MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)'s Scores
- Music
For 178 reviews, this publication has graded:
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87% higher than the average critic
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0% same as the average critic
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13% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 13.5 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 86
Highest review score: | American VI: Ain't No Grave | |
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Lowest review score: | Definition Of Real |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 164 out of 178
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Mixed: 13 out of 178
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Negative: 1 out of 178
178
music
reviews
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- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
It's hard to imagine their music getting much better. But it's not hard to imagine their lives getting much better. Which may be all their music needs.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
- Posted Mar 4, 2011
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Buried at Track 7, the developed rhyme, unkiltered time, unsettling keyboards, and Kenny Garrett sax coda of "Abstractionisms" deliver what the flowery "Caring" and the endless "Do You Dig U?" emphatically do not: the "brand new sound" the finale only brags about.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
- Posted Feb 23, 2011
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Slowed down and keyboarded up, these tunes make what cares they do bear seem lyrical--carefree.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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The result is an exceptionally melodic reggae album that's intensified by rapping devoid of dancehall patois and a hard edge unknown to roots revivalism. The result is also an exceptionally political hip-hop album that's most convincing when it doesn't multiply Afrocentric distortion by Rastafarian reasoning.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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This airy prog-psych self-indulgence is merely an elaboration of the back half of that debut--the half I tuned out then but appreciate some now, because, even as self-indulgent elaborations go, the follow-up's a doozy.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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It's more like sloshing or spewing, as intermittent love lookbacks evoke a social despair also contextualized by fabulous spoken epigraphs from Walt Whitman, Jefferson Davis, William Lloyd Garrison, and Young Abe Lincoln.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Sam Coomes is still disgruntled: with whoever he's sleeping with, with running away, with dystopia itself. But he's catchier about it, and rockier. Maturity comes in many forms.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Fortified by his Christian faith, he lends a cracked gravity to souvenirs of cornball sentiment ranging in tone from Ed McCurdy's political "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" to Queen Lili'uokalani's escapist "Aloha Oe," which close an album that also includes the traditional title song, a Sheryl Crow number about redemption, "Cool Water," and the tenderest "For the Good Times" I've ever heard.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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In which Eddie Argos of Art Brut (!) and Dyan Valdes of the Blood Arm (?) write second-cousin answer songs to, among others, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Kanye West, the Mamas and the Papas, Avril Lavigne, and P.D. "Creeque Allies" is a capsule history of the Maquis.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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On this reassuring piece of big-bottomed exotica, the "Sahara swing" they concocted with Karl Hector is the tipoff. They love the continuity bass-and-drums lay below; I love the content koto and flute and malletophone add on- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Ratcheting his reticence up half a turn, he opens with his bleakest new song, and only if you follow his chronically noncommittal lyrics will you notice his emotions opening up along with his tunes, his attitudes along with his structures.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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He delivers a reprise of the same B part in a more forceful, normal voice: "Why is everything a chore?/I'm too young to be defeated." So far, he isn't. Wish him luck with that riptide.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Contra establishes that his band has chosen another path, celebrating the world's contradictions, contraindications, and contradistinctions with a new pop sound made up of old pop sounds that aren't the same old pop sounds.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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It's far from a shock but definitely a disappointment to watch Ms. Trained Pianist survey her branding options and choose the bland card over the brains card.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Only after being overwhelmed by the sheer visibility of her warp-speed relaunch did I realize how enjoyable and inescapable her hooks and snatches had turned out to be.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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This slightly progger and grander follow-up bypasses such corny stuff until Track 8 begins a closing sequence of five lyrics-enhanced lite-jazzish tracks.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Although I gather there's a concept here, knowing what it is might ruin the gently wigged-out dystopianism the lyrics cozy up to. More important, it might undercut the otherwise irreducible pleasures of their exploding guitars, unworldly synths, and crazy drums.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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The reason we care is that she retains her spunk, tunes, and way with a phrase. And not only is she talented, she's really cute.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Of course she's quieting down as she grows up, plus covering her bases, so after half a dozen winners she levels off into a nine- song sequence.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Mostly it's the tunes that do the slamming. And though their lyrics may be too sincere for sophisticates, they're not sincere enough to suit the Avetts, a disconnect they'll tell you about.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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His salvation is humanistic empathy, spiritual complexity, and melodies more unfailing than back when the Holy Ghost was inspiring into his ear.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Talented lad, Turner. Not on this evidence incapable of ever writing quick, clever, cynical little songs again.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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He takes songs easy without throwing them away, and these were written to hold up their end of that bargain.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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"Perpetual Motion Machine" is about fish who wish they could walk so they could find out how it feels to fall down, and "Whale Song" bemoans Brock's metaphorical uselessness as it demonstrates his capacity for beauty.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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The fourth and best-by-a-mile folk-rock album from sometime Shin Eric Johnson and his cud-chewing sidemen is a message to the freak-folk from "a broke-legged paint in a herd full of unicorns."- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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White's drums duke it out with Dean Fertita's guitar, mostly below the belt. Alison Mosshart doffs her s&m drag to suffer and yelp. Jack Lawrence plays bass. Fierce.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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"Come on children, you're acting like children/Every generation thinks it's the end of the world," begins the candidly catchy centerpiece of these lost-and-found tradsters' best album.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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