No Ripcord's Scores

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For 2,825 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 43% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Strawberry Jam
Lowest review score: 0 Scream
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,983 out of 2825
  2. Mixed: 765 out of 2825
  3. Negative: 77 out of 2825
2825 music reviews
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shine A Light
    There is a monumental feeling of strength and courage in their music that is impossible to deny.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fetch
    An album whose imagination is fortified and enlivened by the limitlessness of punk rock and musical experimentation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Norm
    What's most impressive is there's not a moment wasted in these twelve satisfying tracks, beginning and ending the narrative with a contemplation that also achieves the difficult task of feeling complete.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Laughter's Fifth
    One of the best rock albums of the past twenty-five years.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sonic Nurse
    Sonic Nurse could be the best guitar rock album since, well, Murray St.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Strawberry Jam
    Strawberry Jam, 2007’s strongest album so far.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Skeleton Tree
    Ultimately, Skeleton Tree is the sound of feeling and not expressing sorrow.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Magdalene
    It’s beautiful, inventive, catchy, heartbreaking, addictive, and bursting at the seams with ideas. It captures a performer truly at the top of their game, throwing everything into a project so that not one second is wasted. It’s a record that makes you fall in love with music again, a record you feel privileged to experience and a record that imparts fundamental human truths.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Merriweather Post Pavilion
    MPP had aura to burn long before most of us heard it, but now those of us who have heard it and do love it know that this music will not be content to stand idle on the margins of tuneless hype. Time may very well lend Merriweather Post Pavilion a legend extraordinary enough to faithfully capture its myriad treasures.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light, Vol. 2
    Overall, this album contains some of the most original and hypnotically brilliant rock music ever recorded.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Metals
    Ultimately, what it all boils down to is that, as much as an album can be, it's pretty damn close to being flawless; not only matching the quality of The Reminder but actually bettering it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pretty In Black
    It takes an album like Pretty in Black to make you realise the life affirming power of great pop music.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Begone Dull Care
    It’s a record that takes a little patience and a little effort but when given the proper attention it will become like that one album from when you were young that just won’t leave your iPod.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Seer
    The Seer is 30 years' worth of effort, a unique and exciting height earned after decades of creation, experimentation and unconventional musical disassembly.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What's Going On [40th Anniversary Edition]
    What's Going On is not only a remarkable album, but an opportunity to discover a seminal artist at the peak of his powers; an insight into a true modern genius of pop music.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Monitor
    Titus Andronicus have created an album that will grip the listener, carry them along on a tide of spit and blood and youthful aggression, and leave them dazed and exhausted at the end, with no other option but to start the record all over again.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Neon Bible
    The music is beautiful, spiritual, intense, fun and, as Lester Bangs once called the Clash, righteous.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Halcyon Digest
    Halcyon Digest goes by like a breeze, and when it's finished there's nothing better to do than play it again.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Now We Can See
    Now We Can See is very much a record about vision, death, disease, perspective, and, er, turning into a fish (?) but its great expressive anchor is the elated desperation that gives punk both its wickedness and its promise.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Remind Me Tomorrow
    It’s her grandest and greatest evolution yet.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light, Vol. 1
    Most of all, I'd like to list Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light: 1 amongst the ever-expanding and illustrious list of rock n' roll's most important albums.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Pimp A Butterfly
    It’s precisely those confrontational lyrics that make To Pimp A Butterfly an unforgettable album.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Turn Out the Lights
    These are songs that you feel more than listen to. Everyone has encountered some sort of mental illness, addiction or crisis of faith, whether in your life or another’s. Not only does Baker prove that you’re not alone, but she finds a way to make it better.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Saint Dymphna
    Saint Dymphna is truly Gang Gang Dance and no-one else and for that they should be applauded; creating and defining your own sound is a challenge these days that many bands prefer to shirk.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Primary Colours
    The Horrors instead set out to redefine the band and its purpose, their second album an exciting result.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Plastic Beach
    The whole thing works beautifully, more with each listen.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The SMiLE Sessions
    The SMiLE Sessions is a superior version, its sound undeniably belonging to its era and the true brilliance of Wilson's compositions seeming to shine a tad truer.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    One Armed Bandit
    Ultimately, this is what more bands should be striving to achieve: to thrill us, inspire us and confuse us - often all at the same time; to utiliize technology for the betterment of the whole rather than for technologies sake; and to allow multiple talents to merge and shine without a sense of the intrusion of personal ego.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nevermind [20th Anniversary Edition]
    The album is amazing. The reissue is amazing. The band is amazing.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This Is Happening
    This Is Happening is looking back on a life well lived and well learned, the final cap on a perfect career.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    I Am The Fun Blame Monster
    I can’t recommend this album strongly enough.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    AM
    This is perfection from a band at the absolute top of their game, but this by no means implies that they’ve peaked.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Moon Shaped Pool
    By taking various elements from not only their collective past, but also the work they've done separately, Radiohead has created something wholly new and utterly entrancing.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Rev
    It’s not simply an incremental improvement. It’s a quantum leap. As far as third albums go, it’s their Forever Changes, Summerteeth, and The Meadowlands rolled into one. It really is monumental. ... It truly is one for the ages.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This Is It & I Am It & You Are It & So Is That & He Is It & She Is It & It Is It & That Is That
    This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That, down to its mouthful of a title, is a fearless album, brought to fruition by a desire to push boundaries and explore sound.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pale Green Ghosts
    Throughout its running time, Pale Green Ghosts sees Grant ably balance a sense of humour with quietly devastating content.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Let England Shake
    Let England Shake may be Harvey's less vainglorious manifestation, but it is also her most intoxicating. Rather than exposing a personal voice, she exercises her political inquietudes with studied intellectualism.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Have One On Me
    Have One On Me is so enrapturing, so imaginative and so delicate, that it feels safe to say that in five or ten years time, you’ll go back to it and discover brand new things--whether they be the meaning of a song you’d never fathomed before or a simple amuse-bouche of a beautifully constructed oboe phrase.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lost Riots
    From the outset, it is clear that this album is a triumph.... An album of great beauty, potential and emotional involvement.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Cripple Crow
    This album is nothing short of a miracle.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters
    If you’ve yearned for a band that takes that dramatic indie-rock template but injects a bit of post-rock drama into it, then boy, have you ever come to the right place.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Island
    If you listen to it twenty times, you still find something new.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky
    My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is an advance for Swans, and Gira comes across as less of an eccentric noise-generator, and more of a presence that requires our attention.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Odds
    The Odds is excellent, because the odds are never against him.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I Need a New War
    Finn is operating at a whole new level of finesse here, and gifts us something truly beautiful.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Sufi And A Killer
    A Sufi and a Killer never, ever repeats itself. Gonjasufi’s beautiful, instantaneously classic voice is the glue that holds it all together. It’s captivating.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Kaputt
    Graceful, inviting, and evocative as ever, Dan Bejar's assembled the necessary parts for an early-year success.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Innocence is Kinky
    This mind-expanding record will inspire a more inexpressible connection: you will carve your own niche within its deep and absorbing textures, and you will find new things upon every listen.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    America
    America takes you on a long journey across busy city streets and somber countryside and while this expedition may be absolutely overwhelming at times, it's ultimately much worth the trip.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    King of the Beach
    Even though King Of The Beach marks a dramatic step forward in Williams' abilities as a songwriter, he's still the same lonely dude that can't keep his friends, can't get a girl, and can't catch a break. Except it seems like maybe this time he finally has.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cruise Your Illusion
    Cruise Your Illusion doesn't disappoint; what the Washington four-piece have accomplished is as authentic as the influences that ooze from its fuzz, and warmer than an Arabian armpit.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Boxer
    With The Boxer, The National has not only crafted a contender for Album of the Year.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Drums Between the Bells
    If Small Craft on a Milk Sea was an installation piece in the museum of Brian Eno's career, requiring rapt attention to find meaning, Drums Between the Bells is modern art that immediately captures those witnessing it in a state of aesthetic arrest.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    High Violet
    The National's latest is easily up there with the very best indie-rock records of the year.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Let Me Do One More
    Let Me Do One More teeters betweens knowing jokiness and kindhearted vulnerability. And though she's shown these qualities before, Tudzin carries the weight of these emotions with a masterful command—embracing change and figuring things out as she fumbles along the way.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Semper Femina
    While Marling's lyrics come across as powerful and worldly, it's the conversational tone that makes Semper Femina work so well.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Local Business
    By removing much of their signature distant-sounding vocal filters, grand historical speeches, spacey drones, and tightly knit arrangements, Titus Andronicus has successfully eliminated any sonic barriers that once stood in between the band and their listeners.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Her Majesty The Decemberists
    A glorious triumph.... The Decemberists deserve to become your new favourite band.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    MM..Food
    Contains some of his most memorable moments to date.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Phedre
    It is eccentric and pulsating to the extreme and you exist within its boundless immortality drawing tirelessly from its muse.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The ArchAndroid
    For a first album, The ArchAndroid is astoundingly accomplished. It would be a lie to say there aren't a few lulls in the back end of the record as Monae begins to take fewer risks, but only the truly seminal albums can keep the quality level so high for over an hour.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Silent Alarm
    Sensitive enough to charm you, yet with songs hard enough and strong enough to keep you from getting bored, Silent Alarm is already a strong contender for debut album of the year.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Big To-Do
    The band still has the muscle to match its mileage.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning
    This is the best album of the year so far.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ruff Draft [Reissue]
    Picking highlights is futile; the record might run for less than twenty minutes but it burns brightly for the whole duration.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    St. Vincent
    That’s the wonder of St. Vincent. It’s a personal album that’s well-written enough to provide something we can all identify with.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Swing Lo Magellan
    The album is a melting pot of so many brilliant musical perspectives, which could only be channelled by a band with a gleeful, wide-eyed fascination with the possibilities of their music. And they succeed in their knowing but expertly-delivered goal: to sound like no other band out there.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    22, A Million
    These songs are chaotic, unexpected and jarring. Samples, vocoders, and shambling synths crash together in an unstructured soundscape. But if you listen through the anarchy, you will find a stirring, masterful odyssey.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Raising Sand
    This collection is simply a joy to listen to, with great singers lovingly rendering great songs with a talented producer at the helm.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Limbo, Panto
    Truly, Wild Beasts are those rarest of animals; true, untamed originals.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Kindred [EP]
    The most noticeable difference from his previous work is that the three are symphonic, they have parts, and those parts are distinct, either marked by a certain loop, bass ostinato, drone, or tempo.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Harrow and the Harvest
    A fully conceived album of beautifully crafted songs, and a real treat for fans and newcomers alike.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wild Smile
    Suckers make this stylistic smorgasbord indisputably their own.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Pinkerton (Deluxe Edition)
    This is their Holy Bible--in other words this is an unknown quantity alright; it's Weezer's raw, emotive bastard child; and a great, brilliant, titanic blot on an often pristinely laundered back catalogue. For that reason in particular this is a thing to be cherished.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Here and Nowhere Else
    Cloud Nothings might still be young and quite indebted to their 90’s influences, but their latest shows they’ve already mastered all the qualities of a truly great rock band and all of their contradictions: fury, angst, precision, sloppiness, catchiness and, of course, fun.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It Still Moves
    It Still Moves is the kind of album that can inspire both wonder and respect in equal measures.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bad as Me
    It's Waits' best album since Rain Dogs, and may possibly be even better than that--only time will tell, but it will be time well spent.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do
    With a confectionery of similarly colored assortments, The Idler Wheel... retrenches most of her past output, whether its wistful balladeering or sultry jazz, as a means of expelling a truly uncharacteristic voice.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wilderness Heart
    Wilderness Heart is probably the best new utilization of the Iommi/Page/Lynott grab bag you'll hear because, to put it simply, it's going to appeal to men AND women.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Buds
    With Buds, Ovlov prove once again, and perhaps more effectively than ever, that the alchemy of passion and songcraft is undeniable no matter where your devotion resides.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Face The Truth
    Face the Truth is probably the most eclectic of all Malkmus’s work. There are elements of every Pavement album in amongst the tracks, with familiar noodly guitar intros, shouty, jaunty refrains and languid deadpan-rap segments.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Old
    Old is all about developing the character of one very conflicted dude, and to me that’s its crowning achievement; it’s not his “split personalities” as much as the inner turmoils that fizz around within any complex character, but which you hardly ever hear so convincingly captured on a single record.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Admiral Fell Promises
    Admiral Fell Promises sits somewhere in the middle of being a series of musical pieces and being an album. It's brave, but Kozelek's grace and musical deftness means he never risks alienating his audiences and makes Admiral Fell Promises another essential addition to Kozelek's remarkable catalogue.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    ...Like Clockwork
    ...Like Clockwork is easily the best release from the band since Songs for the Deaf.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    2020
    The result is an album of uncompromising vulnerability and rawness.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I Love You, Honeybear
    Tillman becomes one of the great diarists of our generation in Honeybear, possessing a keen, merciless intelligence within a sophisticated melodic sensibility.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sometimes the Blues is Just a Passing Bird
    In many ways, his music is more punk than punk music is nowadays-stripped down completely to only the most basic and bare of instruments, the tiny Kristian Matsson manages to live up to his name as The Tallest Man on Earth.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Putrifiers II
    An exceptional piece of psychedelic garage rock that never stays in the same place yet manages to still feel consistent as a whole, making this album a true standout amongst Thee Oh Sees' vast discography.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ocean Roar
    Elverum has created an album that demands your time and attention, not to mention any memories you may be willing to part with.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sunbather
    Sunbather needs not to be judged as black metal, post metal, or any other subgenre, but simply as heavy music--loud, visceral, beautiful heavy music.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tomorrow's Harvest
    Tomorrow’s Harvest, the duo’s latest, is a perfect reminder of how well these two can bring their unique aesthetic to life through music.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Electric Lady
    Janelle Monáe has not simply lived up to our expectations here; she has shattered them, delivering a confident, creative, and enormously entertaining record that marginally betters her sublime debut.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
    Set My Heart on Fire Immediately isn’t a perfect album. There are a couple of wormholes that Hadreas gets lost down and the sequencing causes a slightly jilted second half, but once these songs nestle in, they’re impossible to shift.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Take Them On, On Your Own
    Anyone with any vague taste in good music needs to own this album, right now.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Torres
    For a debut album from a gal who can’t even legally rent a car by herself, this is very impressive. She attracts to a wide audience, displays restraint and obscurity at appropriate times.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rhyton
    Rhyton simply play their music, unfettered by the constraints of tradition, structure or expectation, and it's that quality that makes their album such a thrilling experience.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Early Takes, Vol. 1
    A most personal and intimate collection of demos and early takes from George's personal archive of recordings which he left behind
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cave World
    Searing. ... Just when you think Viagra Boys have exhausted their ideas, outside of the surprisingly confessional ADD, Murphy and his cohorts crank up the energy one last time on Return of the Monke.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Say Yes to Love
    Perfect Pussy constantly find new ways to stimulate that teenage bit of your brain that wants to scream and punch things and has a lot of things to say but doesn’t know how to say them.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Girl With Fish
    That’s not to say Girl With Fish is an exclusively positive, agreeable record, though: “Steamroller, you fuck like you’re eating” is how Slocum opens the record’s best song, cutting through a maze of noise with a lackadaisical demeanor. It’s this balance that cues Feeble Little Horse up to be one of the biggest bands working in indie rock right now, especially if they keep making records as good as this one.
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