Spin's Scores
- Music
For 4,256 reviews, this publication has graded:
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50% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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47% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.6 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: | To Pimp A Butterfly | |
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Lowest review score: | They Were Wrong, So We Drowned |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 3,054 out of 4256
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Mixed: 1,147 out of 4256
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Negative: 55 out of 4256
4256
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
Ultimate Care II is reliably dream-like, the sort of album you never quite hear in the same way twice; passages jut out or fly under the radar.- Spin
- Posted Feb 16, 2016
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- Critic Score
Confident, intimate, and weirdly glammy, Life of Pause is worth taking five for.- Spin
- Posted Feb 16, 2016
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- Critic Score
Animal Collective’s latest sees them painting with confidence, acrylics, dinosaurs, Bob Ross, a twist, and a wipe out.- Spin
- Posted Feb 12, 2016
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Even haters will have to acknowledge Opus as being undeniable for what it is, an iconic collection of 21st-century house music that’s so expansive and far-reaching it outgrows its very genre, unable to be contained within any four-walled enclosure.- Spin
- Posted Feb 11, 2016
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- Critic Score
Wiz has a decent feel for hooks and occasionally does some interesting things with melody. But it’s simply not enough to retain interest.- Spin
- Posted Feb 11, 2016
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Pinegrove could have ridden a self-assured record like this to widespread indie acclaim. Instead, it feels like an act of generosity, a record lovingly crafted and intimately written, full of sounds, observations, and emotional realizations that you didn’t know you wanted in 2016, but, in fact, needed desperately.- Spin
- Posted Feb 10, 2016
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- Spin
- Posted Feb 10, 2016
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EVOL, along with the Purple Reign mixtape, doesn’t provide that instant hit that Future’s world-class 2015 was so full of. Instead it crawls into your brain and makes itself at home; you’ll find yourself going back to it over and over without even realizing.- Spin
- Posted Feb 10, 2016
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Big Black Coat works best when the music is as committed to frenzied, all-consuming libidinousness as the lyrics, and on those grounds, it’s a surprisingly successful reinvention for the duo: one that feels more in line than recent efforts with the strengths (if not the tones) of their earliest material.- Spin
- Posted Feb 9, 2016
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I’m Up is not a major work in Thug’s catalog. It’s brief and feels disconnected at the beginning and end, and for the most part doesn’t exercise his considerable chorus-crafting muscles. But it’s a fascinating creative time capsule, and feels like a welcome detour during a hugely prolific four-year period.- Spin
- Posted Feb 9, 2016
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The most-balanced Kevin Gates project to date, discovering an equilibrium between his pummelers and his caressers we didn’t previously know was possible.- Spin
- Posted Feb 3, 2016
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- Critic Score
Nearly forty years in, Williams, 63, is at a place where some are likely contemplating the mortality of her career, too. But on The Ghosts of Highway 20, she’s never sounded more alive.- Spin
- Posted Feb 3, 2016
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- Critic Score
There is almost always an underlying inorganic sound that’s either ominous, nauseous or both, and it’s the only thing that guarantees that none of the slower tracks will unknowingly be embraced in dentists’ waiting rooms next to classic soft rock. The faster songs are highly danceable, especially with these queasy keys.- Spin
- Posted Feb 2, 2016
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It’s no wonder the process felt redemptive for Smith; to exorcise years of mounting bleakness is no doubt a relief, but the resulting record is one that’s compelling for the exact opposite reasons. It’s not a light at the end of a tunnel, but luminescence creeping through the crack of a doorway--illuminating just enough to let you realize just how dark everything still is.- Spin
- Posted Feb 2, 2016
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Fever Daydream is a surprisingly assured debut that, at the very least, evokes electronic music of the past and present.- Spin
- Posted Feb 1, 2016
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ANTI is Rihanna’s first aesthetically personal album, and throughout its disorderly roaming, it remains revelatory in a strict sense; it’s a musical step sideways but an artistic step up.- Spin
- Posted Feb 1, 2016
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- Critic Score
The most standout feature of Nine Track Mind might be its rhythmic consistency, an exercise in deceleration.... inoffensive dross.- Spin
- Posted Jan 29, 2016
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- Critic Score
Plenty of musicians this diverse and dreamy can lose themselves beneath production textures or simply the weight of their own brain, but Hilton doesn’t shy away from indulging in pop, which is as experimental and transitional a form as any other.- Spin
- Posted Jan 29, 2016
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PARA, is both exactly what its name suggests and a galaxy of far, far-flung musical touchstones.- Spin
- Posted Jan 28, 2016
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As important as the production is, though, it’s still the songwriting that makes Pawn Shop stand out.- Spin
- Posted Jan 28, 2016
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It’s a better album than 2012’s conflicted, twilit Four, but Okereke’s new grace awaits an engine as powerful as the one enjoyed by his old gracelessness.- Spin
- Posted Jan 28, 2016
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- Critic Score
Despite being so joyously engulfed by Sia’s voice, the songs come over as dispossessed orphans, all a variation on that same theme of being lost and held down by overbearing powers and temptations.- Spin
- Posted Jan 26, 2016
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- Critic Score
The most impressive thing about Moth is the way it manages to wrap a more compact frame around Chairlift’s spiraling colors without dulling the final product.- Spin
- Posted Jan 26, 2016
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In trying to transcend dance music, he’s actually made its purest form: an album that’s a listening experience.- Spin
- Posted Jan 25, 2016
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- Critic Score
While Purple Reign is not a masterpiece, it is a thoughtful, if slight adjustment on the lens of where Future stands, at a crucial moment in his career.- Spin
- Posted Jan 25, 2016
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- Critic Score
Jonny Greenwood’s electric fuzz, supplementary rhythms, and beloved vintage Ondes Martenot synthesizer add real bulk to this Middle East meets East plus West experiment in cultural diplomacy.- Spin
- Posted Jan 22, 2016
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- Critic Score
At a relatively spry 62, Maal’s voice retains both upper register strength and youthful clarity.- Spin
- Posted Jan 22, 2016
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- Posted Jan 22, 2016
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Night Thoughts honors Suede’s longstanding place in Brit-rock history as theatrical brooders with a penchant for pop and post-punk, while also celebrating the five-piece’s growth by supplying listeners with another round of swirling dance ballads (the gloomy, arena-filling “Outsiders” and the twinkling “No Tomorrow”) and operatic, Dog Man Star-ry ruminations (“Tightrope”).- Spin
- Posted Jan 21, 2016
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- Critic Score
Sonically, Emotional Mugger lands somewhere between all of these records [Manipulator, II, and Ty-Rex], maintaining the cohesion and (relatively) streamlined arrangements of Manipulator but nodding to the scuzzy ’70s hard rock of the latter two and Segall’s trademark haywire, lo-fi garage.- Spin
- Posted Jan 20, 2016
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- Critic Score
The tonal palette is warm and lush, with a transporting quality that’s twofold, sending the listener both to the artist’s western locale and back in time.- Spin
- Posted Jan 15, 2016
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- Critic Score
Her best album-length-EP since Quarantine remains instrumental, but now skitters jazzily.- Spin
- Posted Jan 8, 2016
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- Spin
- Posted Jan 8, 2016
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- Critic Score
Leave Me Alone is a friendly, enthusiastic album of coppery six-strings glinting in the sunlight with the more-than-occasional flat note, scuffing up the album’s already sand-blasted texture with an endearing scrappy quality.- Spin
- Posted Jan 7, 2016
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- Critic Score
Despite expert camping, the title track, lodged like a splinter at the beginning of the sequence, strikes as too reliant on wintry rue. But when three-note fuzz guitar blasts answer each lyric in “Lazarus,” or Bowie harmonizes with himself on the nonsense lyric of “Girl Loves Me,” it’s hard to resist 40 years’ worth of craft resulting in so intriguing a record.- Spin
- Posted Jan 6, 2016
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- Critic Score
While it’s no We Global or even a We the Best Forever, it’s not without its own outrageous merits.- Spin
- Posted Dec 24, 2015
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- Critic Score
There are a few strong sonic ties to God Complex, specifically the works of producer Louie Lastic, but this album has greater balance. The full spectrum of sound explored is even richer this time around.- Spin
- Posted Dec 21, 2015
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Jeremih’s no saint, certainly, but this album feels universal in its depictions of desire--his sexiness is satiable, his desires multifaceted, and the way he chooses to explore them deliberately diverse.- Spin
- Posted Dec 21, 2015
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Every note fits. Every key has a keyhole. And King Push proper would be hard-pressed to beat this small wonder of great cameos (the always-undervalued Jill Scott, sampled Biggie), productions (in a first, Timbaland manning the boards on the eerie “Untouchable”), and block quotes (“I’m the L. Ron Hubbard of the cupboard”) here.- Spin
- Posted Dec 18, 2015
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Whether the devastation of the aforementioned accident has imbued Baizley with new life, or his dual successes in the arts are just making him a fuller person, somehow Purple is still heavier than Yellow & Green despite being a leaner machine.- Spin
- Posted Dec 14, 2015
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- Critic Score
The occasionally somewhat disturbing words he pens for that medium knock around on the page with the same ease that they roll out of his mouth.- Spin
- Posted Dec 11, 2015
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Big GRRRL Small World sounds like the work of someone too tireless to limit herself to genre lines or defined boxes, and it’s hard work resisting rap’s numerous pigeonholes.- Spin
- Posted Dec 10, 2015
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The Buffet is better than just another R. Kelly album, but not enough to be worth saying so outside of a review, much less on a year-end list; call it a good one-night stand.- Spin
- Posted Dec 10, 2015
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The tunes on Saint Cecilia--the patron saint of music, as any Art Garfunkel fan will tell you--were largely assembled from past albums’ cutting floors. The title track crawls towards wholeness on the lovely vocal meld of Grohl and Kweller.... Meanwhile, “Iron Rooster” is a bone-tired dragger that’s probably of recent vintage but could date back to Down on the Upside.- Spin
- Posted Dec 9, 2015
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Though we may never fully understand BUB’s highly advanced Space Speak comprised of rumbling mix of squeaks, chirps, and squrggles, listening to the ebullient Science & Magic would indicate BUB’s newfound ability to sneak out from under the proverbial bed and bask in a ray of sun.- Spin
- Posted Dec 7, 2015
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Even as they add unimaginable depths to a deceptively simple form, Kannon reasserts their commitment to merely existing, unapologetically out of genre and out of time.- Spin
- Posted Dec 7, 2015
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- Critic Score
The deceptive lack of star power would be less of an issue if there was more here to break up the album’s mid-tempo monotony.- Spin
- Posted Dec 7, 2015
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What’s most charming about But You Caint Use My Phone is how unpretentiously Badu comports herself, ever-mindful that one of her most special qualities as a vocalist remains her ability to entwine the resilient with the goofy.- Spin
- Posted Dec 3, 2015
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- Spin
- Posted Dec 1, 2015
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- Critic Score
To say that PRODUCT leaves you wanting more is an understatement, beginning and ending with EDM you can’t dance to, building and toppling all kinds of aural Legos in between.- Spin
- Posted Dec 1, 2015
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When it works best, as on the now globally ubiquitous “Hello” or the show-stopping “All I Ask” (featuring a rending, diva-appropriate performance for the ages), 25 delivers the kind of timeless vibes people have come to expect from Adele, even though the first-person narratives in her songs often still feel oddly generic.- Spin
- Posted Nov 23, 2015
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- Critic Score
The albums ten tracks flow into each other as if conjured by the most sublime after-hours DJ. Atmospheric beatless expanses cascade unpredictably into crashing hi-hats just a track later, and it’s the most laid-back direct challenge to the banal 4/4 thump dominating dance floors since Japanese transplant DJ Sprinkles’ 2009 landmark intellectual deep house revival, Midtown 120 Blues.- Spin
- Posted Nov 20, 2015
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With compressed mechanical wheedles circling each other like birds on “Ghosting” and the self-explanatory “Morning Vox,” the machines pumping through Howl are the most organic you’ll hear all year.- Spin
- Posted Nov 20, 2015
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Mutant, even as it threatens to filibuster itself at over an hour long, feels like the album that Xen was meant to grow into, with every lesson that Vulnicura taught integrated at a molecular level.- Spin
- Posted Nov 19, 2015
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The album is a dense, cinematic, always surprising and often moving album that sounds like it required the full three years that the L.A. crooner and producer spent chipping away at it to get right.- Spin
- Posted Nov 17, 2015
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By giving us the best album of his career, and subsequently re-ascending to Top 40’s mountaintop, Bieber’s answered his own question: In pop music, it’s never too late to say you’re sorry.- Spin
- Posted Nov 16, 2015
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1D’s swan song is hopelessly neither here nor there, appropriate to the drinking-age attention spans of an act whose solo careers beckon.- Spin
- Posted Nov 16, 2015
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Halloween’s Slime Season 2 serves as a companion piece that’s smoother, more skeletal, and, by most measures, superior.- Spin
- Posted Nov 13, 2015
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In making a record about growing up, Lopatin’s come out on the other side in one mutated piece.- Spin
- Posted Nov 13, 2015
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The ten songs that make up the surprise new Mr. Misunderstood are a step back from the arena-scaled grandeur Church has been trading in for the past several years. Many of the songs feel like scaled-down counterparts to some of the best tracks on The Outsiders.- Spin
- Posted Nov 12, 2015
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Rustie’s new album doesn’t signal a reclamation of maximalism as much as it’s a return to form, even if it’s likely that many of its themes were inspired by an acid trip more eye-opening for Whyte than necessarily for the rest of us. But what a trip.- Spin
- Posted Nov 12, 2015
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The emotional arcs are just as fresh and just as gripping [as Barter 6], but here they’re confined to songs, and sometimes to single verses.- Spin
- Posted Nov 11, 2015
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It’s no surprise that the romantic tunes are shunted to the second half of the record. As they go, they go well.- Spin
- Posted Nov 11, 2015
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The record’s biggest flaw might be that it stacks the stunning “Sun” and “Lights” as its first two tracks, setting a challenge to which the nine remaining ones can’t quite rise.- Spin
- Posted Nov 11, 2015
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In spite of the giddy playfulness, it never comes off as a lark. You’ll get no closer to ascertaining his actual identity, but as the balance between jokes and earnest emoting narrows, Sold Out presents something of an abstract portrait of the man behind the haze.- Spin
- Posted Nov 11, 2015
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In her willingness to tread the line between the crushing flood of data and irrepressible pop hooks has created a record so undeniably of its time and place (that is, cyberspace) that it can’t be easily ignored.- Spin
- Posted Nov 10, 2015
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Listening to the man find his voice is the only “thrill” here, as familiar (if hardly marquee-level) Nirvana staples like “Been a Son,” “Scoff,” “Sappy,” and “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” all appear sans finished lyrics, or sung in too-high or too-low range-testing cadences like a very bored kid performing for a live studio audience of stuffed animals.- Spin
- Posted Nov 10, 2015
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Even by Hyperdub’s standards--a 20-year lineage of beats birthed and incubated in London’s most soot-smeared corners (grime, dubstep) and Chicago’s windwept streets (footwork)--this is not a light record.- Spin
- Posted Nov 6, 2015
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Finally, she’s embracing the responsibility to provide stone-cold tunes without pretense.- Spin
- Posted Nov 4, 2015
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That’s Storyteller as a whole: expertly arranged, dense without overwhelming the force of its captain.- Spin
- Posted Nov 3, 2015
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As Shepherd’s confidence grows in his compositions, he gives each element of the song enough time to stand on its own, without the bells and whistles of the Ensemble’s (slightly more) enormous orchestra.- Spin
- Posted Nov 2, 2015
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5SOS finds a balance in their sound here that feels right for them, and ultimately the accurately titled Sounds Good Feels Good suggests there isn’t actually all that big of a gap between the boy band and pop-punk milieus, and probably never was.- Spin
- Posted Oct 30, 2015
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While he’s tugging at strings that have been otherwise picked up by the stable of Berlin’s PAN (M.E.S.H., Helm, and Visionist) or his Tri Angle labelmates past and present (Arca and Lotic), his extreme repetition of these familiar sounds pushes them euphoric.- Spin
- Posted Oct 29, 2015
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This isn’t quite your weird uncle’s Wolf Eyes, capable of clearing a den and ending the party in 30 seconds flat--but it’s a Wolf Eyes that’s still capable of scaring off half the guests. The other half will find a lot to love here.- Spin
- Posted Oct 28, 2015
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If there’s a quibble with II, it’s that like most doubles, it would be more effective as a single disc.- Spin
- Posted Oct 26, 2015
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The album’s escapism is alarmingly potent, to the point where it verges into the downright delusional, but its lack of self-consciousness is--somewhat ironically--the thing that keeps it in check.- Spin
- Posted Oct 26, 2015
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Divers sets itself apart by expanding into new genres and replacing the whimsy of her earlier material with maturity and solemnity.- Spin
- Posted Oct 26, 2015
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Pretend turns out to be an enticing fusion of her wintry, pop-paradise homeland, and the West African musical roots she picked up from her father, the late Maudo Sey, all tempered with raw empathy; her masterful pop-soul captures depressive moments and makes them soar.- Spin
- Posted Oct 23, 2015
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Without truly breaking any paradigms, the well-respected veterans in VHÖL do all kinds of things well that evade heavier peers, never relying too hard on the math or surprises for a thrill. If anything, its 42 minutes fly by so smoothly you’re surprised to discover there wasn’t a hitch or even a dead spot.- Spin
- Posted Oct 23, 2015
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Beach House’s releases to date have come fogged by intoxicant, nostalgia, and hypoxia, but Thank Your Lucky Stars does what their work has begged for all along and wipes the dew from their rearview mirror. You’re going to like what you see.- Spin
- Posted Oct 20, 2015
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Compared to the spontaneous hodgepodges of 2009’s Psychic Chasms or 2011’s Era Extraña, VEGA INTL. Night School is a far more intricately assembled product.- Spin
- Posted Oct 19, 2015
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Some songs feel unfinished, especially on disc one. Much of the production on both halves is terribly derivative and some great samples get mangled.- Spin
- Posted Oct 16, 2015
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Despite the fact that Carnell appears on the cover of his own record drained of both pigment and life, this record’s full of both--moments of calm that justify the storm, peaceful lapping waves that follow the tempest.- Spin
- Posted Oct 14, 2015
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His astounding new Life is even more songful, all the more impressive considering his claustrophobic medium that he gleans so many colorful variations from, à la Fetty Wap.- Spin
- Posted Oct 14, 2015
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This album should be met on its own terms; it’s willing to do the same for you.- Spin
- Posted Oct 14, 2015
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The album frequently slips back into forgettable genericism, and its back half is mediocre--but it’s also a strength. At its high points, Revival is marked by this lush, sphinx-like readinessss: as if, after a decade and a half of being nonstop front and center, Gomez has finally figured out what it means to center herself.- Spin
- Posted Oct 13, 2015
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His 18th, the recently released LP is modern country-by-numbers that will satisfy the faithful and mosey on under the radar of anyone else.- Spin
- Posted Oct 13, 2015
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- Spin
- Posted Oct 12, 2015
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It demands attentive listening, only because it can so easily slip into the delirious wonders of foreign realms.- Spin
- Posted Oct 8, 2015
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Kelela obviously doesn’t shy away from wearing her label’s signifiers, but on Hallucinogen she transcends them, the same way she outlasted lazy classification into PBR&B in 2013, swimming to the hazy surface of a new kind of future sex/love sounds.- Spin
- Posted Oct 7, 2015
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Alex G has always found power in the broken and uncertain. He’s just gotten a lot braver about spinning that chaos into beauty.- Spin
- Posted Oct 7, 2015
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Somehow Williams is at his most charged-up and urgent when he’s at his bleakest, though you’d be hard-pressed to remember song titles here.- Spin
- Posted Oct 7, 2015
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At times, the very sonic repetition and minimalism that makes much of Why Choose so effective also hampers its output; the second half of the album especially feels monotonous and weighed down by its musical rigor. Yet Why Choose redeems itself with the brisk, mostly instrumental closing track.- Spin
- Posted Oct 7, 2015
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Few of the album’s 11 ensuing tracks are quite as barnstorming as “Devil,” but the album remains gigantic throughout.- Spin
- Posted Oct 6, 2015
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- Spin
- Posted Oct 6, 2015
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Forty years down the line, Maiden has proven that they’re still the best metal band in the world; we never had any doubt, but The Book of Souls is one hell of a reminder.- Spin
- Posted Oct 2, 2015
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With this new album, they finally sever those last few ties, and forge ahead into the retro future.- Spin
- Posted Oct 2, 2015
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Women’s Rights has its share of more complex situations as well, not to mention the occasional fourth chord.- Spin
- Posted Oct 2, 2015
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The best thing about Unbreakable is that it proves Janet can still surprise us.- Spin
- Posted Oct 2, 2015
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New Bermuda both expands their range and sees them coming further into their own.... Bermuda is ace metal.- Spin
- Posted Sep 30, 2015
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