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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    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ya-Ka-May
    Galactic struggle to accompany all these signifying voices, sometimes resorting to hard, strident rhythms that don't really augment the performances.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Photo Album
    Ten tracks of heart-baring guitar-doodles by and for people who'd rather talk about feelings than have them. [Nov 2001, p.138]
    • Spin
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blue Songs
    Blue Songs' prevailing mood is deep indigo, not ultraviolet, yet that darkness heightens and complicates.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    With Ghost
    Tokyo psych-folk mystics Ghost add lavish accompaniment that lures these tiny, opining songs out of the bedroom. [Oct 2000, p.184]
    • Spin
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Emotional Mugger
    Sonically, Emotional Mugger lands somewhere between all of these records [Manipulator, II, and Ty-Rex], maintaining the cohesion and (relatively) streamlined arrangements of Manipulator but nodding to the scuzzy ’70s hard rock of the latter two and Segall’s trademark haywire, lo-fi garage.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In The 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into A Swimming Fish And Ate The Head Of His Enemy By Magic
    Buoyant voices erupt in urgent chants, while xylophones, thumb pianos, and percussion create a swirling, hallucinatory web of sound equal to the freakiest psychedelia. [Oct 2008, p.114]
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Keep It Hid
    Black Keys singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach opens his first solo outing with an acoustic country blues that sounds utterly authentic but signifies mainly as a museum-quality reproduction. Fortunately, the rest of Keep It Hid hews more closely to the Keys’ scuzz-encrusted, blunt-instrument assault.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Overgrown
    Overgrown's biggest fault is lack of quality control; it's an uneven listen, with peaks like "Retrograde" segueing into the quotidian piano recital of "DLM," with an undistinguished back half that doesn't linger in the mind afterward.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Buffet
    The Buffet is better than just another R. Kelly album, but not enough to be worth saying so outside of a review, much less on a year-end list; call it a good one-night stand.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bangarang [EP]
    Like cans of Monster Energy Drink, this collection is spracked out and ridiculous and fun and sometimes disposable, just one more shard of debris left in this kid's wake, and his generation's.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Masterpiece
    Masterpiece never quite improves on this impressive opening run, though the profoundly un-country guitar pretzels of “Interstate” and “Humans” give Speedy Ortiz a run for their money, and the former even ends with one of Saddle Creek’s signature found recordings, just like one of those eight-minute Conor Oberst intros.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    True North
    On their 16th(!) full-length, True North, the group's highly evolved savoir-faire proves their greatest asset.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alpinisms
    Alpinisms' sweeping, ethereal pop owes a stylistic debt to My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins, but the debut album by former Secret Machines guitarist Ben Curtis' new project reveals a range of influences and a sophisticated approach to arrangement that sets the trio well apart from less imaginative latter-day shoegazers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Transference
    With little more than tense bass, wiry guitar, and that signature uh-AH-uh-uh-AH percussion, the songs (recorded on the quick in Daniel's house) crackle with the freshness of rough-cut demos.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Before The World Was Big
    Tucker and Tividad have discovered their indie-pop Neverland, and a fanciful, free-flowing sound to suit it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Instinct
    The album clicks because beyond the date-stamping visuals and the music's timeless project to unite art and pop, the longtime partnership behind Niki & the Dove has finally found a proper voice, and a proper name.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shadows in the Night
    Dylan's voice does the same things it does for so many of his own songs: pries open unfamiliar seams of feeling inside phrases long abandoned to cliché. It helps that this may be the best-produced album of his career.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Me And Armini
    Torrini's much more engaging, though, when cooing Me and Armini's less flamboyant folk pop. [Nov 2008, p.102]
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Don't Stop
    Don't Stop boasts gleaming dance-pop production from first-album collaborators Richard X and Timo Kaukolampi, plus Bloc Party/Kate Nash producer Paul Epworth and Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's All True
    Since 2004's Last Exit, Junior Boys' main man Jeremy Greenspan has couched his plaintive voice in various strains of modern electronic music, flitting between 2-step and synth-pop, with diminishing returns.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dumb Flesh
    Maybe not what they originally had in mind when they used to call it “Electronic body music,” but a stunning reinterpretation nonetheless.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's Frightening
    Ignore (or embrace) the similarities [to Spoon] and there’s plenty to love about songs as lightly brooding and likably grabby as these.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Touch Down 2 Cause Hell
    A pleasant surprise.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Twirligig
    It's crate-digging redefined for the chill age.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here's To Being Here
    Collett achieves both scope and cohesion on these tenderly twanging tunes, making his way assuredly through slow-burning swoons ("Henry's Song"), nimble boogies ("Charlyn, Angel of Kensington"), and back-porch laments ("No Redemption Song").
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Weight's on the Wheels
    Hart continues to experiment, ensuring that his wide smile never gets tiresome.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shriek
    Throughout the album, she shifts from restrained cool to soaring sentimentalism in mere seconds; this dynamic is something that Civilian possessed, but Shriek masters.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Feel It Break
    her band's seedy synth pop more often recalls Kate Bush's dramatic art songs and the Knife's ghostly techno-pop (and more specifically, the soured vowels of frontwoman Karin Andersson).
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    C U L T U R E
    If you gauge artistic success by innovation, you can just filter the best of Culture, a very decent group of Migos songs, into a playlist. But if you appreciate Migos and the sound they ushered into contemporary rap as being one of the genre’s most basic, essential natural resources, it will be easier to let the whole album--a drama of perseverance--ride out.
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