Stylus Magazine's Scores

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For 1,453 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 4.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 69
Highest review score: 100 Fed
Lowest review score: 0 Encore
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 987 out of 1453
  2. Mixed: 361 out of 1453
  3. Negative: 105 out of 1453
1453 music reviews
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Us
    Us has a dynamism and vastness that makes Loss cower in its shadow.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Me First
    He may not be the first to mix the bucolic with the mechanic, and God knows he won’t be the last, but here all the symptoms of overexposure sink under the unassuming grace of his gifts.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Flying Club Cup
    The debut album was good, but this is better. Much, much better; the kind of record I will happily and willingly return to long after this review is dead and buried.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pink
    Color me unimpressed.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Martha Wainwright
    Wainwright exhibits a rare talent as a confessional singer/songwriter; her album is an impressive, not to mention emotive, first LP from an ambitious artist unwilling to cling to her family’s famous coattails.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Wind In The Wires
    As an album, WIW seems to have sprung fully-formed from a single night’s restlessness; often more organic than much of his debut, but still with a steady electro-backed pulse, its pacing and sequencing flow like water beneath a frozen creek, barely seen and mostly imagined.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Songs From The Year Of Our Demise
    It's an album that has far more potential for emotional resonance than musical discovery. The arrangements contain few surprises, and the handful of simple acoustic performances quietly outshine the more elaborate productions.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Return To Form Black Majick Party
    [Levi] has an impeccable ear for a hook and packs his album full of them.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pig Lib
    Luckily, his affable spunk grounds much of the exploration, yet, at some point, the line between circumstance and good songwriting becomes suspiciously blurred.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Street's Disciple
    Street’s Disciple reveals Nas at a new peak, finally comfortable in the post-millennial hip-hop world.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Wedding
    The Wedding has some slow tracks, but they’re greatly outnumbered by winners that leap over a baffling range of musical styles.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Begin To Hope
    A little bit of kitsch is important... Begin to Hope has enough of it to stand out, and enough ethics to keep the whole thing grounded.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Warmer Corners
    A terrific and thoroughly enjoyable effort.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Greatest
    The Greatest isn’t perfect, but its stumbles are neither intrusive nor damning.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    White Chalk
    Over the course of eleven songs of grim predestination, virtually no modernizing or even identifying signposts are allowed to disturb the terrain.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Prog
    PROG, like all their recordings, is another collection of professionally played and well-produced tunes that present themselves to a potential mass audience with hectic grace, sober whimsy, fluent navigation of chaos and without the slightest shred of pomposity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Breaking Kayfabe
    Too exciting for the underground (maybe), too weird for the overground (hopefully not), he deserves to be heard by both.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yanqui U.X.O.
    What remains is a sometimes cold, sometimes confusing collection of epics that are more intricate than anything GYBE have ever created.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Hate
    The record is very innocent on the surface, but it’s in the lyrics (again) of Alun Woodward and Emma Pollack that make it cold and dark, even though their vocals seem to make it all sound safe.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Slow Wonder
    Newman has created a record bearing all the traits that make him such an engaging musical personality in the first place: elliptical wordplay, unusual delivery, and obscenely catchy songs.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Pajo
    Building on his unassuming alternative icon status, this great debut (under his own name) is sure to bring him that bit nearer to the awareness of the mainstream.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Super Taranta!
    This is more like their "Give ‘em Enough Rope," a perfectly fine extension of that first energy burst, one that deserved to be milked a bit.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Libertines
    The Libertines don’t even try for a good album; they sound like four blokes lucky to be jamming in the same room again, and their joy in each other’s company redeems the enterprise.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Gulag Orkestar
    It's tightly focused, beautifully written, and totally without filler.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Way The Wind Blows
    And though the album sags a little towards the end, with a few shorter instrumental numbers, it’s still an invigorating journey, a caravan of cavorting musicians, careening through the countryside, stopping only to play festivals and funerals.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    13 & God
    13&God represents less a marriage of rock and rap than it does a meeting of weird with slightly-less-weird.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    We The Vehicles
    One of the biggest surprises of the year.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Con
    The pared-down moments of The Con seem to long for the clusterfuckedness of the album’s meatier tracks, and for the most part, rightly so.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Citrus
    Citrus is an outstanding record because it doesn't fixate on what makes great shoegazer music but what makes great pop music.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Awfully Deep
    His best [album] yet, his most fully-formed, emotionally engaging and sonically rewarding.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Here's My Song You Can Have It... I Don't Want It Anymore/Yours 4-Ever
    Mercury Rev... mostly eschew their distinctive brand of chamber pop, scaling back the saturated psychedelic orchestral flourishes for something a bit more terrestrial. In doing so they’ve fashioned the perfect complement to Dunger’s emotional voice and poignant songs of love lost.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pawn Shoppe Heart
    Pawn Shoppe Heart is the type of thrillingly raucous, visceral, harsh, storming brand of balls-all-the-way-out rock familiar to anyone paying vaguely close mind to current Detroit rumblings.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
    Their music though—and probably the reason they’re used to such great effect in “Friday Night Lights”—actually feels more compelling as an accompaniment to visual drama, in part because the internal drama of the songs themselves are really specific and their presentation is a little tired.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Denies The Day's Demise
    Daedelus does with electronic and Latin music here what he and others have already done with experimental hip-hop: boiling genre to an essence and re-imagining it with novel or illuminating instrumentation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Angels Of Light Sing 'Other People'
    Sing ‘Other People’ leaves behind much of the violence of Gira’s approach but retains the same soul-plunging ambitions, both allying him effortlessly with the druggy expressivity that characterizes practitioners of newer psychedelic music and belatedly identifying him as an influence and antecedent.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ole! Tarantula
    Unfortunately, the magic of [the] first three songs is never captured again.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Place To Bury Strangers
    This is a staggering debut with layers of errant, mystical roars born from man’s relationship between his guitar, a chord, and a speaker.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Tournament Of Hearts
    A slow burn may not be quite as exciting as a scorch, but this is a hotter flame than most anything else you'll hear this year.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Under The Skin
    As beguiling as much of Under the Skin is, these songs would benefit from the Mac’s supple, still-underrated rhythm section.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Pale Young Gentlemen
    It’s a classic first album: A band unpretentiously tangling various genres they--or even listeners--thought would never sound so brilliant together.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    Electric Circus
    So, is this genius or is this madness? As enjoyable as it is on occasion, I’m inclined to side with the latter.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Monday At The Hug & Pint
    The slight progression of the group here is discernible with a better understanding of balancing the musical peaks and troughs.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wig In A Box: Songs From & Inspired By Hedwig & The Angry Inch
    The majority of the album is comprised of covers that don’t deviate enough from the source material to validate their existence.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Miss Machine
    The group’s move toward a math-metal-industrial fusion is a welcome one that should help to bring them fans that have never heard the group before.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Grind Date
    The Grind Date is as notable for what it lacks--skits, filler, bullshit--than for what it has.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    O
    You can actually hear the moment when the album turns sour.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Songs For Christmas
    The sheer amount of misfires makes Songs for Christmas impossible to recommend to anyone but the devoted Sufjanite.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Now Here Is Nowhere
    Now Here Is Nowhere stands as a very good album, delivering on most of September 000’s promises and proving that music not only existed in the early and mid 70s, but it rocked too.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Craft
    Sometimes the after school special feel of it takes its toll... But they win you back, because that's what underdogs do: they eventually win.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Last Days Of Wonder
    An excellent album.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Nashville
    Nashville is chock full of weeping slide guitar work, soaring harmonies, keyboards, and Rouse’s lonely breath of a voice pushing out from the relatively lush production.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    I'll Sleep When You're Dead
    Ultimately, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead displays a type of artistic growth almost alien to the genre.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Emerald City
    The album, like most of Vanderslice’s albums, meanders along like a pleasant afternoon: it is all fair weather and blithe breezes, fairly consistent in both tone and tempo.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Happy New Year
    Fans of â??classicâ? psychedelic music will find few greater pleasures this year than Happy New Year.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Okonokos [Live]
    As an introductory My Morning Jacket mixtape, Okonokos is top-shelf.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Confessions On A Dance Floor
    Easily her finest effort since Ray of Light.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Animal Years
    On the whole, Animal Years seems dashed off. Of course, dashed off by a clever songwriter with a helluva voice makes Animal Years a decent album.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Lifetime Of Temporary Relief
    I was a huge fan of Low before A Lifetime Of Temporary Relief, but the perspective it casts both by amassing so much of their beautiful music and by casting new light on the people who make it make this box set utterly essential.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Antics
    Feels like Interpol-by-numbers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Outside Closer
    It's a beautiful restatement of the group's strengths--and a consolidation of the gains made on Cold House.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Scene Of The Crime
    It doesn't hurt that she's accompanied by the Drive-By Truckers and a handful of old Muscle Shoals session men, but it's still her voice and interpretive skills that carry the record.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Further Adventures Of Lord Quas
    Features some of Madlib’s most difficult and most accomplished production work to date.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tromatic Reflexxions
    MoM, for their part, sound more and more comfortable with a vocalist in front of them.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Gang Of Losers
    The Dears are now less idiosyncratic but have successfully made the kind of straightforwardly satisfying album that you'd expect from a band on their second decade.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Out Of The Shadow
    On many of the songs here, the accompaniment sounds like an afterthought, adding to the bedroom-recording atmosphere.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    In Advance Of The Broken Arm
    Most of it... feels as weighty and emotive as Sleater Kinney, or as seductive as Mary Timony in the mid-90s: fully-formed, feminine indie rock.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Beyond
    Despite Beyond’s tendency to feel like a career retrospective in spots, it contains plenty of songs that rival Mascis’s best work.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Son
    At times, as with Segundo, it’s tempting to just let Molina pull you under.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Sea Change
    It improves on Mutations with sparkling variation and a depth of emotion Beck seldom seems to achieve.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    She Has No Strings Apollo
    If the arrangements were given as much attention as the astonishing, rich, in-the-same-room production: 9.1
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Grey Album
    The Grey Album isn’t much more than a well-executed novelty, nor does it illuminate some genius hidden deep within The Black Album.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Liars
    If Liars have reached the post-masterpiece phase of their career where they hone their craft to a needle’s point, Liars is an absolutely brilliant jump-off.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    So This Is Goodbye
    Where Last Exit was indebted to the clubbier side of dance pop--with its tendency to wind songs around Dark’s close-clipped beats--So This Is Goodbye is a post-aught pop record first and foremost, an elegant, spacious collection of flash-frozen R&B and soft disco laments.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Murray's Revenge
    Murray’s Revenge feels tired, the work of a mind either distracted or unwilling to commit to any one thing.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Unfairground
    If The Unfairground doesn’t quite qualify as a "stunning" return to form--"stunning" never really being Ayers’ stock in trade--it certainly represents the delightful and unexpected renaissance of a perennially undervalued artist, whose quiet but significant influence is long overdue for re-assessment.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Desire
    Desire’s successes stem chiefly from Pharoahe’s unimpeachably brilliant rhyme skills.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
    Like David Bowie’s Station to Station or Peter Gabriel’s So, TV on the Radio make music that demands to be listened to actively, as for the listener to absorb the lethal amounts of heartbreak, dignity, and mystery in the human voice.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Give Up
    Never once during the course of the album’s ten songs, do its creators even graze the surface of mediocrity, instead settling in the sunny middle ground that Gibbard so often inhabits.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shake The Sheets
    Leo proves himself emotionally enervating throughout, so it’s really a shame that Shake the Sheets isn’t half so sonically invigorating.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tio Bitar
    It isn’t the sort of artistic statement that promises to change anyone’s life, but it’s no less a great work of escapist art, the sort of essential record I’d pick for any hypothetical list of desert island necessities.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Alright, Still
    Alright Still is nothing more than pop for people who hate pop music, poptimist Quorn, phony music for people who can't let go of their inhibitions (indie-bitions?) and have to have their music classified as REAL.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Cripple Crow
    It’s the collage of styles that distinguishes this album: Cuban and Indian flourishes, Eisenhower-era doo-wop, the smoky Stax groove, bucolic British trad-folk, the eccentricities of American folk, of both the Dust Bowl troubadours and the Vietnam flower-children.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hip Hop Is Dead
    Nas caps a year of NYC-based disappointments with quite possibly the most crushing one yet.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nextdoorland
    The psychedelic underpinnings of old are cleaned up a bit and the anger and bile that lay beneath the surface of the earlier material has been calmed, but there is still much to be enjoyed.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Mary Star of the Sea
    It's an album that is filled with plenty of big hooks, ample rock crunch and a loving attention to detail.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Killing Joke [2003]
    It’s not the most subtle or nuanced album, you can’t really dance to it, and it’s not particular clever. What it is: brutal, full of hooks, rock solid and fucking loud.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The End Is Near
    On The End is Near, the group seems to follow the same pattern as before, but with less than appetizing results.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Live at Convocation Hall
    The sound of the recording is clear, the audience is not annoying and Hayden’s banter in between is quite humorous and as good as the music.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Campfire Headphase
    This record contains some of the most astounding music that Boards Of Canada have ever composed.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    White Bread Black Beer
    With its laptop beats and closely mic’d intimacy, White Bread, Black Beer conforms to the dictates of a creator with endless time to play all the instruments and no one to please but himself, regrettably.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    See You Next Tuesday
    Aside from the token bummer track, the rest of the album is as stupid fun as stupid fun gets.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Yellow House
    A masterful record.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    II
    It’s an album that leaves you both soothed and disturbed, lulled and shaken by the group’s masterful blend of the comforting and the uncanny, slightly dazed as if returning from time travel or a knock on the head.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Man-Made
    Man-Made is, to be sure, the least immediate record Teenage Fanclub has made since Thirteen, but at a compact and finely-tuned forty-two minutes it avoids the flaws of that under-edited and under-cooked record and nestles itself softly into the heart of every TFC fan as another low-key modern classic.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    No, You C'Mon
    Whilst the songs on No You C’Mon don’t flow together as smoothly as those on Aw C’Mon, a number of them are of a similar ilk; lush, concise modern country that only Lambchop can do, the sound of a band from Nashville rather than a Nashville band.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Audience's Listening
    If Cut Chemist can recreate the effortless fusion of the album's second half, perhaps someday he can make an album worth listening to from beginning to end.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Drum's Not Dead
    A manically strange, darkly and violently beautiful, and deliriously pop album.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Oh You're So Silent Jens
    The result is in some ways immensely pleasing (at its best the quality here is easily the equal of the songs from the proper album), but at seventeen songs and a full hour in length Oh You're So Silent Jens suffers a bit, predictably, from too much of a good thing.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Show Your Bones
    The few tracks on Show Your Bones that sound like they might have fit on Fever to Tell clearly constitute the new album’s weaker links.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Warning
    The fact that Hot Chip can take all these conflicting moods, string them together, and make of them a satisfying whole is testament to their understanding of the classic rubric of the pop album—an identifiable, unique sound that has enough room to allow for variety and enough consistency to keep the listener's attention.
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