For 566 reviews, this publication has graded:
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51% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.3 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score: | I Like to Keep Myself in Pain | |
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Lowest review score: | Graffiti |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 456 out of 566
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Mixed: 97 out of 566
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Negative: 13 out of 566
566
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
DBT sounds like it’s just getting re-started on its 12th studio album, “The Unraveling” (ATO). ... Even better are the songs that describe the emotional toll behind those headline-making, stomach-churning issues.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jan 31, 2020
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Torres takes over production and plays most of the instruments on her fourth studio album, “Silver Tongue” (Merge). It was a good call, her strengths as a songwriter, singer and musician fully realized.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jan 28, 2020
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Some of the shaggy verve of old has been sacrificed, and the latter half of the album lacks the emotional specificity of Alex’s best work. A few quieter acoustic tracks, augmented by understated strings and horns, echo the singer’s work in his alter-ego project, Quiet Slang, and provide some welcome textural variety.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jan 10, 2020
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Overall, though, the songs don’t measure up. ... And it’s clear why. The master songwriter simply ran out of time.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Nov 22, 2019
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“Our Pathetic Age” addresses big topics — social media alienation, nefarious government oppression, the suppression of individuality — but refuses to knuckle under. By breaking sounds loose from the strictures of time and genre, DJ Shadow implies that the music still runs free.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Nov 15, 2019
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Songs melt into one another without losing their identities. Kiwanuka’s narrators drift through a world torn by violence and racism and find purpose. His voice remains plaintive, understated, deeply textured, but there’s a resolve that wasn’t as evident on his earlier work.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Nov 4, 2019
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The gospel-singer moments (the stirring intro to “God Is”) and the verses by the Clips’ Pusha T and No Malice on “Use This Gospel” provide most of the musical sparks, with West allowing message to trump musicality. ... Otherwise, this sounds like a walk-through to West’s next destination, a tentative step that feels neither accomplished nor particularly memorable.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 25, 2019
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Though Battles might be viewed from a distance as a potentially daunting listen, “Juice B Crypts” provides multi-faceted kicks, whether on the dance floor, through the headphones, or riding, screaming with joy, on a rollercoaster.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 18, 2019
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It distills what has made Trupa Trupa a must-see in past years at music conferences such as South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 9, 2019
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The album plays like an extended mood piece that bends and drifts, with a shortage of the crushing hard-rock crescendos and riffs that defined the band’s work on “Lateralus” (2001) and before.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 9, 2019
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The voices and the hooks can’t easily be denied, and Shires injects some playful sassiness on “Don’t Call Me.” But the potential for what could’ve been a harder-hitting roadhouse-style album largely goes unrealized.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 9, 2019
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Things inevitably drift, but beneath the surface in the best songs there is a toughness and a newfound resilience.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 9, 2019
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At a distance, the album can feel like an ambient mood piece with some pretty moments rising from the mist. Listen closely, however, and something changes. The album becomes a meditation on pain and wonder, an apparent duality that Cave’s narrator turns into an acceptance of what it means to live.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 9, 2019
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Though it encompasses traditional elements, “Ode to Joy” falls on the quirkier side of the Wilco spectrum, an album that prizes subtlety and intimacy over immediacy and dynamics.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Oct 4, 2019
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Distortion-saturated guitars, synthesizers squealing like tea kettles and tribal drums give country tradition a swift kick in the back side. This carnage doesn’t belong to a genre, it’s more like a feeling: Side 2 of Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s “Rust Never Sleeps,” ZZ Top demos after three cases of Tequila in a Texas roadhouse, a hurricane.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 27, 2019
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Her solo debut, “Jaime” (ATO), breaks ground sonically and lyrically. It’s both more personal and daring, steeped in ‘60s and ‘70s soul-funk-R&B but with a rules-are-meant-to-be-broken twist.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 20, 2019
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A breezy immediacy wafts through “Dance Through It,” in which a woman steps through a minefield of turmoil, care-free as long as the music’s on. But the album’s vibe is best captured by “Under a Smile,” a slow-burn beauty in which a drifter finds solace in a world that seems to be unraveling. The gentle refrain builds, and one voice melts into a choir.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 13, 2019
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Even though the 33-minute album comes off as slight, Pop still manages to reaffirm his gift for integrating seemingly opposed impulses.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Sep 6, 2019
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The 10 tracks emerge from a web of interlocking melodies, with horns, strings, keyboards and guitar weaving counterpoint lines. It never feels overstuffed, because the rhythm section focuses on subtle swing rather than power.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 30, 2019
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His subject matter is explicit and personal, the album a song cycle brimming with ghosts – four siblings who died tragically young. ... He narrators in these songs are more like a collection of lost voices, including that of Saadiq himself.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 26, 2019
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An album where the filler and the nuggets struggle for supremacy. ... Yet even those indifferent to Swift’s charms since she emerged as a teen-pop hitmaker in 2006 would probably acknowledge that she’s got a knack for writing hooks, and there are plenty of them on “Lover.”- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 23, 2019
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Much of “The Center Won’t Hold” doesn’t sound like the old Sleater-Kinney, which is precisely the point. Brownstein and Tucker prefer to go charging into the future, but at the expense of some of the very attributes that made them so compelling in the first place.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Aug 16, 2019
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These songs conflate his newfound responsibilities as a husband and father with memories of childhood innocence, a mix that humanizes the rapper even as his career transcends music.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jul 26, 2019
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There are a couple of less-inspired contributions, notably the glossy country-pop “You’re My Love,” which Kenny Rogers recorded in 1986. But the overriding impression is wonderment: Prince was on such a roll that he was giving away tracks that could’ve provided the backbone for at least another terrific album of his own during this era, music that ranges from the funk mischief of “Jungle Love” to the falsetto tenderness of “Baby, You’re a Trip.”- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jun 28, 2019
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Help Us Stranger brims with unapologetic rock songs that mine ‘60s and ‘70s signifiers without getting stuck there. Yet it’s the ballads that give the album its unexpected emotional heft.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jun 21, 2019
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The large-scale orchestrations rarely complement the mood. Instead, they barge in, a river of syrup that drowns the sense of betrayal in “Stones,” gushes through “The Wayfarer” and inspires some of Springsteen’s most egregious Gene Pitney-style over-emoting in “Sundown” and the disastrously overdone “There Goes My Miracle.”- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jun 14, 2019
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Their largely instrumental compositions, for all their technical prowess, have always been visceral, less about conjuring air-guitar solos than melodies you can hum a week after hearing them. They double down on that approach on “Nighttime Stories.”- Chicago Tribune
- Posted Jun 7, 2019
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The arrangements only rarely bring out the drama in these interactions. The intimacy becomes wearying, with spoken-word interludes, interstitial pieces and hushed vocals stretching the 16 songs to 64 minutes, an experiment in search of a direction. The most radical album of the National’s career is also its most disappointing.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted May 17, 2019
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Just like these artists [poet Nikki Giovanni, singer Eartha Kitt, blues legend Muddy Waters, funk rebel Betty Davis, jazz greats Miles Davis and Sun Ra, literary icons James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Octavia Butler, poet Sonia Sanchez, iconoclastic painter Basquiat] resisted being boxed in, so does Woods’ music. These are songs that elude genre--a blend of trip-hop, rap/spoken word, R&B, gospel.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted May 13, 2019
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It revels in pleasantness, peppered with quirky but cheerful touches that veil the mild unease expressed in the lyrics. In many ways, Father of the Bride sounds more like a singer-songwriter album centered on Vampire-in-chief Ezra Koenig rather than the interaction of a band.- Chicago Tribune
- Posted May 3, 2019
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