- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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Entertainment WeeklyThe year's best hard-rock album. [6 Sep 2002, p.86]
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This is one of the most accomplished, powerful, and entertaining hard rock albums ever made.
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Uncut[A] breathtaking, virtually flawless album. [Sep 2002, p.104]
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Say hello to your new metal gods.
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Queens Of The Stone Age are the greatest heavy rock band on the face of the planet and soon everyone will know it.
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'The Sky Is Fallin' is a beast.... 'God Is In The Radio' has got just such an awesome riff, like the Lord himself hotwired to a Marshall amp.
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The bottom line is that QOTSA turns in another genre-demolishing, hard-as-titanium album in Songs for the Deaf. This is not your father's metal. It's better.
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Whether or not Songs for the Deaf manages to break through to the ever-fickle TRL crowd remains to be seen; those people with the patience to sit through this remarkable album a few times, though, will know the score.
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MagnetThe playing is imaginative, the ideas vibrant and shimmering and the band's considerable melodic gifts sabotaged by either willfully obtuse compositional tricks or outright punk bratiness. [#55, p.84]
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An album that, for all of its flaws, is still easily one of the best rock records of 2002.
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Their world - sexual, drug-filled, and occasionally paranoid - has become progressively darker, and as such we find them nothing less than guardians of the rock flame.
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Musically and vocally, the band sounds tighter and more accomplished than ever.
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One of the heaviest rock albums since Seattle's heyday.
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BlenderWhile cliches abound... this huge music is delivered with panache. [#9, p.154]
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'Songs For The Deaf' is a triumph, a record forged with fire and sweat in the pits of Valhalla... It is the very essence of Rock.
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MojoAll the elements which made its predecessor so great are here, but in excelsis, and occasionally excess. [Sep 2002, p.95]
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Q MagazineMixes melancholy and might to a rare degree. [Sep 2002, p.104]
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All in all, this album has everything any hard rock fan would enjoy.
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When these guys are on, it truly is the wrath of the righteous. However, Songs for the Deaf vacillates constantly between soaring heights and mind-numbing lows, making for a true hit-or-miss affair.
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The real feel good "hit" of the summer.
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A balls-out, hateful, heavy, and catchy piece of work that rocks like it was 1994 all over again.
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Whether the ace metal is speedy or onerous (or both, as in the case of "Six Shooter," with its shrieking insanity), it is always deployed in the service of the eccentric song structures, and every track becomes a splendid, mysterious thing.
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[The opening] quartet of tunes blows the band's wad, leaving the rest of the album scattered with only moderately cool mid- tempo metal, all of it delivered with gusto but not enough serious hooks to make anything stand out.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 406 out of 441
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Mixed: 16 out of 441
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Negative: 19 out of 441
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Jan 15, 2011
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Aug 11, 2010
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Dec 9, 2014