For 4,084 reviews, this publication has graded:
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67% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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30% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 76
Highest review score: | Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [50th Anniversary Edition Deluxe Version] | |
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Lowest review score: | Songs From Black Mountain |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 3,648 out of 4084
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Mixed: 400 out of 4084
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Negative: 36 out of 4084
4084
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
Fans may feel it’s more of a long slog than they remember, with the slower tempo stretching many of the songs beyond their natural length, and the spoken word passages lending a languorous quality that may induce drowsiness.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Oct 6, 2023
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Rice, singing [on "Light Industry"] about “Bennie and the Jets and dreary weekend sex,” plays perfectly into the song’s hesitant mood. It’s the one moment on Gulp! where his audible exhaustion fits, a song that makes you wonder what the rest of the album would have be like if only the band could translate Rice’s weariness into something more suited to their strengths. Instead, Sports Team take a swing with Gulp! and barely make contact.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Sep 23, 2022
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Entering Heaven Alive is seldom actively bad, but the most interesting component of either of White’s 2022 albums is that, well, there are two of them.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Jul 18, 2022
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The third disc, annoyingly titled Kid Amnesiae, starts off promisingly enough with a straight piano version of “Like Spinning Plates.” ... Only four of the 12 tracks here stretch past four minutes, with the majority of them clocking in at under two. That would be excusable if these leftovers revealed anything about what it must have been like to be in the room while making a pair of classic albums.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Nov 4, 2021
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It is an album that would make Tenacious D roll their eyes and make metal fans scratch their heads.- Paste Magazine
- Posted May 6, 2021
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By track four, a whimsical-by-numbers reverie called “Dinosaurs on the Mountain,” American Head starts to fall off an American cliff. The tempos are slow enough to deflate even Coyne’s considerable charm, and the record’s rootsy, pastoral spin on the Lips’ sound is undermined by the band’s maximalist production ethos. Nearly every song is overstuffed with queasy synth textures and sleek, digitized strings, and Coyne can’t resist warping his vocals in a grab-bag of ugly processors.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Sep 10, 2020
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The chillwave movement has always channeled nostalgia—warm echoes of a distant past, faded and warped into a new aesthetic. Purple Noon, though, mostly just elicits nostalgia for the glory days of chillwave itself.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Aug 13, 2020
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Where A Brief Inquiry… excelled due to its exceptional pop songwriting and well-calculated sonic departures, Notes… is far too ambitious and self-aware (“Will I live and die in a band?”) for its own good.- Paste Magazine
- Posted May 20, 2020
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Making a Door Less Open isn’t as memorable as its predecessors on its own: Toledo’s vision as a whole never feels truly fleshed out, representing the first legitimate misfire in the career of one of this generation’s most talented indie-rock songwriters.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Apr 30, 2020
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Uneasy Laughter is fine. It’d be much better if it was either divorced from ruminations on honesty, or if the band actually managed to define themselves without leaning on ’80s nostalgia.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Mar 23, 2020
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Where these two songs [“Darkseid” and “4ÆM”] burst with fervor, Miss_Anthropocene’s other tracks often stumble and limp.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Feb 21, 2020
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It’s a record in total lust and fealty to Hailey; you’ll probably want to duck out to use the bathroom halfway through.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Feb 18, 2020
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An album that needs a bit more of its own personality, but it’s sung with the confidence of someone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Jan 31, 2020
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Sitting through a slogging collage of beats for 40 minutes before ever hearing a verse is no easy task. It would be one thing if these tracks had a common theme holding them together, but there’s no central voice to bind one to the next. ... The only thing that will keep listeners pressing on is the star-studded back half of the record. The incredible amount of talent Shadow recruited is exciting.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Nov 22, 2019
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- Critic Score
High points feel scattered among a patchwork of pillowy piano tunes, conspicuous genre experiments and politically charged trial balloons. There are good things and not-so-good things here, but there is no cohesion in the overall work. Closer Than Together doesn’t hang together as a whole.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Oct 14, 2019
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Even the bright spots in the album’s composition—the off-beat piano cascades in “Death By A Thousand Cuts” and the pulsating synth of “Cruel Summer” (thank you, St. Vincent) are particular standouts—are overshadowed by the musical anticlimax on most tracks, especially on “The Archer.”- Paste Magazine
- Posted Aug 27, 2019
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What’s disappointing about A Fine Mess is not just that the songs are unremarkable but also that they don’t deviate from the band’s usual approach in any notable way. There are no oddball experiments here, no genre strays, no real risks to speak of. There are just five more songs that sound a lot like Interpol, for fans for whom that is always enough.- Paste Magazine
- Posted May 20, 2019
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Throughout Father of the Bride, a record with half-baked political commentary (“Something’s happening in the country / And the government’s to blame”) and lazy wordplay (“All I do is lose but baby / All I want’s to win”), it feels as if Koenig turned away from what made his band so great in the first place, instead electing to adopt a sound that doesn’t necessarily fit him, one that comes off as derivative and frequently boring.- Paste Magazine
- Posted May 3, 2019
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Not everything has to be pure pop, but nothing else on Brutalism even comes close to sounding like a complete song the way [“Body Chemistry”] does.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Apr 3, 2019
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Other artists, such as Florence and the Machine are creating better, more interesting music with the same techniques. Seek them out instead of wasting your time on this one.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Mar 4, 2019
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The end result is an incredibly inoffensive album, one that’s perfectly lovely without offering any striking new ideas or features that make it memorable.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Feb 11, 2019
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The whole album sounds like it was recorded to be played in an H&M. It’s bland and forgettable, fuzzed with a faux-depth like an Instagram filter.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Jan 28, 2019
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Sometimes Romano manages to pull off an unexpected success: a repeating thinly strummed acoustic guitar chord and quavering vocals at the start of “Empty Husk” eventually build to a catharsis of overdriven electric guitars and a vibrant melody. More often, though, these tunes just idle.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Dec 10, 2018
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It’s a recipe for Joyce Manor at their slickest power pop yet, even as it lacks the narrative depth we’re used to.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Sep 25, 2018
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Tatum and his collaborators nailed the sounds, but they don’t come close to finding tunes that resonate.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Aug 31, 2018
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Dawes’ latest may well sound fresh and new, or at least vaguely soulful, if you don’t know it’s a retread, but Passwords is all too easy to crack, and what’s inside isn’t really worth protecting when others have been doing it all better for decades.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Jun 25, 2018
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The two started jamming together and the songs evolved organically. Before the duo knew it, they had an album’s worth of songs. And that’s basically what the album sounds like--two guys of a certain age doing stuff they think is really cool that only winds up being cool to guys of a certain age.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Jun 14, 2018
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With no dramatic tension, pathos or even story arc, these songs are little more than piles of slack words from an artist who has confused saying whatever comes to mind with having something to say.- Paste Magazine
- Posted May 11, 2018
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It’s not terrible, it’s mostly pleasant to listen to, it’s beautifully produced and it’s easy to recognize the skill it takes to craft their saintly, synth-driven sound. But when you couple a critical reputation like theirs with the band’s own claim of making a big artistic jump, mostly pleasant to listen to shouldn’t cut it.- Paste Magazine
- Posted May 11, 2018
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- Critic Score
This time, there are a couple of solid songs surrounded on all sides by wandering experiments which never quite form into a whole.- Paste Magazine
- Posted Apr 19, 2018
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