Spin's Scores

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For 4,305 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 47% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf's Up Sessions 1969-1971
Lowest review score: 0 They Were Wrong, So We Drowned
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,099 out of 4305
  2. Mixed: 1,151 out of 4305
  3. Negative: 55 out of 4305
4305 music reviews
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Remember the Life Is Beautiful
    The albums ten tracks flow into each other as if conjured by the most sublime after-hours DJ. Atmospheric beatless expanses cascade unpredictably into crashing hi-hats just a track later, and it’s the most laid-back direct challenge to the banal 4/4 thump dominating dance floors since Japanese transplant DJ Sprinkles’ 2009 landmark intellectual deep house revival, Midtown 120 Blues.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Howl
    With compressed mechanical wheedles circling each other like birds on “Ghosting” and the self-explanatory “Morning Vox,” the machines pumping through Howl are the most organic you’ll hear all year.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mutant
    Mutant, even as it threatens to filibuster itself at over an hour long, feels like the album that Xen was meant to grow into, with every lesson that Vulnicura taught integrated at a molecular level.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Free TC
    The album is a dense, cinematic, always surprising and often moving album that sounds like it required the full three years that the L.A. crooner and producer spent chipping away at it to get right.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Purpose
    By giving us the best album of his career, and subsequently re-ascending to Top 40’s mountaintop, Bieber’s answered his own question: In pop music, it’s never too late to say you’re sorry.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Made in the A.M.
    1D’s swan song is hopelessly neither here nor there, appropriate to the drinking-age attention spans of an act whose solo careers beckon.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Slime Season 2 [Mixtape]
    Halloween’s Slime Season 2 serves as a companion piece that’s smoother, more skeletal, and, by most measures, superior.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Garden of Delete
    In making a record about growing up, Lopatin’s come out on the other side in one mutated piece.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. Misunderstood
    The ten songs that make up the surprise new Mr. Misunderstood are a step back from the arena-scaled grandeur Church has been trading in for the past several years. Many of the songs feel like scaled-down counterparts to some of the best tracks on The Outsiders.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE
    Rustie’s new album doesn’t signal a reclamation of maximalism as much as it’s a return to form, even if it’s likely that many of its themes were inspired by an acid trip more eye-opening for Whyte than necessarily for the rest of us. But what a trip.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Slime Season [Mixtape]
    The emotional arcs are just as fresh and just as gripping [as Barter 6], but here they’re confined to songs, and sometimes to single verses.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Heart Blanche
    It’s no surprise that the romantic tunes are shunted to the second half of the record. As they go, they go well.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    One
    The record’s biggest flaw might be that it stacks the stunning “Sun” and “Lights” as its first two tracks, setting a challenge to which the nine remaining ones can’t quite rise.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sold Out
    In spite of the giddy playfulness, it never comes off as a lark. You’ll get no closer to ascertaining his actual identity, but as the balance between jokes and earnest emoting narrows, Sold Out presents something of an abstract portrait of the man behind the haze.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Art Angels
    In her willingness to tread the line between the crushing flood of data and irrepressible pop hooks has created a record so undeniably of its time and place (that is, cyberspace) that it can’t be easily ignored.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Montage Of Heck: The Home Recordings
    Listening to the man find his voice is the only “thrill” here, as familiar (if hardly marquee-level) Nirvana staples like “Been a Son,” “Scoff,” “Sappy,” and “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” all appear sans finished lyrics, or sung in too-high or too-low range-testing cadences like a very bored kid performing for a live studio audience of stuffed animals.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nothing
    Even by Hyperdub’s standards--a 20-year lineage of beats birthed and incubated in London’s most soot-smeared corners (grime, dubstep) and Chicago’s windwept streets (footwork)--this is not a light record.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Delirium
    Finally, she’s embracing the responsibility to provide stone-cold tunes without pretense.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Storyteller
    That’s Storyteller as a whole: expertly arranged, dense without overwhelming the force of its captain.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Elaenia
    As Shepherd’s confidence grows in his compositions, he gives each element of the song enough time to stand on its own, without the bells and whistles of the Ensemble’s (slightly more) enormous orchestra.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sounds Good Feels Good
    5SOS finds a balance in their sound here that feels right for them, and ultimately the accurately titled Sounds Good Feels Good suggests there isn’t actually all that big of a gap between the boy band and pop-punk milieus, and probably never was.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Communion
    While he’s tugging at strings that have been otherwise picked up by the stable of Berlin’s PAN (M.E.S.H., Helm, and Visionist) or his Tri Angle labelmates past and present (Arca and Lotic), his extreme repetition of these familiar sounds pushes them euphoric.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces
    This isn’t quite your weird uncle’s Wolf Eyes, capable of clearing a den and ending the party in 30 seconds flat--but it’s a Wolf Eyes that’s still capable of scaring off half the guests. The other half will find a lot to love here.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    II
    If there’s a quibble with II, it’s that like most doubles, it would be more effective as a single disc.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us
    The album’s escapism is alarmingly potent, to the point where it verges into the downright delusional, but its lack of self-consciousness is--somewhat ironically--the thing that keeps it in check.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Divers
    Divers sets itself apart by expanding into new genres and replacing the whimsy of her earlier material with maturity and solemnity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pretend
    Pretend turns out to be an enticing fusion of her wintry, pop-paradise homeland, and the West African musical roots she picked up from her father, the late Maudo Sey, all tempered with raw empathy; her masterful pop-soul captures depressive moments and makes them soar.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Deeper than Sky
    Without truly breaking any paradigms, the well-respected veterans in VHÖL do all kinds of things well that evade heavier peers, never relying too hard on the math or surprises for a thrill. If anything, its 42 minutes fly by so smoothly you’re surprised to discover there wasn’t a hitch or even a dead spot.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thank Your Lucky Stars
    Beach House’s releases to date have come fogged by intoxicant, nostalgia, and hypoxia, but Thank Your Lucky Stars does what their work has begged for all along and wipes the dew from their rearview mirror. You’re going to like what you see.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    VEGA INTL. Night School
    Compared to the spontaneous hodgepodges of 2009’s Psychic Chasms or 2011’s Era Extraña, VEGA INTL. Night School is a far more intricately assembled product.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Documentary 2
    Some songs feel unfinished, especially on disc one. Much of the production on both halves is terribly derivative and some great samples get mangled.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Safe
    Despite the fact that Carnell appears on the cover of his own record drained of both pigment and life, this record’s full of both--moments of calm that justify the storm, peaceful lapping waves that follow the tempest.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Life
    His astounding new Life is even more songful, all the more impressive considering his claustrophobic medium that he gleans so many colorful variations from, à la Fetty Wap.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Are You Alone?
    This album should be met on its own terms; it’s willing to do the same for you.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Revival
    The album frequently slips back into forgettable genericism, and its back half is mediocre--but it’s also a strength. At its high points, Revival is marked by this lush, sphinx-like readinessss: as if, after a decade and a half of being nonstop front and center, Gomez has finally figured out what it means to center herself.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    35 MPH Town
    His 18th, the recently released LP is modern country-by-numbers that will satisfy the faithful and mosey on under the radar of anyone else.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fading Frontier
    Deerhunter’s inspiring and surprisingly triumphant seventh album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Where All Is Fled
    It demands attentive listening, only because it can so easily slip into the delirious wonders of foreign realms.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hallucinogen [EP]
    Kelela obviously doesn’t shy away from wearing her label’s signifiers, but on Hallucinogen she transcends them, the same way she outlasted lazy classification into PBR&B in 2013, swimming to the hazy surface of a new kind of future sex/love sounds.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Beach Music
    Alex G has always found power in the broken and uncertain. He’s just gotten a lot braver about spinning that chaos into beauty.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    V
    Somehow Williams is at his most charged-up and urgent when he’s at his bleakest, though you’d be hard-pressed to remember song titles here.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Why Choose
    At times, the very sonic repetition and minimalism that makes much of Why Choose so effective also hampers its output; the second half of the album especially feels monotonous and weighed down by its musical rigor. Yet Why Choose redeems itself with the brisk, mostly instrumental closing track.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Agent Intellect
    Few of the album’s 11 ensuing tracks are quite as barnstorming as “Devil,” but the album remains gigantic throughout.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Age of Transparency
    Age of Transparency is his best album yet.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Book of Souls
    Forty years down the line, Maiden has proven that they’re still the best metal band in the world; we never had any doubt, but The Book of Souls is one hell of a reminder.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Exhausting Fire
    With this new album, they finally sever those last few ties, and forge ahead into the retro future.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Women's Rights
    Women’s Rights has its share of more complex situations as well, not to mention the occasional fourth chord.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unbreakable
    The best thing about Unbreakable is that it proves Janet can still surprise us.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    New Bermuda
    New Bermuda both expands their range and sees them coming further into their own.... Bermuda is ace metal.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Holding Hands With Jamie
    The way the album veers between savage energy blasts and more deliberately paced displays of power is extraordinary.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fetty Wap
    He shows the consistency to scatter those songs throughout Fetty Wap’s 17 tracks and to mostly stick to the limited formula that made them hit as hard as they did on the rest of the record.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Caracal
    These are heftier tracks that, because of their added weight, move slower; and like any collection of thematically linked subwoofer-challenging, chart-charting songs, some feel a little Skyped-in--or at least tailored a little too much to their guiding spotlights.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dodge and Burn
    Where the strong Horehound and Cowards sounded interchangeably enough like other White projects, Dodge mostly does not.... Dodge and Burn is one of their greatest.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sexwitch
    Spell-casting pop and Twitter branding this is not; the excellent force of this album is how it taps into the sheer pain, anger, and sensuality of the idea of “the witch,” rather than its archetypal signifiers in pop culture.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Every Open Eye
    CHVRCHES aim for nothing less than maximum forward impact at all times. Beneath the ice-floe synths and Mayberry’s cool, collected belting is an anxious impulse to please.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Negative Feedback Resistor
    It’s disorienting, upsetting, and edges toward unlistenable in its brutalist structures. But it’s a reminder that even if claustrophobia’s an unpleasant feeling, it’s always a powerful one.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What A Time To Be Alive [Mixtape]
    What a Time to Be Alive is not the best album of 2015, but it is the album that best defines 2015 so far.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Honeymoon
    She fills the space with more intellectual depth than she’s shown before, incorporating T.S. Eliot’s apropos poem “Burnt Norton” as a space-age interlude. Ignoring the most offensively nonsensical of her lyrics (“Baby you’re so ghetto / You’re looking to score”), such a relatively monochrome album spans a breadth of cultural markers.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    B'lieve I'm Goin' Down
    B’lieve bears a much closer resemblance to Vile’s true breakout, 2011’s Smoke Ring for My Halo. But even though the late-night atmosphere carries over, the haze isn’t quite the same.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Persuasion [EP]
    On Persuasion, which came out in August, Blondes waste no time stripping three tracks to their most essential elements, decorating them with just scraps of tinsel.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Man Plans God Laughs
    The blunt-tipped guitar chop on the title tune, glassy music boxes and slurping synths of “Give Peace a Damn,” and the more-Stones-than-country “Honky Tonk Rules” are all genuine surprises that no other legacy act is giving up.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Woman
    She’s never more at home than when BJ the Chicago Kid accepts an offer of her “chocolate covered honey” on the closing “Beautiful Love.”
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Duskland
    On Duskland, he veers slightly more into homegrown Kurt Vile territory, especially with the organ-saturated opener “Sundowner.”
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Scene Between
    Ian Parton's picked up Young Guv’s gauntlet and made the power-pop album of the year.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    1983
    The album’s others [songs]--all of them, except for the title track and album opener, remarkably stick to five minutes--like the skittering, piston-punctuated “Pacer,” rise to the occasion of possibly even bigger stages.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Another Life
    His well-aged craft shows on his fourth LP in 15 years.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Names
    BAIO’s always had strange and smarts to offer in his world-class quartet; The Names finally gives us a first-person view.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    La Di Da Di
    Unlike Mirrored or 2011’s underrated Gloss Drop, La Di Da Di is where Battles demonstrate their competence rather than their virtuosity; there’s never that moment of dominos falling to their death or the mutated instruments and real-time looping opening portals to parallel dimensions.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Higher Truth
    He’s turned in 12 tracks of heavily orchestrated and unbearably sincere acoustic pop, territory that he hasn’t touched since the late ’90s.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sun Coming Down
    Sun Coming Down is Robin Hood-rich with pithy one-liners punctuated by Keen’s hi-hats, crashing through Darcy’s free-associating swarm of noise like that one person in every New York-based rom-com or sitcom wending his way through an avenue packed with people.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anthems for Doomed Youth
    Now even Gary Powell’s drums can’t give these sodden valentines the right kick.... The best Anthems recall a time when Doherty and Barât could still tickle each other.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Cry When I Laugh
    There’s no question that Jess Glynne is a very good singer, but her debut proves her best work thus far is on songs that aren’t even hers.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Repentless
    Repentless was never going to be Lulu, though the lack of surprises amongst diminishing returns is almost as bad.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ones and Sixes
    Sparhawk tentatively hits highs in Wayne Coyne territory, imbuing the canyon-filling swirls of background synths and simple, sad, jangly riff with echoes of The Soft Bulletin. “Spanish Translation,” on the other hand, is Low-core and lovely.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    No, No, No
    With the drums intimately booming and the occasional zap of an analog synth snaking across the formalist woodenness, the blessed simplicity of the arrangements on No No No makes one cry out for a more adventurous artist to place in these settings.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rodeo
    This is a cold, calculated record lacking in personality, though it certainly tries to deliver something that Scott is incapable of.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Too
    This new batch thrashes with abandon (“Punks”) and displays a remarkable leap in instrumental maturity with its airtight chord progressions and unhinged shrieks.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Brace the Wave
    Brace the Wave doesn’t really crest above Barlow’s torrential output, it’s just another pre-frayed entry in a catalog of scratchy home recordings.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz
    Dead Petz is a short-lived album by design.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Invite the Light
    Invite the Light is perfect for those times when you need gentle inspiration for cracking open the blinds and facing the world, but the album’s lithium-like vibes are more stabilizing than invigorating.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Perfect World
    The duo leaven Perfect World’s miserablism with just enough smeared hooks and doom-metal licks to make converts of the underground faithful and the casual headbanger; as tortured triumphs go, this debut is a doozy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Original Faces
    The warmth feels sweeter the longer you’ve spent inside.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Frozen Niagara Falls
    Blare Falls in the prescribed order, on shuffle, in a plane, on a train: You’ll dance, you’ll cringe, your Mom will freak out, your homies may start rumors about you--which is as it should be.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Piteous Gate
    Piteous Gate is a porous, sensual record, revealing and alluring in ways that other albums aren’t.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    LP [2015]
    LP builds a steamrolling production and piston-like percussion out of broken electronics and heaps of scrap metal.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lost Time
    Their debut LP for Thrill Jockey feels more tightly composed.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What the World Needs Now
    By the time you reach the where-is-that-nicked-from riff of “I’m Not Satisfied,” it’s clear this is Lydon’s most listenable record in 30 years, though Album was a lot more fun and “Shoom,” the catchiest thing here, ain’t “Rise.”
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beauty Behind the Madness
    Beauty Behind the Madness is front-loaded with fresh directions for the Weeknd that achieve the impossible: make it sound like he’s actually enjoying himself.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Noctunes
    [The] sense of resignation threatens to render Noctunes a laborious listen, but moments of lightness give the record a little bit of balance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Start Here
    Start Here does a great job of cataloging the highs and lows of early milestones: first kisses, first breakups, leaving home for the first time.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stuff Like That There
    The song choices aren’t a deep excavation from the quicksand of their record collection (“Friday I’m in Love,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”), and the uniform decision to do these all in a clean format with brushed percussion and campfire acoustics is exactly what one would presume from an all-covers venture.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Depression Cherry
    Depression Cherry’s particular non-specifics feel as full of breath and life as anything they’ve ever done--an album-length sigh as eloquent as a manifesto.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crosswords [EP]
    Though Crosswords’ lackadaisical pleasantness is by no means offensive, there’s no compelling reason for this EP to exist.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nephew in the Wild
    His new LP, Nephew in the Wild, is largely cut from the same cloth, a collection of (mostly) sad songs looking back, just from a perspective that’s a little older, wiser, and well-adjusted.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Poison Season
    One of the best albums from a restless artist who understands the ridiculousness of being a Restless Artist, but trusts that a consistent voice will make sense of his cross-genre meanderings.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    M
    What remains Bruun’s strongest suit is the way she juxtaposes the extremity of her influences. She comes out of more subdued sections to use blast beats like scare tactics, drops in glacial vocal harmonies as soothing lullabies.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wave(s) [EP]
    Wave(s) is louder, catchier, and about half the length of The Water(s).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Expanding Flower Planet
    Deradoorian’s arrangements now feel less exploratory than rudderless, her harmonies more droning than direct.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    E-MO-TION
    This is music for flash mobs, a valentine to crowdsourcing, and a public engagement proposal to the universe.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    M3LL155X [EP]
    On M3LL155X, she does seem to be growing stronger, testing the boundaries between light and unfathomable darkness, the breathtaking and the nauseating.
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