Drowned In Sound's Scores

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For 4,812 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 It Won't Be Like This All the Time
Lowest review score: 0 BE
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,477 out of 4812
  2. Mixed: 1,220 out of 4812
  3. Negative: 115 out of 4812
4812 music reviews
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Thing
    Ultimately Thing is an album that exceeds expectations, not to mention revealing new trajectories with every subsequent listen. Whether a heavy indulger or casual fan of electronically based music, it's hard to envisage a better record than Thing emerging from any of its sub-genres this year.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Every Valley
    Every Valley is certainly an important and timely record, but happily it's also an extremely satisfying and moving one. While it may not have the obvious scope of their breakthrough record The Race for Space it has something important to tell us about the times we live in and the hard, heartbreaking lessons we should all be learning from the past.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Marauder
    Treat it like a work-of-art, you might be moved to see shapes too. Treat it like a comeback album, and you might find you miss the point. Open your minds, your ears, your energy--and it will show you incredible sights.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Punish, Honey
    It’s broodingly mechanic, and yet harrowingly human; it’s truly Bristolian, and neither futuristic nor nostalgic; it’s simply and unignorably now.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Somewhere Beautiful [Live]
    In the final assessment what we’ve got here are a set of pop songs that are almost uniformly brilliant, captured in a fashion that harks back to the band’s beginnings, presented beautifully and with pride.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    This Gift
    Look beneath the surface sheen, then, and you'll see gratefully receive This Gift as the best, most complete, Sons And Daughters long-player to date.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Arm's Way
    It is a towering, complex achievement and startling progression to boot.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse
    That music so majestically restrained in pace can make your heart beat so quickly is a testament to The Besnard Lakes’ focus and ability to coat each millisecond of track time with an utterly captivating sound without ever becoming clogged up with their myriad ideas.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The New Life
    If Cathal Cully's aim was to leave the past behind then he's succeeded resoundingly, and created one of this year's most ungainly beautiful records in the process.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hit Reset
    Practically every moment of Hit Reset feels as important as it is brilliant. With the possible exception of 'Time Is Up' (a perfectly good song, just not up to the standard of the rest of the album), it feels damn near flawless.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010
    We could go on about how great this compilation really is until the cows come home, the Thurston Moore sampling 'Heaven's On Fire' possibly explaining why such documents as Passive Aggressive are essentially vital in rock and roll's present transitional phase.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    LP1
    Confidently frail and hesitant, LP1 is a refreshing reaction to, and a calm assault upon, the unfathomably fast-paced total noise of the current age.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wind In The Wires
    It’s what Bright Eyes coulda done if he put the songs off I’m Wide Awake onto the canvas of Digital Ash.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Treats
    Stripping away all of the surrounding noise, it allows Krauss to bring her dizzyingly sweet voice to the fore, showing that Sleigh Bells are not just a one trick pony and that these songs work on more than just the basis that they are great at shaking windows.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ritual Spirit [EP]
    Ritual Spirit tantalises with the promise of a staggering force should the next LP surface soon.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Joy As an Act of Resistance
    Joy As An Act Of Resistance is everything anyone could have wanted or expected it to be: Idles have released the most relevant and at times gut wrenching album of the year.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Me Moan
    Me Moan is a remarkable record that takes a genre rooted in formulae and clichés--country--and spins it into something fresh, compelling and edgy. A stunning follow up.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Peanut Butter And Jelly Live At The Ginger Minge
    What makes Coachwhips bigger than the rock n'roll n'amphetamines and extreme petting that inevitably gets etched on them is sheer, dirty, bone-corroding, untamed noise.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Salutations
    It’s the sound of a gifted songwriter comfortable with his craft and in his own skin, offering glinting new facets to earlier sounds and the songs present on Ruminations, and it makes for a subtle, yet striking departure from everything that came before.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Positive Rage
    We’ve been the Hold Steady, and You’ve been the Hold Steady, he says predictably... but for once, on a live-recording, you didn’t have to be there.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tomorrow's Harvest
    These 17 vignettes glow with Cold War paranoia, picking up where Threads, the most scarring piece of TV ever made, left off. It might also be the duo’s most accomplished album yet--and that’s coming from someone unable to remove the Hi Scores LP from his stereo.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Veronica Falls
    For an album with no discernible weak links--we'll deduct a mark simply because half these songs were previously available--the final quarter is where Veronica Falls finds itself elevated alongside 2011's best.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    More Than Any Other Day
    Steeped in the postpunk aesthetic, a well-established rock style that nonetheless remains richer and deeper than any other in formal possibilities, this is a deceptively complex record that conflates doubt and optimism while at surface remaining aggressively articulate.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Peepers
    We can speculate as to how their ethos and focus was developed from time spent in the company of other imaginative musicians – it could well be essential to their consistent evolution – but the evidence on Peepers leaves no doubt as to how successful this union of education and expression is.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Half Smiles Of The Decomposed
    One of the highlights of their career.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Double Negative
    It is an astonishing album, cohesive but wide ranging, sometimes presenting Low as they were, more often seeing the trio forge on until guitars dissolve, words dissolve, flesh dissolves and everything becomes pure light.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Veckatimest
    Really, the only fault of this record is that its most arrestingly beautiful minute is its final one: everything that comes before, however brilliant it is at the time, pales once that choir swells, just for a few too-fleeting seconds.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ghettoville
    R.I.P. suggesting a fitting final ceremony, where Ghettoville evokes Actress driven over the abyss, As an obituary, however, it’s a fittingly emotional, opaque and confounding conclusion for a project that has been an outlier amongst a scene of outliers from its inception.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction
    A Bureaucratic Desire For Extra-Capsular Extraction is yet more proof that Earth were, and indeed still are, vitally different to so much of what's come before them, after them and even surrounded them.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Go
    What's really satisfying about Go is the way the soaring architecture of symphonic hipster du jour Nico Muhly's compositional work looms just as large on the more effervescent numbers as it does in these quieter spots - it really drawing everything together into a wonderfully coherent whole, despite the record's ever-shifting tides and Birgisson's violently affecting knack for distilling every emotion known to humanity into a single echoing chord change.
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