Pitchfork's Scores
- Music
For 11,995 reviews, this publication has graded:
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41% higher than the average critic
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6% same as the average critic
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53% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.9 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: | Sign O' the Times [Deluxe Edition] | |
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Lowest review score: | nyc ghosts & flowers |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 9,811 out of 11995
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Mixed: 1,877 out of 11995
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Negative: 307 out of 11995
11995
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
As good as it often is, Mowed Sound reinforces what, in retrospect, has been Nance’s conundrum all along: He remains the clerk across the record store counter, gushing about all the things he loves without being able to tell you the one he likes best, the one he would forever commit to calling his own.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 22, 2024
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On Blu Wav, Grandaddy’s first album in seven years, Lytle leans into bittersweet Americana twang, a natural fit for his fatally flawed, cautiously optimistic cast of characters.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 21, 2024
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As a synergistic mythmaking effort, the album is certainly doing its job; as music to soundtrack your actual life, well, it’s about time lute pop got its shine.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 21, 2024
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While a few songs here could be Chromeo canon, Adult Contemporary too often feels like a glossy recreation of their earlier sound that’s missing the idiosyncrasy and baked-in humor.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 21, 2024
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Nothing in contemporary music sounds quite like it, yet it seems to have always been with us, hovering just outside the realm of possibility.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 20, 2024
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None of these modes are new—you might hear echoes of the Ramones’ brash vintage punk, PJ Harvey’s spare 4-track demos, or Jeff Rosenstock’s radically optimistic pop-punk—but Grace comfortably inhabits each.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 20, 2024
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These songs are not as impassioned or ornate as “cherubim” or “four ethers,” but serpentwithfeet hasn’t lost his bite.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 20, 2024
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He plays with fewer frills than he did on Uneasy—but his fantastic instincts make the consistency of his beats another motor behind the record’s forward locomotion.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 16, 2024
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Cohen’s songs can sound loose and jammy on a first listen. The delicate strummed figure that kicks off opener “Milk” quickly refracts into pinwheeling dual leads—both played by Cohen, uncannily evoking a live performance—before the band settles into a groove, anchored by Evan Backer’s sensitive bass playing and Daniel Swire’s crisp drums (Evan Burrows plays drums on two other tracks).- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 16, 2024
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On TANGK, Idles smooth their rougher edges as they explore love in all of its facets—it would be their warmest and most melodic record to date, if only Talbot could get out of his own way.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 16, 2024
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On their second album, Harm’s Way, McGreevy and fellow guitarist Lewis don’t do much to upset their winning formula; they just execute it with more militaristic precision.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 15, 2024
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There is an uncanny, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and set dressing and sound design just so, but you can’t shake the nagging sense that there is no center, just a clot of references without a referent.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 15, 2024
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For all its audible stitched-togetherness, there’s value in hearing the entrails of Sonic Youth’s anarcho-apparatus spark into place, one by one.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 14, 2024
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Coming Home is full of delectable singles that prove Usher is still the king of pop-R&B—he’s simply reminding his fans what he can do, how many ways he can do it, and how nastily, too, if you’ll allow him.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 14, 2024
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Every song here, even the slow stuff, feels giant and propulsive—a grand celestial tour of rock and R&B, guided by one of the few singers and multi-instrumentalists with the range and intuition to pull it off.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 13, 2024
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Diaz’s voice is resonant and emotionally rich—sometimes pleading, sometimes dejected, sometimes a gentle whisper and occasionally a powerful belt—and her ear for melody is exquisite, filling her songs with crisp, memorable hooks. This combination helps make even her broadest gestures, like the waltzing breakup ballad “Don’t Do Me Good,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves, feel lived-in but not overworked.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 12, 2024
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There may be a lot of theory, artistic experimentation, and new forms of inquiry on this album, but typical of Lange’s work, it’s carried by pure beauty, the sort of diaphanous songwriting that makes the noise of everyday life fall away.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 9, 2024
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The clarity of her voice is most appropriate for this album, which encourages trusting yourself enough to surrender to uncertainty.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 9, 2024
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[The “Underdubbed” version is] not a finished product but a working mix, one that nevertheless captures how Wings interacted as a band. .... Paul McCartney is surely the driving spirit behind Band on the Run—it distills his gifts as well as any album could—but the peculiarly warm, loving camaraderie of Wings is the reason it’s endured over the decades.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 8, 2024
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You crave a little more wreckage in their wake—a more wanton relinquishing of control, perhaps—but their abundant debut more or less lets them have their cake and eat it.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 8, 2024
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Spiel is heavy but nimble, more direct in its arrangements and sentiments, but also moodier, more melancholy; it sounds like shoulders shrugged against a cold wind.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 6, 2024
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An unbowed creative spirit ran through Perry’s gloriously multifarious career; on King Perry he sounds frustratingly submissive, a passing supplicant in someone else’s court rather than a king on his throne.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 6, 2024
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Blue Raspberry proves that Kirby is particularly dialed in on these vicissitudes of intimacy. With a little fine-tuning, she could transcend.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 5, 2024
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The real difficulty lies in the fact that even if this is the most catastrophic heartbreak that’s ever happened to Herring, the band is content to write essentially some version of the same songs they’ve been writing for the past decade. They are good songs, but it’s almost impossible to draw any deeper meaning from Herring’s writing while it seems like the sequel of a sequel of a sequel.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 5, 2024
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I could say that the twisty guitar and vibraphone lines that envelop “Ultramarine” are like vines growing unpredictably over the song’s rigid scaffolding, or try a more literal approach, examining the way their increasingly dense chromaticism inflects and complicates the otherwise simple underlying harmonic structure. The poetic license of the first risks obscuring the music’s hard reality; the clinical distance of the second risks reducing it to bare formula. The truth, as ever with this beguiling album, is somewhere in between.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 2, 2024
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Across the 40-minute album, Hunter emerges as a dexterous player and loose but imaginative composer. Rather than succumbing to the often corny tropes of new age music—mawkish melodies, pan flutes, chimes—she cleverly incorporates elements of contemporary R&B, pop, and jazz.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 2, 2024
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Mascis has written so many songs about the same needs and frustrations—his failures to communicate, to be understood, and ultimately accepted—that they can’t help but bleed together. Still, the album’s light touch and content disposition make it a very easy listen, especially when Mascis leans into tenderness.- Pitchfork
- Posted Feb 1, 2024
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Continuing from Thirstier, Scott has traded the cynicism of her earlier work for sincerity, but that doesn’t mean she’s losing her edge.- Pitchfork
- Posted Jan 31, 2024
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It’s an ambitious, uncanny, joyously unpredictable album that invites you to get lost within its house-of-mirrors design.- Pitchfork
- Posted Jan 29, 2024
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After the debut’s big bang, Wall of Eyes connects the particles into somewhere you, and perhaps these restless musicians, might like to make a home.- Pitchfork
- Posted Jan 25, 2024
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