Dusted Magazine's Scores

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For 3,271 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 42% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 Ys
Lowest review score: 0 Rain In England
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,655 out of 3271
  2. Mixed: 581 out of 3271
  3. Negative: 35 out of 3271
3271 music reviews
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Toxic City Music
    Taken individually, the album’s 10 vignettes suffer slightly from a lack of individual cohesion, their structures incorporating mostly several short, seemingly miscellaneous scraps. Yet over the course of several listens, Toxic City Music does provide some sort of overall flow, its slippery patterns serving as auditory snapshots of dank irradiated zones and heat realm communities quarantined in an airless isolation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hard Quartet
    The Hard Quartet is one of my favorite recordings of the year, a strong collection of songs made by established artists who refuse to be hemmed in by anyone’s expectations.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vivian Girls
    Though far from perfect, they flit by in an instant, all washes of trebly guitars and nervous vocals that leave enough heartwarming traces to warrant subsequent returns.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
    For a band whose promise has often outdone their execution, All of a Sudden is their most complex, accomplished and well thought out record.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Give the People What They Want
    The now-well-established ensemble pulls off a notable twofer with Give the People What They Want. It’s made a full-length album that hangs together as a distinct whole, and it’s also written a collection of unique songs that stands tall as an example of what still makes the genre vital.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Different Forest
    That this focuses entirely on the unadorned piano may feel like a step down from those who embrace his more adventurous works. The instrumental chops heard here, though, stand on their own very well, and reveal another side to Hauschka’s music — and, perhaps, create some ambiguity as to where he might head from here.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With Trampled By Turtles
    With Trampled by Turtles is indeed closer in the sense that these are verse/chorus/verse songs largely performed by acoustic instruments. Anyone familiar with the sometimes-bluegrass, wide-reaching folk band Trampled by Turtles might guess, though, it still doesn’t sound much like Low. And the record is better for that.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Animated Violence Mild
    It’s another high point in an increasingly strong discography, one that demands more than just mild praise.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Exai
    Maybe a bit more editing could have given it more coherence. At the same time, there are no duff tracks, and a lot of fascinating moments.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Regifted Light
    The darkness of gender dysmorphia may indeed be vast, but given the right illuminating gift, Baby Dee proves there's still light nonetheless--even for hir own chamber music.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cosmic Lieder
    More accurately, these duo performances are truly sympathetic and move at the molecular level, making each piece on Cosmic Lieder wonderfully dense with information and ideas.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Libraries
    It remains delightfully messy and is all the more viscerally resonant.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There Is a Bomb in Gilead
    A Bomb in Gilead, assisted by several garage vets (Tim Kerr, Lynn Bridges, Jim Diamond), captures that live sound and goes it one better, uncovering unexpected depth, soul and intelligence in a set of boot-stomping songs.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jura
    In short, it’s a one-off that makes accidental magic, bringing disparate talents into temporary alignment without blunting their differences. If it’s a reality show, then it’s one that works and one in which no one should get voted off the island.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Snake Pit
    Mandel, of course, steals the show: it’s an eight-track statement for him to make, and he has plenty to say.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Alligator Bride
    With The Alligator Bride, more than previous Howlin’ Rain albums, the breadth of the band’s scope shines in streaming color.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Horizon
    The songs often seem made up of sharp, conflicting parts, that come together at angles, fitting into the spaces left by one another.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rose Golden Doorways
    Rose Golden Doorways is an astonishing experience, uncompromising in its willingness to map extremes of ethereal quiet and the physicality of sound, played without fear by musicians drilling deep into an ugly core to extract beauty and return to share their findings with those who would care to listen.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get On Board
    You could spend a lot of time thinking about why these songs and what Terry and McGhee meant in their own time and what they mean now, but the songs are pure visceral experiences that you feel in your gut and your heart.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Perpetual Now
    The album is warmly, insistently, alive. Its music makes no grand gestures but offers generosity and compassion in its connective tissue.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    1991
    Ultimately, the songs have a provisional quality, provocatively lovely but elusive and unfinished. If you love shoegaze or the Drop Nineteens or both, though, this is well worth checking out.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Abyss
    The spell is strong enough that you can’t help but follow.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One Hundredfold Now In This Age
    A lot about One Hundredfold reflects its unsettling time and place, with its gleaming technological surfaces, its machine-like precision and its invocation of rot and threat and corruption. If we ever get through this period, we may not want to hear it again, but for now, it’s a mirror to what’s around us.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Silver Age
    Silver Age is a very good album, one that recalls, in all the right ways, Mould's best post-Hüsker work, and in particular his Copper Blue.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oneiric Formulary
    It’s strange to encounter an album that is so deeply weird and disjointed, and yet feels polished and made with the utmost craft. The result is otherworldly, and plays like a soundtrack to a moody and impressionistic film.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Going Down in History
    Going Down in History is a visceral, gut-thumping, pretty-close-to-live album one of whose main themes is astonishment at being alive, still, inexplicably.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tournament Of Hearts
    What makes the Constantines appealing, then, is not that they do something totally new but rather that they do something familiar very well.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan
    It’s definitely a more expansive palette, and not entirely to my taste, but I’ll defend any artist who takes a chance like this.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Still Life
    Though much of the album is aggressive in its tempos, the mood continues to circle around to the pensive, moving from catharsis to solemnity and back again. Or, to put it another way, it’s a map of a mind that doesn’t feel self-indulgent.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Salt River
    He never makes an overt argument that these things belong together, or are parts of a whole (even a whole as nebulous and encompassing as the human experience), or should be taken as equally important, or that all the good and bad therein are equally a vital part of life. He simply does it, and for another 43 minutes the world feels like it makes a little more sense.
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