Neumu.net's Scores
- Music
For 474 reviews, this publication has graded:
-
50% higher than the average critic
-
3% same as the average critic
-
47% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.5 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 72
Highest review score: | Twin Cinema | |
---|---|---|
Lowest review score: | Liz Phair |
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 362 out of 474
-
Mixed: 100 out of 474
-
Negative: 12 out of 474
474
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
-
- Critic Score
One of funniest, smartest, truest, saddest and flat-out rockingest (in the very best way) albums I've heard in a very long time.- Neumu.net
- Posted Dec 14, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Yes, the overall sound is more uniform. Uniformity, however, is not necessarily a bad thing.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The difference this time is that the Hold Steady consistently kick ass, nailing both Paul Westerberg's Teenage Yearning/Angst and Bruce's Common Man to a cross of Pure American Rock, unafraid of cliché, undaunted by the task of making the familiar exciting again.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
For Human Animal, Wolf Eyes have stepped back from pure violence, bringing in some of the old cinematic features while retaining pieces of the vicious nature that has served them well.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Whichever way you look at it, as avant-pop or cubist soul, Return to Cookie Mountain remains an intoxicating, intriguing but accessible album.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The icy qualities of Last Exit's synths are retained, but the old minimalism is certainly gone, and enough real warmth buoys these productions that songcraft actually develops.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
There's more body here, more barroom spill and rollick. There's also a feeling Ward is pushing at the fabric of his music, trying to expand and progress. But the same cinematic mist hovers, the same old, old intimacy fans know well.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Her rock-oriented approach here will please some, but such a genre-hopping exercise is only occasionally provocative.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
No, this album is not superfluous -- far from it. The Avalanche brings Stevens' exacting vision on Illinois into sharper focus.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
I'm not clear on everything Cex, but I've heard enough to know you want to hear this.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Rather Ripped is what you'd expect from a Sonic Youth that's getting back to the cool rock 'n' roll sound they trademarked years ago, completed by a tagline of frenzied feedback and chiming guitars.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If naysayers can't get past the sheen of spiced-up production, it's their loss.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
While their sound may be familiar, Camera Obscura are anything but run-of-the-mill.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Although Loveless and Psychocandy are obvious reference points, this album actually succeeds most on its charming, candy-colored pop songs.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Really, there are few surprises here, but there is a crucial one, which is that Continental gradually reveals itself to be a solidly constructed and rather strong collection.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
At the close, the guitars surge forward in waves of noise, a precursor of what's to come. And come it does, with the hammering, staccato fuzz of the album's title track and the speed riffs of "Woman on the Screen."- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
An album full of vitality that is smart and intelligent without being boring. More importantly, however, it is simply incredible.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Bitter Tea offers immediacy, but little reward for return visits; offers vastness -- at a dawdling 73 minutes -- but nothing in the way of big ideas.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Listening to Introduction is like viewing the world through someone else's glasses, skewed, disturbing and perhaps causing a bit of vertigo.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It is, at one time or another, twee reggae, hipster rock-ism, synth-pop balladry, post-Interpol gothickry. It's an inconsistency that's both noble and annoying.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Somewhere in the mess of feedback and sonic sluggishness is something that strikes a nerve, makes you want to hear it again.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
What makes At War With the Mystics different is spontaneity -- and not spontaneity in a jazz sense. Listening to this album you get the feeling that absolutely anything could happen -- as if it's taking final form only as it reverberates off your eardrums.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Ringleader of the Tormentors feels rushed and underdone in both the songwriting and arrangements.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
In the end, it is musicianship that makes Duper Sessions unquestionably successful.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
My Morning Jacket are much more upfront, and pretty easy to share. Band of Horses keep a lot shrouded in effects and indistinct lyrics.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
While not as dark, muscular or streamlined as the band's excellent, eponymously titled 2003 album, Flat-Pack Philosophy grows better and better with each listen.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It is hard to say which side of Mogwai is more moving, the quietly beautiful or the transcendently loud, but the great thing about Mr. Beast is that you don't have to decide.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Like previous albums, this one is full of sharp, sudden observations, rueful admissions of failure and surprising sweetness.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Despite dozens of listens, much of Whatever People Say congeals together like so much spent gravy, with only the clever couplets sticking out.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This is the defining Destroyer work because of its size and scope, because of its melodicism ("Painter in Your Pocket" the hottest pop song Bejar's authored yet), because of the caliber of its musical chops, and because of the shots Bejar continues to fire.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The tracks fail to hang together in a convincing way -- often giving the impression that they were more or less strung together on a whim.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The Life Pursuit is an immaculate album; Belle & Sebastian craft pure pop perfection better than just about anybody.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It is quite possibly Stoltz's best work ever, and certainly one of the landmark releases of 2006.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Lyrically Black Cadillac is exquisite. Musically it's far more than a country record, expanding into those mighty rooms of roots music and pop-rock where Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind and Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road shine and burn against their own dark palettes.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
At their best... Pearls & Brass churn out hard-rocking sculptures of distorted sounds at buffeting volume, but with a meditative, trance-inducing core.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
I don't expect people outside the shadow of the Rockies to understand this music.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Up Above Is, in such, a gentle enough jam to work/non-work in an incidentalist sense; but compare it to folk that do this sort of gear with a fearsome seriousness -- like, most obviously, the Vibracathedral Orchestra -- and T&C come up as pale as a Midwestern mid-winter tan.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The earthy tones, accomplished songwriting and passion within Full of Light give Mendoza Line newcomers good reason not only to hear their new album, but also to dig into their back catalog.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Their record runs through a range of instrumentalist archetypes and quietly surprising turns-for-the-worse, from electrified screech to tape-op minimalism, through pastoralism and soundscapery, to numbers where they knock out all manner of feigned sturm und drang.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A rare, perfect instance of collaboration, where two distinct sets of talents merge into something larger than its parts.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
What's impressive is the way they bring all these elements together, the natural world leading seamlessly into a brighter landscape of surreal otherness.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
My feeling is that Rehearsing My Choir is an odd, initially indigestible album that is far more interesting than most people are willing to admit.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Although surprisingly self-conscious at moments, Feels remains rife with a triumphant beauty, a bucolic sound that stirs and entrances the listener like a happy secret.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The spell is broken, however, by pieces like "Tears From the Compound" and "Oscar See Through Red Eye," which get lost in the marshes of their own hypnotic rhythms, sugar-sweet synths and lo-fi, breathy drones.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Listening to Hypermagic Mountain is like picking up the live end of a downed power line.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Their third full-length is their best ever, a passionate yet cohesive vault into outsized rock sound.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This album more than any other swiftly dispels the notion that the trio are condemned to register wary introspection through brooding atmospheres.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
An exhilarating take on rock-'n'-roll caught, torn, between striving for the light and reveling in the dark.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
What makes Thunder... such an easy-to-love affair is the schoolyard exuberance they ply their tunes with.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The comparisons to the Mamas and the Papas are ultimately weak; there's a lot of blues mixed in with the folky pop, and traces of '80s British band Prefab Sprout, who also spun their troubles into melodic gold full of boy/girl harmonizing.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Lacking both the musical and counter-cultural thrill of the Brion recordings, this album turns away from a certain artistic "rawness" in the original recordings, razing away counter-melodies and acoustic decay for a well-polished delivery that presents the photogenic songstress in a more "flattering" light.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
His songwriting shine is soon obscured behind the dark clouds of densely layered home recording.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Among contemporaries, Calla now stand alone, making dark, beautiful, intensely understated music that's as much landscape as narrative story.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The resulting sound is tougher and more insistent, a succession of incessant rhythms layered with fuzziness and distortion.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Whether it's due to the backing band, or the better studio resources, Banhart seems more self-assured than ever as he sings his songs on Cripple Crow.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
When they play, they sound confident and sloppy. When they sing, they sound sincere and sarcastic. They crunch and slash like early punk, toy with country like The Mekons, and use chiming melodies like indie rock. And all fastened together by a combination of mockery and carelessness, they come out with something that could easily stand up against any of the favorite rock 'n' roll records you turn to for a good time.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
With Noah’s Ark Coco Rosie have truly come into their own, delivering an eccentric sound so one-of-a-kind it could have come from no world but their own.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Sigur Rós piece together breathtaking orchestrations that sound like they're singing to you from another world, telling you why your world is not so bad, that even in all the miserable monotony, something beautiful perseveres.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Amber Headlights fails, when it does, because it's trying to be two things at once: a personal reflection on life and death and a commercially acceptable rock record. But when the album ditches the tricks and conventions that define mainstream rock and focuses on Dulli's songs, it is very powerful indeed.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Never the hardest rocking of bands, Death Cab for Cutie sound positively muted throughout Plans, Gibbard's obsession with the temporary nature of relationships and life itself receiving appropriately somber accompaniment.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
No BIG message here; I Am Kloot simply made a good, heartfelt rock record and, without sounding like they had to try too hard, pulled it off.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
They've broken their own mold and achieved something unexpectedly fine and durable.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
In danger of hitting the point of "OK, we get it" -- when that zap of newness wears off and a successful band suddenly feels less than essential -- the New Pornographers instead come up pretty big on Twin Cinema, transitioning to a sound just as catchy as their old stuff but with more space for the tunes to breathe.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Pixel Revolt feels, at the end, like two EPs packaged together and passed off as a full-length. The justification could be made that the fierce, angry and frustrated responses to international armed conflict and girlfriends leaving are very much the same, though that would seem to be kind of a stretch.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Melding big, weary Fleetwood Mac-esque emotion to stretched-out arrangements, both electronic and folk, the Canadian singer/songwriter's power lies in his dedication to his own individuality.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The songs don't float off into space; the strumming guitars and subtle electronic effects give the fantastic lyrics an earthy feel, rather than lifting them into the air.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The problem with Warnings/Promises is the material: the band failed to bring enough good song ideas with them when they went into the studio.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It doesn't have the edginess of the Kid's previous recordings, and cloaks its eclectic sense of play in tasteful, textured layers, but in so doing achieves a consistency that has previously been lacking.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's the conviction and passion within the singing -- both male and female -- that wins me over in the end.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The gear is buffed to such a productional sheen that its every sound seems like a reflective surface, the compositional complexity leading to an album as confusing -- and, ultimately, distancing -- as a hall of mirrors.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Hiatt delivers a batch of songs that powerfully evoke certain places, certain times, certain characters, with an eye for detail and an understanding of the complexities of human behavior seldom seen in songwriters these days.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Chávez Ravine works because, ultimately, it isn't a history lesson or museum piece. It's the sound of musicians, now on the periphery, playing and singing the music they love.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album succeeds in creating a dreamy mood that is both soothing and slightly unsettling. And yet this mood is relentless, and, ultimately, all the songs begin to sound the same.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
You could dismiss Teenage Fanclub as not being original, but that would be missing the point. Instead, appreciate a group that, in 2005, can create absolutely perfect songs that somehow manage to channel the magic of early-to-mid-'60s pop-rock.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This is a compelling debut/reunion, with the two men seeming to push each other far more than any of their recent collaborators have.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
His 12th record holds no surprises for longtime fans, and yet here it is, his best, his greatest.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It is, in fact, what almost every other Oasis album has been: Not nearly as bad as overhyped sufferers might fear, not nearly as good as its enthusiasts want it to be.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
His party peaks too early, though, with the gear soon settling into a middling middle, where the songs start to sound less distinct, and the changes start to become less pronounced, and interest starts to lag, and where, eventually, like a desperate host hoping to keep the party going, Hebden stacks on break after break in a gallant attempt to remind you that the disc is actually playing.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A Certain Trigger has Maximo Park inserting enough creativity, energy and personality into their music to get away with lifting sounds directly from such post-punk bands as XTC, The Jam and Wire.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
In stripping things back Mercury Rev suggest that in their case more actually was more, that bereft of the digressions and expansions they're just another band with a nasal, naïve-sounding singer, a way with a hook and a penchant for using the studio as an instrument.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
While the album is pleasant, it takes awhile to open up. And once opened up, it's nice, but hardly revolutionary.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's a relaxed and ambitious collection that confirms Ryan Adams' reputation as a top-notch singer and songwriter who easily jumps styles and evokes comfortable sadness with every turn.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Finn's masterful lyrics can't be ignored. And the music, stopping, starting and crashing with wrenching enthusiasm, is equally undeniable. But the way Finn understands the human condition in all its glory and contradiction is, simply, brilliant.- Neumu.net
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Their reverb-drenched nostalgia trip is full of enough talent and original thought, though, that the result is respectable and classy, not boorish and (yawn) retro.- Neumu.net
- Read full review