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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- Critic Score
Elegiac rather than dancey, but elegiac about the preconditions of the dance, it states, sustains, and varies a bracing mood. It even has an ending.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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OK, 19 songs, gotta be filler here somewhere, and there is, only it isn't melodic -- with all music credited to the band, Shonna Tucker's muzzier lyrics and Mike Cooley's more elusive ones sound as well-turned as those of Patterson Hood, who's never written better.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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The sound is bigger too, strengthening a band that's all guitars-drums-vocals sonics -- including Molly Siegel's yelping vocables, without which the sound's faux-tween soul and wise-ass tempo shifts would evanesce into abstraction.- 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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The painful detail and joyful exuberance are there once they get going. But in under two years this Welsh punk sextet has matured/devolved from tromping over their pan-sexual alienation like so many glockenspiel-wielding grape dancers to enacting "miserabilia" about how unfulfilling it is to get on your knees next to a urinal.- 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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Live, McMurtry can still be way too strophic and trad. But he's never made an album so loud or hard.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Affecting a clarity and delight that pleases the many and confounds the some, their lyrically alluring, structurally hop-skip-and-jumping songs aren't deep. They're just thoughtful fun.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Even the now-obligatory vulnerable one, where Karen tries to prove she's not only human but nice, is... well, not a cartoon, but at least a bedtime story.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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True, Green spends more time supplicating than celebrating, and probably fabricated the whole scenario. But he knows his subject, and he doesn't need Jesus to lay it down.- 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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Half associative rhymes that clock in under two-and-a-half minutes, devoid of hooks but full of sounds you want to hear again, it's like a dream mixtape.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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The result is less a mixtape than a hip-hop version of a good Augustus Pablo album--more varied, jocular, and disquieting because that's how hip-hop is, but still a single organism.- 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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A glockenspiel in a guitar band? Freshens up the sound, they think. And they're right.- 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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As on most Go-Betweens records, the melodies take time to sink in, though not the Grant McLennan legacy retrofitted with a Robert lyric about Grant's affinity for melody.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Playing at world, at heavy, at soul, [Jack White] arts it up plenty and protests a little.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Hood is too inclined toward dark-side thoughts and the world too inclined toward dark-side realities for the newer songs to come off complacent.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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Loaded with talent, heart and personality, he's an eccentric who still thinks the world is his friend, and one more sweet argument for the civilized compromises of democratic socialism.- 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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There's no denying her eye for out-of-the-way details or her ear for a decent tune.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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With an incongruent Fall Out Boy track set aside for single duty and all those rappers a dream community taking the burden off Black Thought, this is the most accomplished pure hip-hop album in years.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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It's Buenos Aires' Gaby Kerpel without irony, maybe even Barcelona's Manu Chao without hooks -- ecstatic yes, escapist no.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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- Critic Score
The fun comes easier when he fools around with the title conceit, and even sometimes when he thinks about it.- MSN Consumer Guide (Robert Christgau)
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He goes Motown with so much joy in one-man-band craft he'll not only convince the girl he's sweet-talking that this is forever, he'll convince you.- 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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