Spin's Scores
- Music
For 4,260 reviews, this publication has graded:
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50% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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47% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.6 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: | To Pimp A Butterfly | |
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Lowest review score: | They Were Wrong, So We Drowned |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 3,058 out of 4260
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Mixed: 1,147 out of 4260
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Negative: 55 out of 4260
4260
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
Its smug, unexplored sense of intellectual superiority is pretty much all it has to offer. Musically, it’s an hourlong misallocation of the considerable resources that made a nu-metal minor classic out of 2000’s Mer de Noms.- Spin
- Posted Apr 25, 2018
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- Spin
- Posted Apr 24, 2018
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- Critic Score
Sparrow transcends its own tastefulness, and odds are excellent you’ll find it gorgeous.- Spin
- Posted Apr 24, 2018
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- Critic Score
It’s a commendable effort, with Cole putting himself in a creative territory to respond to critics, peers and progeny. His messages are timely despite the fact that they continue, rather than conclude, a larger conversation.- Spin
- Posted Apr 23, 2018
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- Spin
- Posted Apr 18, 2018
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- Critic Score
Invasion of Privacy is a cohesive piece of work that demands to be heard in full, from front to back, side to side, on the pole and on the stove.- Spin
- Posted Apr 17, 2018
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- Critic Score
“Outer Acid” remains uncanny in its mix of blissful keys and menacing acid squiggles and “Spy” diffuses some dubby harmonica into Heard’s atmospheres. “Inner Acid” returns to the squelchy acid house Heard made back in the ‘80s and the knocking beat and bells of “Nodyahed” suggest that he can still make a dancefloor quake.- Spin
- Posted Apr 16, 2018
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America presents the most contemporary, Top 40-friendly version of Thirty Seconds to Mars to date. Bombastic drums and guitars have largely been replaced with fairly tame looped and programmed beats and ominous synths, basically reimagining Thirty Seconds to Mars as the glossy grungetronica of Imagine Dragons. Leto still screams like a banshee, but for once the sounds backing him don’t match his fury.- Spin
- Posted Apr 13, 2018
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Expectations is an insistent but uneven album that points toward greater musical ambitions than it achieves. The sound is pleasantly aquatic and soft-edged but fussy and overwrought, as though its architects were worried that too much downtime might spur listeners to click away.- Spin
- Posted Apr 12, 2018
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By balancing on the tightrope between meme and icon, between relatable and aspirational, Ephorize emerges sounding remarkably human.- Spin
- Posted Apr 11, 2018
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- Critic Score
The richness of the music occasions her best vocal performances to date. The arrangements are airy with distance and light, but their architecture is boldly drawn: the basslines thick and taut, the arpeggios whirring and spangled, the guitars unfurling in a glossy neon cursive.- Spin
- Posted Apr 11, 2018
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The best you could say for Lil Xan is that he can be serviceable: “Saved by the Bell” and “Shine Hard” are catchy enough, and at least fully-formed ideas. The album may be bad but it is not especially so. It’s paint by numbers and as such blends in with everything else. You might hear it at an Urban Outfitters and confuse it for three other recent rap albums you’ve heard.- Spin
- Posted Apr 10, 2018
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Freer of their influences, Hop Along have produced a stunning batch of songs--each of them like a small world of its own, continuously unfolding.- Spin
- Posted Apr 6, 2018
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- Critic Score
Here’s hoping The Tree Of Forgiveness is not either an incidental or deliberate farewell. If it must be, at least it’s both a suitably goofy celebration of his career and a dignified capstone.- Spin
- Posted Apr 5, 2018
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Kinetic and thrilling as the uptempo blasts are, where Your Queen shines is on the slower pieces, revealing that Hutchings can purr, murmur and wax lyrical as well.- Spin
- Posted Apr 2, 2018
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- Critic Score
The production retreats into his comfort zone. But it is also really just a breakup album, and a really mopey one at that.- Spin
- Posted Apr 2, 2018
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- Critic Score
Where she once had a compelling songwriting portfolio, here she has a compelling mood. That mood’s best described as “content.” ... It’s not a belting voice, but it’s a remarkable instrument, capable of imbuing with winsome empathy songs.- Spin
- Posted Mar 30, 2018
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McMahon’s most transcendent statement yet. ... Freedom rings as both immediate and timeless, intensely personal and easily understood. ... Freedom exalts in subtlety. It offers powerfully economical songwriting.- Spin
- Posted Mar 29, 2018
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- Critic Score
Braxton’s tunes here rarely warrant her gusto, and the coupling of virtuoso performances with rather mediocre material squares with Sex & Cigarettes’s larger theme of the dissatisfaction that results from pouring one’s heart into an undeserving relationship. It’s a depressing album, but not quite in the way that’s intended.- Spin
- Posted Mar 28, 2018
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- Critic Score
The results don’t resemble the King’s hits nearly as much as Prince’s demos.- Spin
- Posted Mar 23, 2018
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These are well-loved songs that Ndegeocello loves a little bit more, singing them with a rich, warm tone (she’s never sounded better) and backed by a band who know how to anticipate every bob and weave she might make. It’s one of her best.- Spin
- Posted Mar 22, 2018
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- Spin
- Posted Mar 20, 2018
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- Critic Score
There are glimmers of melodic gems--but that’s all they prove to be, sagging beneath the weight of these overstuffed songs.- Spin
- Posted Mar 20, 2018
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The Breeders’ there/not there qualities are such that unacquainted listeners will imagine what the band sounds like and they’d be right. Expedient and necessary, All Nerve is what we need now, next week, in 2023.- Spin
- Posted Mar 20, 2018
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Though firmly planted on the dancefloor, Record is for sunshine and joy the way 2008 masterpiece Out of the Woods was for moody rain and 2010 chamber-pop charmer Love and Its Opposite for snug wood paneling. But for all its color and vim, it’s also a brave, grave survey--emotionally if not always factually autobiographical--of Thorn’s relationship to London, her family, and her own heart.- Spin
- Posted Mar 19, 2018
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Less deadpan and more florid than its predecessor, Now Only is heartrending in new, different ways. Sonically, the record doesn’t stray far from Mount Eerie’s elemental standard operating procedures, where meandering, nylon-strung acoustic strum or heavy metal thunder underlie Elverum’s streams of consciousness.- Spin
- Posted Mar 19, 2018
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There’s something more filigreed at work: a thoughtfulness about the band’s mannered chaos as though they’ve come out on the far end of some mass realization.- Spin
- Posted Mar 19, 2018
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It’s Georgia Maq’s raw-edged vocals you’ll remember, and the consistency of the musical canvas opens space for her to work. Her lyrics articulate human entanglements with a lack of sentimentality that belies how much she cares, and like Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan, she has a gift for evoking shame hand-in-hand with fury.- Spin
- Posted Mar 19, 2018
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Despite these moments [“NBA YoungBoat” and “66”], it’s disheartening that virtually every lyric from Yachty on Lil Boat 2 is wholly unmemorable.- Spin
- Posted Mar 16, 2018
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It’s no more mixtape-like than anything else they’ve done, but Drift feels unusually scattered despite its lean runtime.- Spin
- Posted Mar 13, 2018
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