Blender's Scores
- Music
For 1,854 reviews, this publication has graded:
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39% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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58% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.8 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 65
Highest review score: | Together Through Life | |
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Lowest review score: | Folker |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 957 out of 1854
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Mixed: 862 out of 1854
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Negative: 35 out of 1854
1854
music
reviews
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- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
Backspacer is the bands most mature album to date and clocking in at just over 36 minutes, it is also their most condensed work; It’s as if Pearl Jam is channeling Ernest Hemingway, with not a wasted breath or note anywhere to be found.- Blender
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There are few high or low moments--which might put some listeners off--but texture and content, rather than pulse-raising histrionics, have always been Q-Tip specialties.- Blender
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Her second album is rowdier and less well-behaved, and thus better, although the template is the same: breathy coos and lush strings intermittently blown apart by distorted guitar blasts.- Blender
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This album takes major steps beyond its predecessor, "Love Is Simple." It adds a streak of joyful African funk, with sputtery rhythms and guitar curlicues.- Blender
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Ever since he figured out how to write tough-buzzard songs, on his 1997 comeback Time Out of Mind, he’s been knocking them out of the park. This one leans hard on ready-made blues in the citified-country-ways style of Chess Records.- Blender
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You could roll your eyes and complain that these guys are still pimping teen angst in middle age, but really it sounds more like it’s matured into the longest-running mid-life crisis ever--30 years and counting.- Blender
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With this foulmouthed, backsliding rock, Hull and his flock do Dixie real proud.- Blender
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The fourth disc from her Toronto foursome Metric adds brawn, finesse and grandeur to their new-wave drive and Morse-code guitar scrapes.- Blender
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Aubert’s dude-sings-like-a-lady tenor conjures false hope for a relationship he knows is doomed. SSPU salute misery as a kind of ideal, the opposite of love but just as beautiful.- Blender
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Pragmatically exploiting his sure tune sense, his saving falsetto and a command of the political facts well exceeding that of Living With War, he’s turned out the first great protest album of the new dispensation.- Blender
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Junior Boys’ immaculate synth-pop comes with a heartsick afterburn, even such unrobotic elements as a wandering saxophone or gentle acoustic guitar.- Blender
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On their fourth record, the tempos are slower, the guitars thick and meaty, the rants kinda melodic, the thoughts impressionistic.- Blender
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It’s Blitz! is the sound of a band reborn with new momentum, and on an album that requires dancing, the message is clear: It doesn’t matter where you came from. Just keep moving.- Blender
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Parish brings out Harvey’s crazy, arty side, pushing to extremes as she works her long-established territory of sex and death.- Blender
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The sound matches lyrics about isolation and despair, achieving a freeze-dried catchiness in the opening songs. But by the end of the album, cleverness gives way to the bleak and the drab.- Blender
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Their final album is no solemn headstone. The languid beats are hazy with heat-distortion organs and porny electric guitars; the spirit is carefree.- Blender
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The diversity isn't as effortless, but the pushier, poppier beats dislodge A&M from their polite safety zone. [Apr 2009, p.58]- Blender
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Andersson’s lyrics are often tricky to make out--can she really be singing, “We talk about love/We talk about dishwasher tablets”?—but almost every song incorporates shrewd production details, like the clog-dance percussion that kicks 'I’m Not Done' forward.- Blender
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He's a master of sweaty hyperventilation, but it's his less frenzied moments--the techno equivalent of circular breathing--that keep the party from collapse. [Apr 2009, p.59]- Blender
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Through it all, the machines sound as juicily alive as the human beings. [Apr 2009, p.63]- Blender
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Mastodon present a prog-metal concept that would make Stephen Hawking bang his head.- Blender
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She's been kicking around the industry a few years--she cowrote Britney's 'Gimmee More'--but she still comes across as fresh on her long-delayed debut.- Blender
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The sound quality is appropriately assy, and guitarist Ira Kaplan has fun playing a pissed-off leather-jacket pimplehead. But Yo La’s gentle side naturally peeks out.- Blender
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His new take scythes through the original, revealing growls and guitars long obscured—sometimes it’s distracting, but often it lends the songs a newfound jolt.- Blender
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Lush and languorous, velvet-robe decadent and soft-focus steamy, Histoire is a make-out record and a gross-out record.- Blender
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Scored with ramshackle grandeur by scribbly guitars, fat horns, poignant keyboards and ragtag sing-alongs, Benaim’s lyrics narrate the anxieties and optimisms of New York City’s young, educated and underemployed.- Blender
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Over skeletal guitar and drums, An Horse balance scruffy musicianship with offbeat melodic beauty as Cooper narrates the day-to-day drama of a flailing relationship.- Blender
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On her third album, Clarkson finds a Third Way: She makes nice with the pop machine and takes back the mall while keeping her integrity and personality intact.- Blender
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Face Control is a small triumph of intoxicating claustrophobia, full of crumbling, poignant melodies spurred along by thecold, unfeeling whip-crack of a cheap drum machine.- Blender
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