Sonicnet's Scores
- Music
For 287 reviews, this publication has graded:
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55% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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42% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.3 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: | Bow Down To The Exit Sign | |
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Lowest review score: | Unified Theory |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 196 out of 287
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Mixed: 90 out of 287
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Negative: 1 out of 287
287
music
reviews
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- Critic Score
Their songs still bulge at the seams with clever ideas, but they're veiled in deep grooves and hooks.... Outkast have developed a major sweet tooth for P-Funk, but what they've picked up from their former collaborator George Clinton isn't his low-end bounce. It's rather his hovering, serpentine vocal arrangements and his acidic political fantasies.... [but] Stankonia's conceptual sprawl isn't all good for the album -- the collection is hampered by more than a little filler.- Sonicnet
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It's been a good three decades since Dylan has sounded as footloose and, er, freewheeling as he does on much of Love and Theft. That it comes on the heels of '97's haunted, hellhound-on-my-trail-vibed Time Out of Mind makes it all the more remarkable.- Sonicnet
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Comparisons will inevitably be made between Canto and the Buena Vista Social Club disc, but the most significant similarity is that they both feature great songs and terrific musicianship.- Sonicnet
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Casablancas is all old-school rocker in the Mick Jagger/Chris Robinson mold -- an ugly/pretty boy out to beg, borrow and bleed for even prettier women while acting like nothing ever satisfies.- Sonicnet
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The band's new sound appropriates slabs of dance music, free jazz, rock and techno to create a menacing landscape of rattling beats, thundering bass and crippling distortion, dotted with lyrics that evoke urban decay and social disgust.- Sonicnet
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Miss E... So Addictive shows another side of Missy Elliott, yet unlike the calculations of other artists who morph themselves mainly as a marketing scheme, her dancing-sex-queen moves come through more like revelation than reinvention.- Sonicnet
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On the evidence of her work here, one would have to say there really isn't any pop-rock composer writing more sophisticated material these days than Mann.- Sonicnet
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By my count, you've still got 50 keepers out of 69, give or take a few songs. And about a third of those sound like classics.- Sonicnet
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The collaboration ultimately benefits both players, adding a touch of art house abandon to Hammond's at times studied formalism, and authenticity to Waits' Martian grease-monkey blues.- Sonicnet
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She has always been a good songwriter -- experimental, dynamic, probing -- but here she demonstrates that she has the potential to be a truly masterful one. With newfound clarity and restraint, and with her usual wit, she examines the ways in which we try to convince ourselves that we are safe in an unsafe world.- Sonicnet
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1997's Homogenic, also a mixture of heavy beats and strings, was not as varied or complete as this album, and while Selmasongs, last year's soundtrack to "Dancer in the Dark" (in which Björk starred), was lovely in its own sweeping, cinematic way, Björk has surpassed herself with this new work.- Sonicnet
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The Blueprint is not a perfect album. Some of the material is undoubtedly filler. But this recording makes it clear that hip-hop is supposed to be fun -- and that Jay-Z is having a ball.- Sonicnet
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The only complaints involve omissions. Four of five singles between '92 and '94 (among them the minor American hit, "Bang") aren't here, which bypasses the band's crucial early development and leaves only one song from Modern Life, the punchy "For Tomorrow." On the other hand, the disc could easily have shed at least one of its five offerings from Parklife -- most noticeably the title track.- Sonicnet
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Agaetis Byrjun is an impressively unself-conscious record that would have been difficult to make in a trend-obsessive center like London or New York. It is sincere and though its influences may be familiar, its beauty and tenderness are refreshingly new.- Sonicnet
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Welch has become a notable talent on that long, rootsy highway, and she and Rawlings have fashioned their own unique sound.- Sonicnet
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With the twangy, kaleidoscopic blend of country blues, downtown jazz and so many other unexpected flavors and sounds on Bill Frisell's latest album, Blues Dream, one can't help but be reminded a little of the updated American folkloric music score in the Coen Brothers' latest film.- Sonicnet
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The writing shines throughout... Steve Earle seems able to do anything he cares to.- Sonicnet
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Little Sparrow captures one of country's greatest talents in top form, backed by some of the best acoustic players around...- Sonicnet
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Even darker and more emotionally resonant than its impressive predecessors.- Sonicnet
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Without resorting to sappy new age or yuppie lounge cliches, Hebden has created a blissed-out ambient album for the post-rave generation.- Sonicnet
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He's responsible for some of the most classic (and controversial) jams in the history of hip-hop.- Sonicnet
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Continues the musical evolution that was evident on last year's Knock Knock, with a collection that goes beyond Smog's standard home-alone-in-the-basement-with-a-four track-and-a-weird-mood aesthetic.- Sonicnet
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Feeding everything from polyrhythmic samba marches and interstellar jazz excursions into his mixer-microprocessor, then topping them off with obsessive beat-programming, Tobin blurs the boundaries between organic and prefabricated, as if the coexistence of the two should be an undeniable rule.- Sonicnet
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Featuring vocal contributions from Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, punk-blues aficionado Jon Spencer and ex-Tricky collaborator Martina Toppley-Bird, Bow Down to the Exit Sign is a dark, soul-wrenching trip through an even darker world.- Sonicnet
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- Critic Score
Horns, keyboards and acoustic guitars dominate the 10 tracks here, with an overall live sound that steers clear of the studio effects the band embraced with their last release, Guerrilla.- Sonicnet
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ESG may have been heard mostly in other artists' songs, but A South Bronx Story is an impressive attempt to focus attention on the force behind the samples.- Sonicnet
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Ditching lo-fi aesthetics for a more radio-ready sound in the spirit of, say, the Raspberries or Badfinger, Pollard has wisely chosen not bury his songs in oblique lyrical references and muddy tape hiss.- Sonicnet
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