For 5,918 reviews, this publication has graded:
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34% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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62% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.1 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 67
Highest review score: | Magic | |
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Lowest review score: | Know Your Enemy |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 3,633 out of 5918
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Mixed: 2,245 out of 5918
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Negative: 40 out of 5918
5918
music
reviews
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- Critic Score
Goats Head Soup didn’t — and still doesn’t — sound like what one would have expected from the Stones after Exile. ... The alternate mixes of a few of its songs don’t add terribly much, but the same can’t be said of an instrumental jam on “Dancing with Mr. D,.” which lets you eavesdrop as the band locks into a groove and jams without Jagger. ... The Brussels Affair bristles.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 4, 2020
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Vince’s knack for combining brevity and sly wordplay, together with Kenny Beats’ restrained production, make the album particularly lucid from start to finish.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jul 9, 2021
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It’s rare to hear Dylan sound like a fan trying to be a peer, but that’s what’s evident here. Those sessions serve as the core of Travelin’ Thru, Dylan’s 15th “Bootleg Series” release, but since the Man in Black is spry and dominant throughout — he’s the true star here — it could also be a new entry in his own Bootleg Series.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Oct 31, 2019
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Guest turns by singer Jessy Lanza and violinist Owen Pallett are telling high points--if Snaith's vocals sometimes lack character, his tracks never do.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Oct 15, 2014
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Often on Currents it feels like you've camped out in a middle spot at a festival, halfway between a mainstage rock headliner and the dance tent.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jul 17, 2015
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Extends the murky, revelatory folk of [Bonnie Light Horseman] with wistful reflections on the passing of time and free-falling in love. [Jan 2022, p.71]- Rolling Stone
Posted Jan 26, 2022 -
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At its worst, the music on Everyone’s Crushed sounds like etudes – studies in experimentalism, finger exercises for tyros in the avant-garde. But when Water From Your Eyes find transcendence – especially on the record’s final two tracks, “14” and the extra winky “Buy My Product” – it can be quite stunning.- Rolling Stone
- Posted May 26, 2023
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The band has tossed some of the sunny pop of 2001's The Coast Is Never Clear, paring down some of the horn-happy melodies that have defined their style, but their songs are still bright and elegant.- Rolling Stone
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JPEGRAW is both a musically dense snapshot of an American stoner dad just trying to focus in a world that allows for anything but, and an album that amalgamates an array of sounds, influences, riffs, and samples while still finding room for the searing guitar solos that made his reputation.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Mar 21, 2024
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Cottrill, who performs as Clairo, raises the stakes on Sling, her compelling, sharply-focused and musically adventurous second album.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jul 16, 2021
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Beam finally brings the blood, instrumental colors and quirky but fluid arrangements that make explicit the worry and wounds running red in his Southern-gothic stories and dead-love letters.- Rolling Stone
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Her debut full-length fuses together jagged textures, vaporous synths and her versatile voice into forward-thinking R&B animated by its restless innovation.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Oct 6, 2017
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Transatlanticism should be overwrought -- it's an album about young men enduring lost love in an ocean of memory; instead, it feels like a conversation with an old friend.- Rolling Stone
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Lee’s sound design—the rush of Uzi getting sucked into a portal, the hum of the spaceship engine, the unsettling, pulsating rumble coming from the great beyond—co-exists seamlessly with the album’s production. It creates narrative tension and helps create a broader cosmic context for his sex marathons and shopping sprees, for the great eccentric force with which he raps and sings.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Mar 12, 2020
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Painful memories are twirling around in Lenker’s head on Songs. It’s an album that lives up to it’s name by capturing the basic, natural truth of her art.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Oct 30, 2020
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A pulse-quickening, mind-tickling dance LP 27 years after their debut? This duo did much more than get lucky.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jul 16, 2013
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- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jun 3, 2014
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Vampire Weekend have gotten better at just about everything they do.- Rolling Stone
- Posted May 7, 2013
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Grande’s latest is a gorgeously exposed journey to the end of her world — or at least what she believes to be the end. It’s a divorce album that goes through all the stages of grief, and the singer navigates a new beginning with some of the most honest and inventive songs of her career so far.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Mar 7, 2024
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It's no surprise that Wire still aspire to make complex, strange punk; the shocker is that the spine-tingling Send sounds fresher than the pop punk currently being generated by pups half their age.- Rolling Stone
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The rare art-rock album that comes as much from the heart as the head.- Rolling Stone
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El Camino is the Keys' grandest pop gesture yet, augmenting dark-hearted fuzz blasts with sleekly sexy choruses and Seventies-glam flair.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Dec 6, 2011
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It's a dizzying, nonchronological spin through the Madonna years, years it makes you feel lucky to be living through.- Rolling Stone
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His music is loose and rustic, his writing skirts the heart of the matter instead of bulldozing into it, and his careful deadpan imbues everyday statements with almost mystical resonance.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 17, 2013
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With age/sex/location, Lennox has delivered her best work to date, one that mostly leaps past her patchy but inspired Shea Butter Baby debut in quality.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 30, 2022
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It seems the isolation of lockdown made her bolder about looking inside herself. The most exciting thing about Hold the Girl is that you can’t even guess where Sawayama might go next.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 13, 2022
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This isn't a mixtape, it's a suite of songs, paced and sequenced for maxaqimum impact.- Rolling Stone
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Her best LP since 1998's landmark Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. [May 2020, p.89]- Rolling Stone
Posted May 5, 2020 -
- Rolling Stone
- Posted May 15, 2014
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Her goal on The Collective, as was her goal with Sonic Youth, is to subvert listeners’ expectations. Gordon will turn 71 next month, and she’s made one of the most daring albums of her career. If you want to get it though, you have to turn it up and submit.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Mar 7, 2024
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[Lambchop vocalist Kurt] Wagner shares a sense of offbeat phrasing and doleful humor with his singer-songwriter friend Vic Chesnutt that is both profoundly Southern and affectingly universal.- Rolling Stone
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It's Malin's personal reflections, such as growing up a child of divorce in the Seventies in "Almost Grown," that give Fine Art its soul.- Rolling Stone
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Bun B, doesn't wallow in the macabre. Instead, we get UGK basics: songs about drugs, sex and flossing, flavored with thudding, no–nonsense beats.- Rolling Stone
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Their most compellingly dire-sounding [album], not as grabby as their 2005 debut, Funeral Dress, but rocking out in a frayed, mordant way that makes every stick-in-your-head chorus they share seem like a small triumph.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jan 4, 2012
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- Rolling Stone
- Posted Apr 23, 2013
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On the first half of her impressive solo debut, Presley fills her disappearing middle-class blues with sharp, compassionate tales of unfulfilled pensions and steep tuition bills. Later on, the bona fide coal miner's daughter changes gears with a series of vulnerable country-soul ballads.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jan 30, 2015
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These 12 songs map out a concise history of American soul, with a heavy dose of New Orleans strut.- Rolling Stone
- Posted May 4, 2015
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The album arcs like a well-calibrated live set through the soaring "Thorns of Life," the Hall and Oates soul of "Sarah, Surrender," and the title track's spikey New Orleans funk.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jun 21, 2017
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It's a revelation. Tyros (Maren Morris) and legends (Dolly Parton) mine deep cuts to reveal in John's songs a very country strain of stoic melancholy. Miranda Lambert delivers a stormy "My Father's Gun"; Don Henley and Vince Gill wring pathos from the divorce lament "Sacrifice."- Rolling Stone
- Posted Apr 6, 2018
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Always an underrated vocalist, he delivered lyrics with two-pack-a-day gravitas, gruff aggression and flashes of fraying soulfulness. Musically, he doubled down on vintage earthiness and living history. ... The deluxe edition includes six bonus tracks that show just how much fun these guys were having at the time.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Apr 5, 2019
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For the most part, Years finds Anderson at his most convincing, and moving, since his hit-making heyday. It’s the type of record that should cast his entire discography in a new light, an inspired offering that shows a forgotten legend pulling off a new trick just as effectively as his old ones.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jul 6, 2020
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Americana firebrand makes a grand rock & roll record worthy of her Bowie jumpsuits. [Sep 2020, 68]- Rolling Stone
Posted Sep 10, 2020 -
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A tonally and emotionally dynamic set of of originals that touches on compassion, perseverance, and divine intervention. [Jul/Aug 2021, p.137]- Rolling Stone
Posted Jul 20, 2021 -
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Despite its scattershot title and the fact that it was recorded in five separate studios across Nashville and California, Strays feels like Price’s most cohesive collection yet guided by light West Coast shadings courtesy of Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Dawes). Price finds ways to effectively and subtly tease out different shades from her longtime versatile band, the Price Tags.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jan 10, 2023
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A great album of stretching out, proving that her sounds and beats can do more than just make feet tangle.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 27, 2018
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Todd Snider's compressed story-songs are so vivid and knowing that they seem completely plausible, even the one on his new album voiced by a piece of discarded junk mail that dreams of being a tree again.- Rolling Stone
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At 15 tracks, Petals for Armor can occasionally feel redundant; two or three songs feel like retread territory that was better explored elsewhere, and there’s only so many metaphors you can create for flowers. Still, the album’s final third, while the most pop-oriented section, is also its most interesting. ... It’s the sound of an artist blooming into some the best music of her career.- Rolling Stone
- Posted May 7, 2020
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If listeners have the stamina — and the patience — Senjutsu is one of the most rewarding and vital albums in Maiden’s catalog.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 3, 2021
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Japandroids sing about lost youth and sex and drinking atop hammer-of-the-geeks distortion swirls and holler-along refrains a gorilla could pump some paw to.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jun 5, 2012
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To be sure, it's a jazz album, as much about tradition as expanding it, informed by Coltranes (John and Alice), Miles Davis fusions, bebop and more; yet it's clearly shaped by crate-digger funk and film scores, hip-hop collage and gospel.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jun 18, 2015
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An album that rewards both short attention spans and deep listening. It’s a real treat to hear them zip between sonic epiphanies.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Oct 28, 2021
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This isn't just B.B. King's best album in years, it's one of the strongest studio sets of his career, standing alongside classics such as "Singin' the Blues" and "Lucille."- Rolling Stone
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Mostly they provide gentle melodic loops familiar to fans of old-school soukous and indie-rock fusionists like Vampire Weekend. But sometimes they break ranks.- Rolling Stone
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This handsome solo acoustic set overlaps a few songs with earlier entries in Neil Young's official bootleg series. But there's no shortage of standouts.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Dec 10, 2013
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Just a classic power trio lineup in the spirit of Midwest post-punk juggernaut Husker Du and its barely-sweetened antecedent Sugar, with Bob Mould conjuring the ecstatic rage of his earlier bands for a grim new era, apparently still convinced that the best way to meet crushing hopelessness is by barreling head first through it with a throat-shredding howl and all amps cranked.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Mar 23, 2016
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The album doesn’t possess the piercing introspection, precision or revelatory quality of Swimming, but of course, Miller wasn’t there to see it across the finish line. It serves as a fitting coda to his career.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jan 17, 2020
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Her torchy virtuosity on her medium-small vocal instrument, applied to country-bluesy-Stonesy ballads and driving midtempo rave-ups, transforms what could have been a dull exercise in rote revivalism into sweet soul music.- Rolling Stone
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If you liked Warm, you’ll like Warmer. It’s Tweedy at his most self-findingly laid back, low-key and ruminative, leavening intimate recreational folk-rock with offhanded guitar tastiness.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jul 8, 2019
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- Rolling Stone
Posted Mar 6, 2020 -
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uknowhatimsayin¿ succeeds as a kind of high-wire act that balances Brown’s folk hero status against his documentarian sensibilities, tragedy against comedy, bluster against self-mockery. It’s shorter than his previous albums, and also lean in a way that few other rappers could replicate. Five albums in, he remains a singular talent who only needs a few short words to tell a good story.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Oct 8, 2019
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Despite its length and musical theme, Cruel Country doesn’t at first feel like a grand statement, but Tweedy has subtly laid out the ambitious concept of tying his classic American music to the classical theme of American social and political alienation (this, Uncle Tupelo fans, is where the record truly becomes roots music).- Rolling Stone
- Posted May 27, 2022
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Live in Paris is a 48-minute purge reaffirming the power of that hoary rock cliché, the live LP.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Feb 8, 2017
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The results are both pure Ellington ('Day Dream') and Monk ('Bright Mississippi'), as well as pure Toussaint, emotionally and structurally expansive, yet as keenly done as one of Toussaint's perfectly knotted ties.- Rolling Stone
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He’s pulled off the neat trick of making his music at once elegant and more refined but also warmer and more intimate — the polished-marble smoothness of Steely Dan with the generosity of an Al Green or Yo La Tengo record.- Rolling Stone
- Posted May 16, 2022
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It's full of surprising, creative moments that recall Nas and Kanye West.- Rolling Stone
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That dead-end sense haunts the people he sings about on much of Look Now; they’re further down the road of life yet just as troubled because, as always, a satisfied person in an Elvis Costello feels like someone who got off at the wrong bus stop.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Oct 11, 2018
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- Rolling Stone
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The music is as bleep-y as it is banging (James Blake produces on two tracks) and touchstones include Andre 3000, James Joyce, Leonardo DiVinci and Jay Gatsby.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 1, 2016
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The production is vivid, trippy and abrasive, bleeding the line between hip-hop and EDM--a sound as compellingly haywire as Brown is an MC.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Oct 7, 2013
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So goes the follow-up to the 'Chunk's 2010 comeback, Majesty Shredding: rock vets fighting demons with delicious noise and sugar-crusted hooks as darkness falls.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Aug 20, 2013
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Though Silver Bell meanders at times, "Little God" (which might be about the devil) and the vengeful "Sorry and Sad" pit her thoughtful, detailed lyrics and blue, reedy voice against tough Stones-in-the-bayou guitars.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Nov 18, 2013
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Her latest, Like the River Loves the Sea, feels simultaneously grounded and even more expansive as it tracks its way through the changing seasons of a relationship.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 3, 2019
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For every head-nodding beat, Game Theory has a head-turning treat. [7 Sep 2006, p.100]- Rolling Stone
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Isolation Drills makes the case more persuasively than ever that these indie-pop godfathers should matter to more than just the loyalists.- Rolling Stone
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The title track and "Pay My Debts" are unusually groove-driven near-pop. But the trumps are familiar folk-rock incandescence.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jun 9, 2015
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- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 4, 2012
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Giving both of these records some distance allows for the songs to have breathing room, and for Whole New Mess to stand on its own.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Aug 28, 2020
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As insightful as it is, Piano & A Microphone is also imperfect: You can hear him flub the rhythm and adjust the tone of his voice. But that’s also part of what makes it so moving now. Here is a truly spontaneous moment, something we can share with a departed icon, his 88 keys and anyone kind enough to dim the lights.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 21, 2018
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- Rolling Stone
- Posted Apr 24, 2012
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Apologies To The Queen Mary is often unfocused, but it's plenty lovable.- Rolling Stone
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The loveliness comes at a predictable cost in breakaway energy. [30 Nov 2006, p.112]- Rolling Stone
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It all adds up to something so captivating that vocal guests like Erykah Badu ("See Thru to U") can get a little lost.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Oct 5, 2012
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The root vibe is elegant techno minimalism, but that vibe is augmented with wildly eccentric detailing.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Apr 2, 2013
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- Rolling Stone
- Posted Aug 26, 2019
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Foil Deer is an upswing from the listless cynicism that clouded their 2013 breakout, Major Arcana: This time, Dupuis and fellow guitarist Devin McKnight take charge.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Apr 21, 2015
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There's a tender heart beating beneath the evil distortion and punishing blitz.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Mar 12, 2012
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Producer Steve Albini makes sure you feel every snare slap and guitar abrasion.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jan 19, 2012
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Words & Music improves the sound on Reed’s original tape (available to hear, with many others, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, home to the Reed Archives), and evidently takes some liberty with song order.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Sep 13, 2022
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There are numerous nods to classic rock throughout. ... Lambert’s more adventurous side comes out on “I’ll Be Loving You,” which combines echoing piano notes and thick coils of electric guitar into a booming anthem that’s more Arcade Fire than Alan Jackson. ... The LP’s final track, “Carousel,” is a breathtaking ballad of trapeze-artist romance and long-buried secrets.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Apr 28, 2022
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Hindsight reveals, like so much in Reed's career, an album full of greatness, beneath its consensual role-playing and market-minded mishegas. This final chapter in the vault-scraping Velvets reissue series, a handsome six-CD set, reaffirms it.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Nov 23, 2015
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What still sets the Avalanches apart, besides their careful groove pacing, attention to detail, and uncanny ability to move you from inside a track to outside looking in, is their sweet sense of nostalgia.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jul 8, 2016
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They ratchet up the latent R.E.M.-isms, elevating themselves heads above their musical kin.- Rolling Stone
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We get the sound of master musicians in their comfort zone, doing everything their own way. Nobody would want to hear the Beasties try anything else.- Rolling Stone
- Posted May 2, 2011
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The Prodigal Son, Cooder's first album in six years, serves both as an urgent commentary on our current dystopia and a satisfying window into the interpretive process of a musical mastermind.- Rolling Stone
- Posted May 11, 2018
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Recorded near Joshua Tree, the LP loses itself in the desert and finds timely survival metaphors everywhere. And it burrows deep into desert mythology without invoking any of the hoary narratives above (they’ve already done a Bono tribute, after all).- Rolling Stone
- Posted Mar 28, 2019
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The result is the most enjoyable record Mars has been a part of — a glorious excuse to turn out the lights, break out the bubbly and let the sublime power of their almost troublingly uncanny retro verisimilitude work its mimetic magic on your soul and mind.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Nov 12, 2021
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At 76, her music remains truly vital: unsettling, touching, funny, undeniable.- Rolling Stone
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Just as “Deja Vu” and “Good 4 U” proved Rodrigo was going to be much more than a one-and-done phenom with a viral hit about careening through heartbreak, Sour confirms this is just the start of her story, where she expertly rides the wave of teenage turbulence and emotional chaos down any road she chooses.- Rolling Stone
- Posted May 21, 2021
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It's a bash-up of prog-rock, electronica and funk, in descending order of influence, and Bruner conjoins all of them to create a drifting, happily disorienting otherworld.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Jun 18, 2013
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Yeah, it's literary; yeah, it's the polar opposite of cosmetic-surgery pop. As such, it's not for everyone. But its jazzy rawness represents a high point of emotional craft in a career defined by it.- Rolling Stone
- Posted Feb 3, 2016
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