Record Collector's Scores

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For 2,550 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 51% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 74
Highest review score: 100 Doctrine Of Love
Lowest review score: 20 Relaxer
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,695 out of 2550
  2. Mixed: 849 out of 2550
  3. Negative: 6 out of 2550
2550 music reviews
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    What a Time to Be Alive
    This album bristles with anger, desperation and disbelief. Hopeful resilience is occasionally brought to the fore as well, and guest backing vocalists from acts including The Magnetic Fields are on hand to help Superchunk feel less adrift and alone.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Halfway Towards A Healing
    A thoughtful and subtle gem.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Messes
    Though Messes is a record full of heart, it doesn’t always hit there as powerfully as it could.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burning Cities
    As comeback records go, then, Burning Cities isn’t a bad album, but neither is it a particularly great one.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last Night All My Dreams Came True
    Not since The Smiths or Pulp had an indie band so keenly evoked and vivisected the spectacle of lubricious, learned masculinity at large. On this final hurrah, they sound like the last of a dying breed.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Could It Be Different?
    It all adds up to a bold celebration of difference that feels like an album made for these times of divisive unease.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Freedom's Goblin
    Segall is all over the place across these 19 tracks which are too much to absorb in one sitting, if ever. Most of his carefree pastiches, bonhomie homages and sloppy costume-party shenanigans merely induce a craving for the long-awaited studio comeback of the mighty Ween.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Full Circle Nightmare
    The leaping chorus of Exile Rag’s hysterical country-rock, Jon Spencer-ish juke-joint holler of Belmont (One Trick Pony), the Dylan-indebted Slice & Delta Queen and fell-off-a-barstool theatre of Fake Magic Angel are vivacious vagabond story-songs with vim and character to spare. A colourful cast of wayward angels and thrill-seeking beatniks populates their fringes vividly.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ruins
    Wherever you listen, Ruins pairs tough truths and tender melodies with tremendous expressive punch, from the piercing self-investigations of the title-track to Hem Of Her Dress, where heartache and rage merge with raucous honesty. Meanwhile, Nothing Has To Be True hews beauty from transformative circumstance.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Always Ascending
    So there’s verve, vigour, and more energy from the slightly revised line-up too, but it isn’t groundbreaking.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dream Wife
    Opener Let’s Make Out begins with 60s-style, chorused “whooos” before Mjöll (imagine Karen O with Björk vowels) urges us to have a snog, embracing you in a hook so strong you may well find strangers puckering up. That of the blissful, blistering Fire is even harder to escape, while Love Without Passion is a sweet hymn to a pure, non-sexual deep connection. Whatever their mood, Dream Wife are a band to fall for.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marble Skies
    What they do well, they do here in spades, and the new experiments come off as more than memorable.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Twin Fantasy
    This is no stop-gap, contract filler of a record but rather a perfectionist giving a great album the full workout it deserved.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Coffee
    The musical equivalent of a super-caffeinated espresso laced with Jack Daniels.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Widdershins
    Phillips’ melodies are solid and simplistically accessible, never swamping the lyric’s articulate message; protest songs have rarely been so polite in their persuasiveness.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Room Inside the World
    An album precision-pitched between angst and optimism, tension and release.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Damned Devotion
    Her sixth solo set steers her back to what she’s best at: exquisite, tenderly fraught torch-soul songs of compulsion and regret, where the lights are dimmed, the feelings run deep and the hushed elasticity of her voice commands close attention.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Transangelic Exodus
    Furman’s stories erupt in sunbursts of detail, lived-in and lividly imagined.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vol. 8
    Bardo Pond often shine brightest at their most long-form and Volume 8’s closing track is a case in point. The only conceivable criticism that could aimed at And I Will is that it winds down after just 17 short minutes.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Walk Between Worlds
    It’s still undeniably cinematic and heartfelt, but clearly the work of mature heads reflecting on excesses of their past.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Microshift
    [An] emotionally open and exploratory shapeshift.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Open Here
    The first thing that strikes you is an apposite openness of sound, achieved not just via thoughtful, spacious arrangements and due diligence at the mixing desk, but built into the compositions themselves, from the ground up. ... Is it too early to call 2018’s album of the year?
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Purgatory
    Purgatory is a formidable equal to the Southern states snapshots Steve Earle took on Copperhead Road, and the largely acoustic melodies and arrangements will have some listeners checking the sleeve to make sure they’re not playing a long lost record by The Band. Yes, the likes of Price and Simpson have returned country to impressive heights, and Childers has the weaponry in his arsenal to take it even higher.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Whatever It Takes
    From the heartfelt rhumba of I Don’t Wanna Be Without You and the title track – the perfect showstopper for the Harlem Square Club crowd--to Blisters, a captivating shuffle, and How Long, a going back to church blues, every song’s a winner.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Age of Absurdity
    Most of the stuff is catchy, with full-fat choruses on the excellent Dropping The Needle and Get On Your Knees, and while the rest of the album doesn’t push out any envelopes it offers up an energy-packed good time.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Official Body
    Produced by Edwyn Collins, it’s full of immediately infectious tracks that burrow deep into your head before working their way down to your limbs.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Passover
    Insular, yes, but in being laid bare it speaks with a strong purpose.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Like Fun
    Sonically, it boasts richer textures than recent albums, thanks largely to the pair’s expanded touring line-up playing a greater role in the studio; a more fleshed-out sound than the occasionally irritating minimalism of yore. Arguably, the decision to beef up the instrumentation is designed to bring heft to the lyrics’ serious topics, even though the band are, as ever, likely to be preaching to the choir.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Thread That Keeps Us
    While Calexico have been bridging their influences and styles for long enough to be able to take risks, never letting an overriding mission statement cloud an album’s quality, here the foot is ever so slightly let off the gas, and the breathing space allows gems to be uncovered.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Snares Like a Haircut
    A third of the way in, there’s a sequence of up-tempo dreampunk numbers harbouring brattier attitudes and melodies of a more generically slapdash nature, at which point this reviewer’s notebook became overly burdened with ditto marks. The quality picks up later with a couple of shimmering near-ballads. As far as power duos go, that’s not a bad ratio and it certainly beats those impotent hacks known as The Black Stripes or The White Keys or whatever they were called.
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