Spin's Scores
- Music
For 4,254 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: 3,052 out of 4254
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Mixed: 1,147 out of 4254
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Negative: 55 out of 4254
4254
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
Each trek follows a similar path: a tumultuous hike through sludgy quagmires and craggy doom, culminating in a melancholic, melodramatic guitar solo. This repetitive pattern accordingly obfuscates the LP’s overarching dynamic arc, although the record’s not without its surprises.- Spin
- Posted Mar 24, 2017
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With a tangle of voices and viewpoints, both songs [“First Letter from St. Sean” and “A Better Sun”] write beyond Boucher’s near-exhaustive projections-of-self to see things from with a larger, more insightful point-of-view.- Spin
- Posted Mar 23, 2017
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The music is melancholic, urgent, enveloping. After more than a decade, her tightly controlled croon has lost none of its flinching effect to communicate shock and smoldering rage. Aside from sparking urgency and indignation, it evokes feelings the other side could use: humility, and shame.- Spin
- Posted Mar 22, 2017
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The pleasure they provide is difficult to dismiss; there’s so much life in these new songs, formula or not.- Spin
- Posted Mar 21, 2017
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Though Drake’s globetrotting is seeping into American pop (hi, Katy) More Life still stands apart. Its closest recent antecedent is probably Drake’s own Take Care, itself a kaleidoscopic masterpiece that pulled horizontally and vertically from across music.- Spin
- Posted Mar 20, 2017
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Hot Thoughts sounds like Spoon and Dave Fridmann’s idea of a futuristic, guitarless record, which is to say it’s full immaculately constructed rock songs arranged on layers and layers of synthesizers and studio fireworks.- Spin
- Posted Mar 17, 2017
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Where Turn Into’s multilayered arrangements sometimes felt scrunched, Everybody Works blossoms.- Spin
- Posted Mar 14, 2017
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Nothing on Heartworms matches the processional majesty of Port of Morrow’s “Simple Song,” or even the go-for-broke mugging of “Fall of ‘82,” an unholy riff on Joe Walsh, Steely Dan, and Thin Lizzy. What Heartworms does have, though, is the informal approach to formalism shared by another Southwesterner transplanted to Portland, Britt Daniel.- Spin
- Posted Mar 10, 2017
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These songs are more believable--touching, even, if you’re not put off by the milky expressiveness of his voice--than the multiple attempts at rapping.- Spin
- Posted Mar 7, 2017
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FORGET sets out for new terrain with an expanded collection of collaborators, but isn’t far from what you’d expect from the project at this stage.- Spin
- Posted Mar 1, 2017
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The most arresting moments on Tears in the Club come when he is working with singers. ... The rest of Tears in the Club is instrumental, aside from the snatches of sampled vocals that Kingdom has long favored in his tracks, and the mix of formats renders the album a somewhat inconsistent listen.- Spin
- Posted Feb 27, 2017
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Why Love Now is reserved in its sonic experimentation. But for a band as sharp and capable as this one, that’s not really a problem. Beneath the acerbic jokes, Korvette is a humane and considerate writer and performer.- Spin
- Posted Feb 24, 2017
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FUTURE is lively and engaging, with production and rapping that feels consciously animated.- Spin
- Posted Feb 22, 2017
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A conduit for sound at its most expressive potential, No Home of the Mind squeezes all it can from the five-person form into something warm and full and unprecedented.- Spin
- Posted Feb 17, 2017
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The contrast between his interiority and the sturdiness of his compositions is striking. So, too, is the contrast between this album and Heartbreaker, his lauded solo debut. Ranking breakup records is a ghoul’s errand; suffice to say that loss was Heartbreaker’s fuel. Here, it’s turned to fumes.- Spin
- Posted Feb 17, 2017
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A generous, pacifistic record about the dynamics of friendship and the grace of listening--both, however coincidentally, apt palliatives for a tense, hostile global moment.- Spin
- Posted Feb 16, 2017
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Doing away with his human human voice entirely in favor of an android’s syrupy drawl would seem like a logical next step for Sakamoto’s music, and it’s tempting to wonder what Love If Possible would sound like if he’d further indulged his more experimental tendencies.- Spin
- Posted Feb 14, 2017
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Like Joni Mitchell’s spare 1976 masterpiece Hejira, Not Even Happiness is a lonesome travel album par excellence: a document of transience and half-formed inspiration, reveling in riddles and paradox rather than firm conclusions.- Spin
- Posted Feb 7, 2017
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Though it runs just 33 minutes, Tourist in this Town feels like a road trip movie, a scrapbook of mixed emotions compiled from postcard-sized travel diary entries.- Spin
- Posted Feb 3, 2017
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He’s separated from some of his R&B peers, fellows who douse themselves with sorrow and express their angst through detached, self-centered screeds obsessed with how things should be. Sampha, meanwhile, has an uncanny ability to eloquently express the painful facts of life that we learn to internalize. ... What makes Process exceptional is its delicate focus on relationships corroded and fissured by time and unintentional neglect.- Spin
- Posted Feb 3, 2017
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A distinctly contemporary album that is in conversation with trendy, critically acclaimed R&B.- Spin
- Posted Feb 2, 2017
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If you gauge artistic success by innovation, you can just filter the best of Culture, a very decent group of Migos songs, into a playlist. But if you appreciate Migos and the sound they ushered into contemporary rap as being one of the genre’s most basic, essential natural resources, it will be easier to let the whole album--a drama of perseverance--ride out.- Spin
- Posted Jan 30, 2017
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While Ty Segall may not be his opus, but it’s certainly a testament to his fruitful brain and the unparalleled output that spills forth from it--a mind on a marathon, yet to stumble.- Spin
- Posted Jan 30, 2017
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In a genre where “authenticity” is supposedly located in stripped-down effortless amateurism, Priests is at their most authentic when they’re using performance to challenge themselves and their audience.- Spin
- Posted Jan 27, 2017
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Japandroids fans will be happy to know that Near to the Wild Heart of Life is a Japandroids album, pushed to 11 even in the quiet moments: towering riffs played on maxed-out amps, drums hit with due diligence, big whoa-oh harmonies, passionate, evocative rock n’ roll songwriting about girls and alcohol.- Spin
- Posted Jan 27, 2017
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Here, they’ve crafted a shag and wood-grained interior as remarkably indebted to its predecessors as it is now warm and full and huge.- Spin
- Posted Jan 20, 2017
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I See You is still distinctly and deeply an xx album, but in the gap between albums the group has found a way to move unmistakably forward while still sounding like themselves.- Spin
- Posted Jan 13, 2017
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Their sound is still thrilling, but it’s an album made by men who have watched lives crumble despite willful rebellion and are picking up the pieces to continue fighting, even as the cycle is doomed to repeat itself.- Spin
- Posted Jan 4, 2017
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Not the Actual Events is probably the grimiest Nine Inch Nails release since The Fragile. Rather than running the gamut between overdriven steamrolling and receding, glitchy ambience as on most of the work Reznor loosed between 1994 and 2008, the EP realizes a specific, portentous mood from several equivalent angles.- Spin
- Posted Jan 3, 2017
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That combination of bottled passion and efficiency spreads itself evenly through the 11-track set.- Spin
- Posted Dec 5, 2016
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