust enough to envelop but varied enough to leave you both craving and curious for more.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Jun 18, 2013
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While the Knife seem to have outlined a much clearer vision for what they were trying to achieve, they do so, crucially, through experimentation starting outward from their own comfort zones, and with almost zero lyrical element.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 30, 2013
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She is expressing something ineffable in a way that is consumable and still interesting: the album as starting point, a work that grows with the listener--the gateway drug to thinking differently.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 30, 2013
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Modern Vampires of the City’s songs rarely feel overstuffed or overwritten, with simple kick-snare drumming, plaintive piano chords, and astoundingly well-recorded vocals at their centers.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 30, 2013
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Trouble Will Find Me is impeccably sequenced, even at thirteen songs the rare National record that doesn’t contain “the one song they should have obviously left off.”- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 30, 2013
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It’s a humble record, yet one with the timeless appeal to become a classic in league with the work of Waxahathee’s influences.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 21, 2013
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Monomania is the sound of a healthy and aware group of musicians who have experimented with artifice and ultimately moved beyond it.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 21, 2013
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Phoenix has somehow managed to follow a universally acclaimed breakout record with one that not only avoids falling flat, but succeeds at creating and sustaining a subtly different atmosphere.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 21, 2013
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The Terror is an unselfish view of a world free of human manipulation, and as such is a staggering listen to fans accustomed to the Lips’ sheeny pop orchestra and, before that, their lo-fi quirk.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 6, 2013
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The result would be encyclopedia-thumbing pastiche if it weren’t all so carefully curated, and if the production wasn’t so intricately, lavishly produced that as each track stretches into the fifth or sixth or eighth minute it was not still revealing permutations, secrets, strange little surprises.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 6, 2013
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RKives as a whole, hopeful and appreciative above all else, a way for the band and the fans to celebrate what they had one last time before returning to the present, to careers already well into the next phase.- cokemachineglow
- Posted May 6, 2013
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Not so much a change of pace as a consolidation and careful re-allotment of her powers.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Apr 12, 2013
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The result is a collection of great, hard-driving tracks that feel poppier than any of the long-winding snores on that new Justin Timberlake album.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Apr 12, 2013
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You can’t really blame Bowie for conforming to 21st-century quality control when it comes to the sound and scope of this record, but it’s not exactly something to be celebrated either. What deserves celebration, or at least indulgence, are the glimpses of sublime execution on The Next Day, as well as Bowie’s skill in maintaining his mystique after all this time.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Apr 5, 2013
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Fans of Angles should rejoice as Comedown Machine is essentially a refined version of that album’s strengths.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Apr 5, 2013
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New Moon feels a little bit long; though only twelve songs, they are all pretty substantial (especially the eight-minute “Supermoon”), and things lag a little between “The Brass” and “I See No One.”- cokemachineglow
- Posted Apr 5, 2013
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The result is light as a feather, with laid back songs that would be perfect played live during some lazy afternoon outdoor festival, sprawled on the grass and drinking a cold beer.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Mar 29, 2013
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Eat Skull can be really charming when they want to be, but just as often they seem content to putter around, resulting in enough slack to overwhelm such a short record.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Mar 6, 2013
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The third Foals album doesn’t represent a huge leap forward from Total Life Forever’s formula so much as a refinement.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Mar 6, 2013
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It’s an entertaining record to hear, but at times a devastating one to listen to.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 28, 2013
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Amok is a palatable piece of 21st Century electronic pop that generally sounds complex without really being that complex at all. It’s as smooth a surface as Yorke has ever painted, without grain or contour. It seems designed to say little, to equivocate, to slither around the perimeter of our expectations.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 26, 2013
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Every song, for better or worse, is constructed with its own identity in mind, and if nothing else, Mondanile commits to each and every one of these attempts at distinction.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 12, 2013
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- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 8, 2013
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Ritzy Bryan’s choruses are as sturdy as they need to be and the songs are an improvement upon those on The Big Roar because they’re lither and punchier, packing more hairpin turns into shorter run times.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 7, 2013
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It’s an exhilarating listen, even if all of this dread seems to be in the name of dread only.- cokemachineglow
- Posted Feb 6, 2013
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