Spin's Scores

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For 4,264 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 2.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 To Pimp A Butterfly
Lowest review score: 0 They Were Wrong, So We Drowned
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,062 out of 4264
  2. Mixed: 1,147 out of 4264
  3. Negative: 55 out of 4264
4264 music reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nosebleed Weekend
    Its excellence and momentum vastly outweigh one’s ability to describe it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Hope Six Demolition Project
    Project is prime second-tier Polly, opening melodic and textural doors unlike much else you’ll hear in 2016, and it amounts to a lean, compulsively listenable 41 minutes that makes a conscientious effort to do something larger with her gifts.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Sailor's Guide to Earth
    With Simpson self-producing Earth, and with the Dap-Kings always ready to land on the one with a bari-sax skronk, it feels like a Nashville album that’s been dudded up and funked out.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ears
    In timbre and voice alike, the new LP is startlingly, richly fulsome, commingling the mysticism of Smithsonian Folkways LPs, IDM’s furrowed futurism, and the free-fall questing of Laurie Spiegel’s 1980 landmark, The Expanding Universe.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gore
    While Gore is far from impenetrable, it’s still evident that Deftones are the most interesting and esoteric thing the radio-festival circuit might dare touch.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Human Performance
    What makes Human Performance a narrowly great record is that it bucks narrative. It’s not their most sensitive record or politically astute or least dissonant but all of these things--their most convincing performance as humans to date.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Super
    Super rates as less essential than 2013’s marvelous Electric because I don’t hear another “Thursday” or “Love Is a Bourgeois Construct,” no grand conceptual coups like their Springsteen cover.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Out My Feelings (In My Past)
    [Out My Feelings (In My Past)] is not the bright and exalted counterpoint you might expect--it’s still grim, but Boosie turns his focus outward.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Slay-Z [Mixtape]
    Slay-Z is a very good mini-mixtape, and more than half of it sustains in any formation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Streams
    Love Streams manages to break through the vaulted cathedral ceilings and peer above the clouds, largely eschewing the degraded, gothic textures Hecker has become so fond of in favor of more vivid, almost celestial palettes.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Next Thing
    The group [her band] gives Kline’s ideas depth without ever bogging her down. Smith’s keyboard playing replaces the bizarre synth flourishes on 2015 mini-EP Fit Me In with an understated sound that mirrors the warm, delicate quality of Kline’s voice. Kline’s songwriting is more nuanced, too.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Second Love
    The songs are foundationally solid enough in their swaying rhythms and sublime melodies that they don’t need twists to keep them interesting, but the care Emmy puts into the album’s crevices makes it one of the fullest-sounding and fullest-feeling singer/songwriter LPs of early 2016.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stranger Things
    This third batch has something to prove, and Bloom makes the most of it, stutter-riffing his best Toadies impression on “Hearts in Motion” and sneaking the timeless gorgeousness of Sebadoh’s “Too Pure” into “Down.”
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Man Made Object
    There’s not much artifice to be found in U.K. trio GoGo Penguin’s sophomore album, as even though the LP is a construction of jazz, classical, electronica, and trip-hop building blocks, it flows together naturally.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Human Ceremony
    Sunflower Bean have enough homegrown ability between them to draw up a series of immersing and original compositions.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    MartyrLoserKing
    This smart, jagged, contemplative work makes you wonder if Williams could wring amazing stuff out of Bennington too.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seth Bogart
    His new self-titled record slips out of the leather jacket in favor of body-oiled synth-pop that balances between swagger-happy and tooth-rottingly sweet.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Emily's D+Evolution
    Her fifth album is indeed one of the most alt-friendly jazz cycles you’ve ever heard, pivoting constantly on tight, proggy arrangements that evoke St. Vincent, tUnE-yArDs, and Incubus in their odd-angled crunch more than anything on Blue Note.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Slime Season 3 [Mixtape]
    Although Young Thug moves away from exploring emotional pain, SS3 is still very much informed by introspection.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Follower
    At times it’s hard to tell where exactly he’s going, but that’s okay when it’s all too easy to get lost in the Field’s subtly nimble percolations.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It's the Big Joyous Celebration, Let's Stir the Honeypot
    For a lo-fi project, Celebration is a particularly imaginative, lengthy work full of vivid character portraits, using additional instrumentation and computer-generated distortion to expand far beyond the boundaries of more straightforward guitar-driven indie acts.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Slow Forever
    Slow was born of isolation and betrayal, but it’s music that was meant for concert halls Cobalt deserve to fill, music that rewards both introspection and reveling in like-minded rapture.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Weezer (White Album)
    The White Album not only matches the sounds and feelings of Buzz Bin-era Weezer, but also the craft.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Azel
    The addition of female vocalist Mama “Mahassa” Walet Amoumine and periodic excursions into skanky Caribbean rhythms (wryly dubbed “Tuareggae” by Bombino) stamp Azel as yet another remarkable transition for the guitarist.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Potential
    That sense of newfound freedom and exaltation surges through Potential, a rich matrix of the Range’s knack for digging up strangers’ stories and assimilating breakbeat, grime, U.K. garage, and late ’90s R&B.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vroom Vroom [EP]
    Vroom Vroom is scintillating new ground for Charli, totally unlike anything she’s ever done before, and still quintessentially her in its streamlined, indomitable turbo-pop.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hella Personal Film Festival
    Open Mike Eagle’s momentum has raised anticipation for his fifth collaborative full-length (and ninth album altogether), Hella Personal Film Festival, this time made with British producer and vocalist Paul White. But he doesn’t quite scale up his political and personal concerns. Instead, he gives us more modest delights.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Burden
    “Direct Address” fails to make sticking mantras of “Honesty is like a kiss on the lips” or “I don’t believe in first sight” or “I fall in love with everyone I see,” but there’s plenty of promise here that she’ll move past them, and it’s sometimes fulfilled.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    DJ-Kicks
    It’s a seamless, flawless mix that in Moodymann’s hands becomes a timeless capsule spinning across the galaxy to rally any generation that finds it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    No One Deserves Happiness
    In declining to meet expectations, the Body have gotten free of the potential pigeonholing that plagues both them and the genre at large, providing something so utterly resigned, hopeless and, above all, barren; the most exciting bits on No One end up heightening the frustration and disappointment we crave more and more with each listen.
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