Spin's Scores
- Music
For 4,260 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: 3,058 out of 4260
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Mixed: 1,147 out of 4260
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Negative: 55 out of 4260
4260
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
Sonically velveteen the whole way through, it’s certainly a comforting album, though Gonzalez’s efforts to capture the commanding, immediate quality of the music of her influences feel, overall, a little too cautious.- Spin
- Posted May 10, 2017
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No Shape is Hadreas’ longest album yet, and even moreso than its predecessor, it feels like a complete conceptual project. Taken as a whole, it’s a real thicket, imbued with the innocence and horror of fairy tale.- Spin
- Posted May 5, 2017
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- Critic Score
Ultimately, the curiosity of the song selection helps Best Troubador feel like a more thoughtful and earnest tribute. Sometimes the two men’s disparate sensibilities find an appealing point of overlap.- Spin
- Posted May 4, 2017
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- Spin
- Posted May 4, 2017
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- Critic Score
The narrative structure of nighttime reveries can often feel unsettling, but throughout Slowdive, the band use foggy images and slippery transitions as a soothing sort of déjà vu--you feel like you’ve been here before, even though you obviously haven’t.- Spin
- Posted May 3, 2017
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The rhythm sections and synths have been crafted with a newfound appreciation for sound, but with unexpected, childlike curiosity. The lyrics retain a relatable amount of simplicity, yet they also portray an intimate exploration of self-worth and image.- Spin
- Posted May 1, 2017
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- Critic Score
Her pop hits remain enjoyable, but what makes Feist’s albums hold up is the unexpected. Pleasure perhaps asks more of the listener than her first two records did, but really, the best pleasures do.- Spin
- Posted Apr 28, 2017
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- Critic Score
His most concise, transportive record to date. The keys to Consciousness’ triumph: fewer songs, fewer vocals, way, way more gorgeous guitar work.- Spin
- Posted Apr 27, 2017
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- Spin
- Posted Apr 27, 2017
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- Critic Score
Consistent with his acclaimed “New History Warfare” series, it captures a human arpeggiator reconstituting post-minimalism, jazz, and metal in growling, moaning pieces with far more syncopated parts--percussion, bass, melody, harmony--than one guy recording without overdubs should rightfully account for.- Spin
- Posted Apr 26, 2017
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A couple of the drone bagatelles, though masterfully realized, break Gas’s signature hypnosis and could be mistaken for any number of Kompakt artists rather than being unmistakably his. But at best, Narkopop faithfully upgrades Gas’s murky fundamentals to HD.- Spin
- Posted Apr 20, 2017
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Forging modern myth and cryptic missives into something as immediate and accessible as this is no small feat. Almost 25 years on, Ulver has crafted the best entry point for their catalog–a dramatic pop saga impossible to deny.- Spin
- Posted Apr 20, 2017
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- Critic Score
File it [“NVRLND”], and the rest of 2016 Atomized, with the band’s impressive collection of non-album treasures.- Spin
- Posted Apr 20, 2017
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- Critic Score
AZD quickly and wonderfully makes clear that neither retirement nor creative exhaustion is in the cards quite yet for Actress.- Spin
- Posted Apr 18, 2017
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- Critic Score
Kendrick is at his best when he’s rapping through the abyss, and better when his flow pulls in rappers from times past.- Spin
- Posted Apr 17, 2017
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- Critic Score
All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ manages to find a balance between necessary gravity and inviting wistfulness. The message can be preachy, but the pace is conversational.- Spin
- Posted Apr 10, 2017
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- Critic Score
Peeling back the density and obtuseness of Xen and Mutant, Arca is his most engaging, emotionally draining and confrontational album to date.- Spin
- Posted Apr 6, 2017
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- Critic Score
The album presses pause on Holter and her band at an uncomfortable moment of transience--when their relationship to these years-old songs is clearly comfortable but also mildly antagonistic. However, they still manage to bring out the richest valences of Holter’s pristine and eccentric songs, and more than ever before, communicate her incredible skill as a passionate, intuitive, and controlled performer.- Spin
- Posted Apr 5, 2017
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- Critic Score
Triplicate is not a shining hour for Dylan when put into the full context of his fifty-plus-year career. But nonetheless, his insuppressible spirit is baked into every moonstruck moment.- Spin
- Posted Mar 31, 2017
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- Critic Score
The failure to evoke anything specific is what gives Silver Eye its aloof, Bond-theme posture, but in another light, it’s alienating.- Spin
- Posted Mar 30, 2017
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- Critic Score
The result is a satisfying if not uneven release that never drags in its lament, looking toward the next ballad lost among the chaos. Richly produced fuzzed-face guitars and clattering percussion accentuate the band’s classic noise-pop formula without ever feeling staid.- Spin
- Posted Mar 28, 2017
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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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- Critic Score
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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- Critic Score
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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- Critic Score
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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- Critic Score
Where Turn Into’s multilayered arrangements sometimes felt scrunched, Everybody Works blossoms.- Spin
- Posted Mar 14, 2017
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- Critic Score
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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- Critic Score
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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