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
    Here's The Tender Coming
    Despite personnel changes, Here's the Tender Coming, the Unthanks' third LP, is still steeped in brutal Northumberland lore, and its doomed subjects (drowning sailors, child mine workers, a woman who dies on her wedding day) are well served by the band's dark, gentle strums and ghostly piano lines.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Hovvdy
    Hovvdy houses their most eclectic transitions and banger-certified pop songs.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    James Blake
    Using lo-fi digital techniques to play up rough edges and raw emotion, Blake's rare talent is to make music so naked seem unshakable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Don't Like Shit: I Don't Go Outside
    [A] taut, very good sophomore studio album.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ecstatic
    The Ecstatic is easily his finest full-length since "Black on Both Sides," his 1999 solo debut.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Azel
    The addition of female vocalist Mama “Mahassa” Walet Amoumine and periodic excursions into skanky Caribbean rhythms (wryly dubbed “Tuareggae” by Bombino) stamp Azel as yet another remarkable transition for the guitarist.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    You In Reverse
    You in Reverse... rejects the pithy pop of their 1999 breakthrough, Keep It Like a Secret, for spacey, stretchy tracks that emphasize their unique, virtuosic musicianship.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Islah
    The most-balanced Kevin Gates project to date, discovering an equilibrium between his pummelers and his caressers we didn’t previously know was possible.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shadows
    Bless their Glaswegian hearts, they never sound bitter, 15-plus years after their brief alt-rock moment.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lost Tapes
    The closet thing to Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes hip-hop has ever produced: a collection of songs from, and largely about, the past that bode well for the future and sound damn good today. [Dec 2002, p.140]
    • Spin
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Someone To Drive You Home
    Ridiculously entertaining. [Jul 2007, p.98]
    • Spin
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kannon
    Even as they add unimaginable depths to a deceptively simple form, Kannon reasserts their commitment to merely existing, unapologetically out of genre and out of time.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Dark Matter
    Is Dark Matter that different from immediate predecessors Backspacer, Lightning Bolt, and Gigaton? Not really. But is it somehow Pearl Jammier, in an ineffable sense? Yep—in fact, it’s something special.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Boxing Mirror
    One of [the year's] most heartfelt albums. [Jun 2006, p.80]
    • Spin
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Los Angeles
    Flying Lotus' spaced-out visions are the album's trump card, a computerized mesh of hip-hop beats at dub-like tempos.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Money Store
    The Money Store fits into modern hip-hop like a square peg on fire, a 40-minute straitjacket tantrum of vein-popping, slow-flow barks closer to Helmet's Page Hamilton than Harlem's Charles Hamilton.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Phosphorescent Blues
    Elegant and nimble songs that are intricate in their beauty and restless in their heartbreak.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fantasy Black Channel
    The quartet's fervent debut, produced by DJ Erol Alkan, offers a fabulous simulation of '80s new wave, with burping, sputtering synths and sleazy, Bowie-inspired crooning from frontman Sam Eastgate.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Set Yourself On Fire
    Delicate Casio-toned anthems. [Mar 2005, p.91]
    • Spin
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Damaged
    Kurt Wagner's conversational croak is, charitably put, an acquired taste. [Sep 2006, p.106]
    • Spin
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Obliterati
    Fifty-year-old men rarely sound this enraged and energized. Neither do twentysomethings. [Jun 2006, p.82]
    • Spin
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lion's Roar
    Mogis never allows the arrangements to pull focus from the Söderbergs' vocals.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Post-War
    Brings a welcome grandeur to Ward's honeyed rasp and nimble guitar picking. [Sep 2006, p.114]
    • Spin
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ruff Draft [Reissue]
    Though Dilla's rapping is never more than competent, Ruff Draft is still a platform for the versatility of his eccentric genius. [Apr 2007, p.88]
    • Spin
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Small Medium Large
    Within the milieu of creative, atmospheric, tradition-defying music termed alternative jazz by default, this is important work.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Why Make Sense?
    Why Make Sense? smooths out Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard’s longstanding, ever-evolving musical partnership and collective existential quandaries into an album as polished as Larry Levan’s disco ball, and their most cohesive as well.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Your Queen Is A Reptile
    Kinetic and thrilling as the uptempo blasts are, where Your Queen shines is on the slower pieces, revealing that Hutchings can purr, murmur and wax lyrical as well.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Goldenheart
    Yet even minus narrative detail or plot points, one surrenders to the logic of Richard's world, thanks to the modernist sheen holding the entire suite-like venture together, a voracious and melodic urban contemporary sound referencing 1980s pop as much as house or electro.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mangy Love
    Mangy Love, his eighth album, now finds him on the Anti- label and like the title suggests, it shows divergent aspects of Cass, at his most subtle, resonant, and resplendent, and at others, his most maddeningly repetitive and scabby.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Sing The Sorrow
    As big and slick a rock record as you're likely to hear all year. [Apr 2003, p.101]
    • Spin
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