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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    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unapologetic
    The now-24-year-old's voice may be simple, but it's distinctive--and as defiant as her album titles.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ring
    It's also in those nature-obsessed lyrics, delivered in tones so dulcet and hypnotic that the inclination to don a robe and commune with Vespertine-era Bjork is overwhelming.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Port of Morrow
    The best songs bear the mark of an auteur weirding out, by himself.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur
    A dark lark, but worth a listen.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Dinosaur Life
    My Dinosaur Life, on which the band strikes a radio-ready balance between mayhem and melody, may well trigger their long-awaited breakthrough.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    See Mystery Lights
    The duo are most enjoyable when they just surrender to sweaty delirium on 'Summer Song.'
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Exploding Head
    Led by effects-pedal guru Oliver Ackermann (the Edge is a customer), this Brooklyn trio further their rep for insane volume on their first proper studio album.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Is And Always Was
    Often brilliant, occasionally creepy songs such as the bitter toe-tapper "Without You" and the optimistic six-minute epic "Light of Day" aren't appreciably improved by the trappings, but still cut deeply
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Smother
    Surprisingly hot to the touch, Wild Beasts' third album does more with less, paring down the quartet's groove-inflected chamber pop to expose raw burning desire.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night of Hunters
    Amos' classical-label debut is a wildly imaginative ride full of orchestral fireworks and fairy-tale melodrama, though anyone with a Ren Faire aversion should stick to more straight-ahead songs like "Edge of the Moon" and "Job's Coffin."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is...
    Even when they're shouting, they do so in a particularly musical and distinctive way, and although their smash is one of five This Is… songs the duo had no hand in writing, they nevertheless suggest a consistent sense of authorship through the intensity of their shared ecstasies and frustrations.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Part 1: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made
    John Shade moves with composure and ease through arch, almost dour indie pop ("The Believers") as well as joyous dollops of Of Montreal–inspired electro pop.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    High Places Vs. Mankind
    Rob Barber intensifies the band's trademark polyrhythms with snappy post-punk bass and eerie dub echoes on disco-leaning tracks like "On Giving Up," while singer Mary Pearson eschews lyrics about happy trees for stories of loneliness and alienation.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shangri-La
    On Shangri-La, YACHT add sinewy live instrumentation to their previously chilly electro, and when frontwoman Claire Evans, possessed of Kim
 Gordon's cool authority and Annie's playfulness, 
espouses her utopian "belief system," the 
bubblegum beats make it easy to buy into the philosophizing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Damage and Joy
    The result is a satisfying if not uneven release that never drags in its lament, looking toward the next ballad lost among the chaos. Richly produced fuzzed-face guitars and clattering percussion accentuate the band’s classic noise-pop formula without ever feeling staid.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
    Hardcore is mostly content to refine the band's epic, frequently breathtaking constructions.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Two Tongues
    Two Tongues is some of the most powerfully original music either camp has released, with the intimate production raising the goose-bump factor of Conley's and Bemis' earnest, if wildly contrasting, vocal styles.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dry Food
    Pretty much every guitar band going is currently toiling in the same ’90s nostalgia mines that Kempner dives into here, but few are able to do so with both technical prowess and its emotive content intact.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Creature I Don't Know
    If the Sheryl Crow–isms of the first few tracks throw you off, sit tight: From tempestuous meditation "The Beast" on, every song is chillingly badass.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Get Evens
    This lo-fi duo... continue to make charming albums while simply shrugging at their own limitations. [Jan 2007, p.88]
    • Spin
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Modern Guilt
    In a scant 30-plus minutes, Modern Guilt modestly proves that it's still restlessness, both artistic and personal, that drives the only living boy in Los Angeles.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Naturally
    It's all blatantly unsubtle, but also raucously fun.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Transfixiation
    A Place to Bury Strangers is one of those bands like Clinic; they've never made a bad album even if normal listeners have decided they only need one or two of them. Transfixiation might not be one of those two, but the abnormals have more fun.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Four the Record
    The real strength here is the feline sharpness of Lambert's voice.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dissent of Man
    are a few new wrinkles--the manic push-pull of "Meeting of the Minds" could almost pass for System of a Down--but it's generally overdrive-guitar heaven.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pebble To A Pearl
    On Pebble to a Pearl--an authoritative, refreshingly organic pop-funk manifesto featuring musicians who've played with Al Green and Stevie Wonder--the exhilaration of liberation literally screams from R&B workout 'Can't Please Everybody.'
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    UGK 4 Life
    UGK 4 Life is a fitting capper to this Texas duo's storied career--nothing groundbreaking, just funky, rough-hewn, celebratory tracks.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pedestrian Verse
    Frightened Rabbit's best material rivals brothers-in-brood the National and Arcade Fire, and even their B-level stuff is better than that of most acts working in this vein. But unlike those leading lights, these guys don't have the pop instincts to throw in the occasional punk scrappers, chamber-folk interludes, or disco rave-up to keep things from getting monotonous.
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