Blender's Scores
- Music
For 1,854 reviews, this publication has graded:
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39% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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58% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.9 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 65
| Highest review score: | Together Through Life | |
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| Lowest review score: | Folker |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 957 out of 1854
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Mixed: 862 out of 1854
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Negative: 35 out of 1854
1854
music
reviews
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- By Critic Score
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Brand New took a huge step forward in 2003 with Deja Entendu, tossing away everything predictable about emo. But the leap on their third studio album is even bigger, and gutsier too: using rock’s earthly forces to amplify the heart’s greatest loves and fears, and in the process summoning the kind of grandeur that blows minds in bedrooms and raises fists in stadiums.- Blender
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They break their own rules, even adding expansive guitar solos, to keep themselves interested and fans off-balance. [May 2003, p.123]- Blender
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An intentionally ludicrous Eurotrash concept album about the sweet life. [Apr/May 2002, p.113]- Blender
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They're like the best party band at the best party you can imagine. [#11, p.130]- Blender
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He's more vehement than ever before, and the music feels rag-and-bone honest. [Sep 2004, p.136]- Blender
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El Guincho has only himself to get along with, but you'd never know it just listening to his album. [Dec 08/Jan 09, p.78]- Blender
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It's Li's confidence to stray that gives this album its depth. [Sep 2008, p.82]- Blender
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The weirdest hip-hop album since OutKast's Stankonia. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.112]- Blender
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While it can tend toward the tuneless, the upside is language that differs plenty from a Jay-Z or Eminem but stands beside them in terms of power--a flow that, once you get used to it, becomes its own form. [May 2006, p.110]- Blender
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The whiff of apocalypse is unmistakable. Yet the scent of wildflowers and lovers’ musk wins out.- Blender
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They still emphasize meditative atmosphere and near-whispered melody. [#10, p.120]- Blender
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With 81 chronologically ordered tracks... With the Lights Out can be a slog. But for Nirvana fans, it's also a necessary rite. [Jan/Feb 2005, p.119]- Blender
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Though she seems to be done with rapping, her hip-hop loops and restless genre-mixing still save her from vintage-dress purgatory. [Jan/Feb 2006, p.94]- Blender
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Rooty boasts a raw, bustling edge and compulsive experimentalism closer in spirit to the hypersyncopated, R&B-flavored two-step garage currently ruling London clubland. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.104]- Blender
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[They] channel post-adolescent despair into 10 groove-centric tracks that will gladden anyone who misses Play-era Moby. [#11, p.141]- Blender
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Classicism yields all the right stuff: alert sound with a lived-in feel, finely detailed tunes that shoot straight. [Aug 2004, p.140]- Blender
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Lavigne splices the angst of Alanis Morissette and the snarl of Courtney Love into a debut full of sunny guitar pop. [#8, p.115]- Blender
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Campbell and Millan use boy-girl harmonies to make a mockery of romance. [Jan 2004, p.109]- Blender
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[A] dense, inventive disc. [Oct 2005, p.134]- Blender
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The world's heaviest band turn out to have metal's lightest touch too. [Nov 2005, p.137]- Blender
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Fresh off his triumphant "Fishscale" series, the thinking-thug’s MC once again shows why he’s the alpha Wu-Tanger: palpable street authenticity, classic taste in R&B (Stax, Motown) and the breakneck rhyme virtuosity of hip-hop’s golden age.- Blender
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[Meiburg] applies this Audubon-ish enthusiasm to his songs, too, crafting a rich, occasionally macabre, fantasy world populated by starlings, gulls and solitary falconers.- Blender
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Not all connect, but a bonus disc, the soon-vanished 2002 full-length Nothing to Fear, compensates. Buy this before it vanishes, too.- Blender
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There are long, gloriously messy instrumental passages, and Coomes pulls off a bunch of swaggering guitar solos. [Oct 2003, p.126]- Blender
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The impact of M.I.A.'s music isn't in what she says, but how it arrives: in tracks so irritating they're irresistible. Anything but naive, M.I.A. brings a connoisseur's ear to her beats.- Blender
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Traces of Joni Mitchell, PJ Harvey, Björk and Cat Power are all proudly on display in the unpredictable arrangements and off-kilter emotions.- Blender
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Finally: bedroom music from a guy who seems to know his way around the bedroom. [Nov 2005, p.141]- Blender
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It's ghetto viciousness as literary exercise--an episode of The Wire with a better soundtrack. [Nov 2006, p.142]- Blender
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The eighth volume of the erractic and fancinating Bootleg Series, exhumes his unreleased music. [Nov 2008, p.80]- Blender
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Putnam lays fragile vocals and haunting piano melodies over tightly wound postpunk rhythms that add immediacy to lyrics about missed opportunities and broken relationships. [Dec 2005, p.151]- Blender
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From the orgiastic "We're All In Love" to the painfully mortal "Take a Good Look at My Good Looks," they're all clearly Dolls for life. [Aug 2006, p.113]- Blender
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Eighties punk-funk meets '60s idealism and reefer-toking? Make way for the hipster hippies. [#27, p.134]- Blender
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That it doesn't dissolve into kitsch and comedy is a tribute to Mika's gifts. [Apr 2007, p.118]- Blender
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The best song on Super Taranta! is all about one <i>bad</i> party: the disappointed, outright funny 'American Wedding. [Aug 2007, p.111]- Blender
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The big surprise on the 61-year-old’s follow-up isn’t her knockout voice--it’s the sympathetic backup provided by Lynyrd Skynyrd–worshippers Drive-By Truckers (whose guitarist, Patterson Hood, produced the record). The well-selected, never-obvious covers of songs by writers from Elton John to Willie Nelson are unflinching tales of struggle and survival.- Blender
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YYY cram their furious music full of twists and spasmic enthusiasm, filling every second with motion. [#8. p.127]- Blender
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Like a question 1970s double disc compacted into 45 brutally efficient minutes, it has the momentum of a meteor. [Aug 2006, p.108]- Blender
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New Moon sounds less like a pile of outtakes than an official album released in a parallel universe.- Blender
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Beyond Green’s wriggly, giggly, purring-to-screaming magnificence (as well as two smoking support vocals by young acolyte Anthony Hamilton), this is an album of intricate groove.- Blender
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They’ve upped the sonic oomph a notch, leaning on the piano, violin, xylophones and perfectly mangled Pavement-style guitar mess.- Blender
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The kind of boiling, roiling blues the Bad Seeds haven't cooked up in years. [Nov 2004, p.131]- Blender
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Artfully arranged songs about planets and beasts and bittersweet harmonies recall British folk-rock combos like Fairport Convention and Pentangle without coming off as retro or twee. [Jun 2006, p.137]- Blender
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Immediately transforms VHS or Beta from disco revivalists into one of rock's best new bands. [Oct 2004, p.130]- Blender
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Celebrity shines brightest when the group matures enough to forget about its image and focus on the tunes. [Aug/Sep 2001, p.126]- Blender
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A beautifully contained album, short in length and miniaturist in vision. [#14, p.135]- Blender
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The album's plush and detailed enough to invite extensive exploration, and varied enough to not get exhausting. [Oct 2005, p.135]- Blender
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No new fans need apply here, but those who know and love his sound will find that this self-styled career summation, a nod back to late Husker Du with computerized updates, sprouts horns with repeat listens. [Aug 2005, p.112]- Blender
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On [Takk...], the band opens up emotionally, warming up their lengthy jams to a slow burn to create intoxicating, meditative rock. [Oct 2005, p.143]- Blender
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If you buried Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks in a graveyard for 200 years and then dug it up, it would sound like this corroded, bottom-heavy music. [#11, p.134]- Blender
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B'Day never cools down, and swaety up-tempo numbers prove the best platform for Beyonce's rapperly phrasing and pipe-flaunting fireballs. [Sep 2006, p.138]- Blender
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Even if the high-minded concepts prove elusive, no worries. [Nov 2006, p.138]- Blender
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Most of the time he makes the profound sadness seem like the best party in either Nashville or Dublin. [Apr 2006, p.116]- Blender
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Though their restraint can be alienating, Steely Dan sound hungry, relevant and full of ideas. [#17, p.147]- Blender
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An acoustic jazz trio for the future: funny, imaginative and completely unbeholden to the traditions of the music. [#14, p.130]- Blender
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The songs change, but the sensibility remains the same, more or less: plaintive to mopey, clever to smartass, and back again. [Jul 2005, p.118]- Blender
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Folding in lean funk, tender arias and as many catchy tunes as West Side Story, Ze makes his cryptic polemic perfectly enticing. [Jul 2006, p.105]- Blender
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Rather than homogenizing his sources, Parton rubs them against each other. [Oct 2007, p.108]- Blender
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It's one big, horny wink--halfway between charming and totally sleazy. [Apr 2008, p.78]- Blender
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Swift has the personality and poise to make these songs hit as hard as gems like 'Tim McGraw' and 'Our Song' from her smash debut, and, once again, she wrote or cowrote them all.- Blender
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Parish brings out Harvey’s crazy, arty side, pushing to extremes as she works her long-established territory of sex and death.- Blender
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He's a full-fledged alternative auteur, skipping effortlessly from hypnotic electronics to refracted torch songs to balls-out alt-rock. [Aug 2003, p.134]- Blender
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Not since his debut has the Doggfather been any higher. [#12, p.155]- Blender
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Easily Kim's strongest work since her pheromone-thick 1996 debut. [Nov 2005, p.136]- Blender
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Slug pushes against the beat like he's afraid it'll pass by before he's done, returning to the challenges of coupledom. [Oct 2003, p.114]- Blender
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It nearly always feels fresh, the way a new flame does. [Dec 2004, p.132]- Blender
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Sheff straddles the line between precious and brilliant, warbling twisty, appositive-packed tales about life on the road and crumbled relationships over cranked-up, vaguely folkish rock riffs.- Blender
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Girls isn't as pop-friendly as 1998's From The Choirgirl Hotel, but Amos's take on Depeche Mode's starkly beautiful "Enjoy The Silence" is irresistible. [Aug/Sep 2001, p.120]- Blender
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THe result is like a cross between R.E.M. and Coldplay, but Idlewild show their true smarts by continuing to attack every track with youthful energy and passion. [Apr 2003, p.124]- Blender
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If the White Stripes gave up blues-rock for steroids, acid and death metal, they might sound something like this. [Apr 2003, p.124]- Blender
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His second solo album (which he dedicates to Pimp C, his partner in the pioneering Houston rap duo UGK who died of a codeine overdose last December) features blunts, ho's and Caddy-shaking beats galore--but also elegantly constructed takedowns of corrupt politicians, covetous ministers and crooked police.- Blender
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They go for punk rock at the most physical level, until their rhythms feel almost like a rave, as in the seven-minute 'Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came From an Angel).'- Blender
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The Mekons can do anything, because no one told them they couldn't, and they do it better than almost anyone else. [#9, p.152]- Blender
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Here, their frustration with scheming girlfriends and negligent boyfriends boils over into a cathartic froth. [Nov 2004, p.132]- Blender
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Even the loudest moments reverberate with warmth. Bridwell sounds determined to build a new world for himself, one gorgeous ballad at a time.- Blender
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Sets the gold standard for diva records in 2005. [May 2005, p.118]- Blender
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The introductory kiddie voice and opening guitar scrape establish this second album as White's show; mariachi-style brass fanfare, Appalachian-hoedown fiddling and plenty of Roman-candle solos soon follow. [June 2008, p.76]- Blender
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Unlike 2001's spare Essence, this album prickles with the lyrical details that make Williams's work exceptional. [#15, p.126]- Blender
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Though not as ambitious or original as the [White] Stripes at their best, the VB's indelible punk-rock blues parks a new car in the Motor City garage. [Apr 2004, p.136]- Blender
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Wake Up... is the set of inspired anthems they needed to deliver in '96. [Oct/Nov 2001, p.103]- Blender
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Tuneful, kinky and deeply rooted in groove--a combination that evokes the best of both Prince and Macy Gray. [Feb/Mar 2002, p.112]- Blender
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Is Under Rug Swept as good as Jagged Little Pill? Ultimately, no. [Feb/Mar 2002, p.108]- Blender
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The 808 features just 16 sounds, but Kanye works wonders with this limited palette, turning lo-fi kick drums into an austere artistic statement.- Blender
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While cliches abound... this huge music is delivered with panache. [#9, p.154]- Blender
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Unashamed candor often spells dreary self-indulgence. In Germano's insightful hands, it's fascinating and strangely exhilarating. [May 2003, p.119]- Blender