Pitchfork's Scores
- Music
For 12,014 reviews, this publication has graded:
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41% higher than the average critic
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6% same as the average critic
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53% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.9 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: | Sign O' the Times [Deluxe Edition] | |
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Lowest review score: | nyc ghosts & flowers |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 9,829 out of 12014
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Mixed: 1,878 out of 12014
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Negative: 307 out of 12014
12014
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 29, 2023
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- Critic Score
The best songs will be welcome additions to their live repertoire; it’s already riveting to watch them play these songs at full dual drummer power. But the threads that bind these songs are loose and inconsistent.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 29, 2023
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- Critic Score
Even if you get the sense her best work still lies ahead, it’s refreshing to see an emerging star earn their concept album.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 28, 2023
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- Critic Score
Despite the occasional misstep, Mystery School overall succeeds in enhancing the most spellbinding aspects of Cabral’s music: her winding, changeable voice and unpredictable melodic left turns.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 25, 2023
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- Critic Score
Perfect Saviors excels in a more conventional sport of measure, expanding the physical capabilities of radio rock just a few degrees beyond the previously acceptable standard.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 25, 2023
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- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 25, 2023
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Everyone Else Is a Stranger is all that an old fan could want. The four songs are long, expressive strings of supple lines and curves, twisting like silvery roller-coaster tracks.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 24, 2023
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It’s an album that feels less like a roving party than a backyard BBQ, and the music seems designed to fade pleasingly into its surroundings. Such an anodyne approach has its appeal yet it’s strange that a record from a singer/songwriter as ambitious as M.C. Taylor equates optimism with simplicity.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 23, 2023
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Listening to him navigate those raw emotions while staying the diamond-encrusted course makes for some of his messiest and most mature music yet.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 23, 2023
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For anyone who enjoys a thoughtful singer-songwriter record with adept, minimalist instrumental backing and a powerhouse vocalist, Echo the Diamond is a worthy listen.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 23, 2023
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- Critic Score
Haunted Mountain is his fullest and most structured album. He and his band amble through these songs with… well, not more purpose or focus, which are anathema to getting lost. But listen to the coda of “Didn’t Know You Then,” which stretches out before losing its way.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 22, 2023
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Barring a few notable exceptions, World Music Radio is so beholden to its premise—so enfeebled by Batiste’s insistence on universality—that it offers up few opportunities to get to know Batiste himself: his stories, his struggles, his euphoric victories and devastating losses. That absence leaves the record feeling hollow, like a pretty house where no one lives.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 18, 2023
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Where career-spanning setlists from most veteran bands will inevitably succumb to wild variances in tone if not quality, Live in Brooklyn 2011 dissolves three decades into a holistic 17-track noise opera that enshrines Sonic Youth’s greatest attributes and contradictions.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 18, 2023
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She’s often ventured from the shores of American folk to touch the waters of blues, soul, and gospel, but this time the shifting itself seems to be the point as Giddens stretches her reach further. Even so, You’re the One never coalesces with the clear vision or poignancy of her previous work.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 17, 2023
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Chrome Dreams carries a dream logic that's bewitching in a way the individual moments simply aren’t, a testament to how a good album sequence can almost be a magic trick.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 16, 2023
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Deliverance might work best as something else entirely, perhaps as a beat tape filled with reference vocals for the sort of stadium-status UK indie stars that know how to squeeze the maximum amount of drama out of the minimum amount of wordplay.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 15, 2023
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- Critic Score
Even as life interferes, you can imagine the album as a flight of whiskey: subtle variations on one recipe, pure fun to consume, liable to intensify one’s desire to punch cops. Very occasionally, the production is countryfied to achieve a spaghetti western vibe, or larded with Halloween pedal effects.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 15, 2023
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Connection is the first time that Ceramic Dog has made dissent sound like just a collection of recordings, instead of a prickly, teeming world of its own.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 14, 2023
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- Critic Score
Oldham long sounded like he had wisdom to share, and he sometimes did. Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You overflows with it.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 14, 2023
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- Critic Score
The one slight drag of Sundial: In contrast to Noname constantly barring out, her hooks sound a little weak, as on “Hold Me Down,” where her plain melodies are backed by the type of full-throated choir that sounded better on Chance’s Coloring Book. The features, however, are explosive.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 11, 2023
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End of World is hellishly inconsistent, its mid section adrift in ’80s funk-rock sheen, like INXS being harassed by an angry wasp. But when it works, End of World, more than any other recent PiL album, offers the winning combination of instrumental oddity and vocal drama.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 10, 2023
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On Eyeroll, Ziúr crafts warmer yet more extreme textures, responding to the composed poems and vocal improvisations of a handful of guests. Ziúr’s collaborators are a fierce and versatile cohort.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 8, 2023
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Central City is a distillation of Freedia’s pump-up talents and endless charm.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 8, 2023
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- Critic Score
Ooh Rap I Ya plays it entirely too safe, feeling less like a biting subversion of nostalgia than a straight-up “remember when.” This could have been saved by meatier hooks, a more realized emotional arc, or production choices that didn’t feel as if they were well and fully covered by Neon Indian and Washed Out over a decade ago.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 8, 2023
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- Critic Score
If They Live in My Head lacks the woozy danceability of vintage Tetras, it doesn’t skimp on the political bite.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 8, 2023
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- Critic Score
When, on “The Same Again,” she sings, “Move slow when you speak, so you really get to say what you’re meaning,” sounding as if her face is scrunched into a grimace, she turns a fairly oblique phrase into a razor-sharp barb. These moments, although far between, suggest that A New Reality Mind could have been a more dynamic record if it had zeroed in on Kenney’s intentional, suggestive performances.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 8, 2023
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For the first time in a while, it sounds like they’re listening to what’s happening in clubland and asking themselves not what they can poach for the charts, but what they can bring to the table.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 7, 2023
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The complexity of the music helps to make up for the comparatively placid lyrics, but Mackey’s writing is most interesting when she zooms in on domestic bliss.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 7, 2023
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“True Love,” “Up,” “Everybody’s Saying That,” and “Love Is Enough” bob to the same Chic formula: skanking guitar, twangy bass, canned strings. It’s a solid formula, but the textural sameness makes more idiosyncratic tracks like “Give Me Your Love” stand out.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 4, 2023
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Jim O’Rourke’s soundtrack is perfectly calibrated to this unforgiving space squashed between parched fields and blown-out sky. His palette—detuned piano, watery vibraphone, and a muted, amorphous shimmer that might be harmonium or synthesizer—matches the film’s dusty tones of beige and pewter and mobile-home brown.- Pitchfork
- Posted Aug 3, 2023
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