Dusted Magazine's Scores

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For 3,287 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: 2,670 out of 3287
  2. Mixed: 581 out of 3287
  3. Negative: 36 out of 3287
3287 music reviews
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    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Unraveling In Your Hands
    This one of the best releases of 2024 and one of the best in Blackshaw’s uniformly excellent catalog. Truly, well worth the wait.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Shaw Deal
    The team of Weitz and Shaw have a camaraderie and collaborative spirit that shine through in these recordings, and the individual tracks taken together reveal multiple facets of the pair’s friendship. Working apart, but spiritually together, these two reflect platonic love in musical form.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love You All Over Again
    These songs are gently, buoyantly lovely, littered with domestic imagery but canted into strange angles.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wish Defense
    FACS has been a monster band for a while. Wish Defense may be their best so far.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bad Fire
    The slow buildup provides a sense of valediction, with distorted layers reminding us of Mogwai’s love of volume, only to have a slow fade cap things off. The Bad Fire is a satisfying listen from disc to double disc.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seed of a Seed
    Seed of a Seed is a pretty record, and you can get lost in that but not for long. Heynderickx is always pulling you up short, interposing a clever line or a surprising sonic texture that upends expectations. A lot of folky, singer-songwriter records provide a bit of respite, but Seed of a Seed is too prickly and interesting for that.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
    It affords Van Etten the space to really lean into the role of frontwoman, at times reaching into an almost operatic register. It’s a dramatic and unexpected new chapter for an artist who is rarely less than compelling.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cowards
    The songs won’t grab you or pull your hair. They’re barely touching you. They won’t even acknowledge that you’re there. And yet, they can sink deep into your cortex over time, haunting you like the nightmares you can’t remember and the words you wanted to write down but that fade completely as you open your eyes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strawberry Hotel
    Whether it’s the lengthier, arpeggiating climaxes of “Gene Pool” or the shorter, more reflective burbles of “Burst of Laughter,” it feels like they haven’t lost a step.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Force Majeure
    The second-hand Buzzcocks reference hints at this bomb-throwing ensemble’s secret strength: the tunes. Even at its most abrasive and agitated, Delivery punches with hooks.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It​'s Getting Late (​...​And More Songs About Werewolves)
    Their 20th album, an absolute hoot of a disc that shows no signs of age or frailty.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Humanhood
    The album is lovely. The band as currently constituted has chops, and mixes highly polished songwriting and arrangements with select extemporizations.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Think of Mist
    Some of the songs feel like echoes of one another, such as “Diver” revisiting the water imagery of the opener, and short instrumental interludes “Made of Mist” and “Resolve” create an uninterrupted sense of flow. There’s an expansion of perception in “Night Picture,” which feels akin to Phil Elverum’s work as Mount Eerie.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ensoulment
    The mixture of the mundane and the otherworldly is powerful. The writing is exceptionally good. You probably forgot about The The (I did), but it’s time to take notice again.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Neon Gate
    Jamming is an intrinsic part of Nap Eyes’ aesthetic, but the songs that are tightened up provide welcome contrast. Neon Gate is a varied and satisfying recording.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Midwinter Swimmers
    The Innocence Mission delivers its tunes with an uncalculated freshness, still innocent, even now.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    we will be wherever the fires are lit
    If nothing else, it leaves you receptive for the bruised and ravaged beauty of “meet me under the ruins,” as radiant as a Jack Rose raga, and a fitting elegy for all that precedes it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Camelot
    As much as the songs with the band click, “Earthsong,” which features just voice and acoustic guitar, is moving. While I hope that she continues to make vibrant music with others, Jennifer Castle can reveal vulnerability, eloquence and imagination all by herself.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Way Out of Easy [Live]
    Parker gets plenty of cred for the production acumen he has exercised with Tortoise and the New Breed; his work with the ETA IVtet affirms his mastery of making music that feels and is felt in real time.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Songs of a Lost World
    The Cure emerged from the studio with a grand late-era statement, full of maturity and melancholy, but with an appropriate sort of wisdom.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Halo Moon
    It’s a languorous, barely moving, fever dream of sustained organ tones and ritual chants, but it creates its own world if you let it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Roses, My God
    The result is a record is suffused with grief without ever drowning in it (or, for the most part, addressing it directly in the lyrics even when you can parse them out).
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revelator
    Revelator is an exhausting listen in the best sense of the term. Skip at your own risk: Far from hip-hop homework, Elucid’s Revelator is a port of call in this storm, a howling document from the edge, muons in which we are all tomographers.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Depression in Heaven
    Even more than Luminol, No Depression in Heaven builds up such a heady and consistent ambience that you can relax into it like a warm bath.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Night Palace
    Now we have Mount Eerie’s 26-track, 81-minute Night Palace, which unites the many facets of Phil Elverum’s musical preoccupations into a raw, artful, sprawling double album. Unwieldy as it is, there are so many wonderful moments across the track list that it pays dividends to invest the time.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Title as of 13 February 2024, 28,340 Dead
    If G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! frequently felt like the massive, sweeping motions of some sort of gestalt entity, it’s fitting that things here feel fractured at times, if no less cohesive.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Crying Out of Things
    It’s awful and overwhelmingly loud — but there’s also a soaring quality to the melody that establishes itself amid the clangor and noise. That’s the curious, nearly undecidable quality in The Crying Out of Things. It’s full of ugly volume and rage. But there is a terrible beauty in many of the tracks, an affect that expands underneath the ugliness.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Space as an Instrument
    Atkinson, like other environmentally conscious composers such as John Luther Adams, Raven Chacon, and Liza Lim, creates an ecology when they create a piece, an environment they populate with sonic significations for their own meditation, and more so for our beleaguered world, its remaining beauty, and its tiny place in the universe. A favorite of 2024.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Acadia
    If the first third of the record was maybe a modernized version of County Records, and the middle third was Windham Hill, the final third is decidedly ECM territory, fusion with a folk twist, because that fingerstyle mastery is omnipresent. Hearing Williams’ fuzzed out lead on “Dream Lake” will send chills down your spine, it is completely inspirational musicianship.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Resuscitate! [Live]
    Callahan’s set may have erred on the heavy side of recent material (as much of this tour did), but he was even-handed in what he cut and ruthless in how he ordered what was left; only opener “First Bird” is left untouched in its original place. He would’ve been fine leaving the sequence as he played it, frankly, but Resuscitate! sharpens Callahan’s considerate cowboy demeanor even whilst songs expand in length and narrative moments stretch out in relatively small spaces, extending into stories that meander, convoluted and beautiful as any bedtime story.
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