The Line of Best Fit's Scores

  • Music
For 4,492 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 64% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 32% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 77
Highest review score: 100 Adore Life
Lowest review score: 20 143
Score distribution:
4492 music reviews
    • 80 Metascore
    • 95 Critic Score
    Someone New has a presence that lingers long after it’s finished. This is an album that demands your full attention, sucking all the air out of the room and leaving you to drift in the grey matter of Deland’s mind. After the last notes fade to black, the ghost of Someone New continues to haunt you — it’s an utterly unforgettable record.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bea is a beacon of nostalgia for '90s kids who wished they were born a decade or two earlier, donning their Walkman, listening to cassettes, swapping out one grunge gem for the next. Bea provides a much-needed trip down memory lane, but not so much that it’s a pastiche to the era, rather an ardent nod, an ode to.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    While Dark Hearts hits an exceptional stride in its beginning, we find quickly that its other tracks don’t necessarily live up to their fullest potential.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    The echoes of his home band are clear, but there’s also an underlying feeling of something greater at play - the proof that he can cut it as a name as much as he can a band, and Serpentine Prison is Matt Berninger’s artistic truth and joy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Despite tracks such as “I Pray” and “Save The Day” re-treading the Disney dewiness and naïve optimism of Carey’s earlier ballads, the hardening of the singer’s artistry is palpable across the record.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Collectively, it’s certainly Moss’s strongest work to date - a thoughtful, mature album, which delivers plenty of food for thought and a range of sounds, emotions and lyrical quirks to keep most listeners happy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flowing effortlessly between melodious vocals and blistering guitars, between reflecting on past feelings and accepting new eventualities, the majority of the album feels weightless.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Underpinned by sharper melodies and, shock horror, notions of hope, they sit comfortably as among the best songs Metz have written so far. If they’re a nod to how the band intend on developing their sound further, we may well soon end up with a record that truly feels like serious change has occurred.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    An album that delivers on all fronts, from the ratatat of drill or the swinging hip-hop beats, EDNA explores as much as it uncovers more sides to its voice. Throughout, the littered guest posts each represent a facet of Headie’s journey perfectly.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Lament is testament to the power held in each new day, and the moments to be discovered within, delivered with crushing passion by a band worth standing behind.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Burnished with all the hallmarks that have moulded the band into such a robust songwriting entity, As Long As You Are is a portrait of Herring and co at the top of their game - a collection of taught electro-pop numbers graced with poetic flair.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death Valley Girls’ music is, for better or worse, calculatedly disposable, and the band make no real attempts to secure lasting hooks or forge undeniable melodies. What they do, they do well, and that’s more than enough reason to give Under the Spell of Joy a spin.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Each song a little burst (nothing over 2:30), the rough ’n’ ready charm to Stay Alive is where it shines like a diamond plucked from the depths of blackened coal. It feels like Grace is in the room, life unfurling from her mind and straight into music.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    By the time the record reaches it’s 12-minute close “Angel”, it feels like a great release. You’ve been put through the ringer with the abrasive “Cook A Coffee” (with plenty of shots at a certain, now former, Politics Live pundit) and “Be My Guest” and made it out the other side. Sweatier and ready to take on the world.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The band started with a really strong debut album, but Midnight Manor somehow takes this to new heights. You’ll hear the Stones, you’ll hear Lou Reed, you’ll even hear a bit of Alice Cooper in there - and you’ll come away having connected with a new, intensely fulfilling sense of cool.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Less antagonistic than Gore and wandering down considerably fewer stylistic avenues than Koi No Yokan, Ohms plays instead like a spiritual successor to Diamond Eyes. Like that record, the production is polished enough to see your face in, and like that record, there’s a sense that the arrangements are being granted plenty of room to breathe.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sylvan Esso have always made albums that demand to be listened to at the expense of everything else in your record collection. Free Love is no exception. It’s the pair’s most cohesive body of work yet, and despite its more left-field moments, possibly their most accessible.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On this form she’s Bianca on horseback, a new Moroder drop in ’77, bootlegged Larry Levan DJ sets on cassette, the nocturnal delights of the Studio 54 VIP room, casually leaving her contemporaries trying to negotiate guestlist entry at the nightclub entrance
    • 76 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Ultra Mono is an enjoyable but ideologically confused record and one in which some of IDLES best material must compensate for some of their worst.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Alicia offers its listeners with the ultimate microcosm of the singer’s discography thus far, re-positioning Keys as a force to be reckoned in today’s musical landscape.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The result isn’t just Moore’s finest solo album: this is some of the most remarkable music he’s ever been involved in.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    This combination of stripped-back lyricism and expansive musicality contributes to the sense of The Ascension as Stevens’ most plainly spiritual record to date.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Though it is by no means a flawless album, it is exactly the kind of thing you should be using to set your mind at ease. Fleet Foxes have always been inherently hopeful and thankfully they’ve not lost sight of that, roll on 2021.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dapperton, by inviting listeners so openly into his feelings and experiences is where Dapperton will find his footing for the next step up. It really is hard to predict just where Gus Dapperton will go after this.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Songwriting of this quality, with powers of suggestion and intimations of doubt, deserves an audience well beyond the historically-inclined.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Find The Sun is an unsurprisingly great album from a curiously underappreciated artist, and an unassuming one at that. Deradoorian and her collaborators have made an album that fits the times, without knowing just how pertinent it would be.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Apple is barely a whisper in the breeze by comparison at ten tracks long, and in the way that 7G meticulously unpicked Cook’s innards so fans could see the master’s mind at work, Apple weighs out the specifics and pours them into the meting pot.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A.Swayze & The Ghosts prove that songs with substantial lyrical content don’t have to be preachy at all, and Paid Salvation is a confident debut from one of the more impassioned and exhilarating bands around.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Overall, it can be said that Tea for the Tillerman² is a strong throwback that boomerangs and turns in on itself ; it’s not the perfect path to Yusuf / Cat Stevens music for new listeners, but it undeniably succeeds in touching nostalgic hearts.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It’s a raw, cathartic, but incredibly gentle record that pushes through personal boundaries, and wonderfully reiterates the fact that it’s okay to be alone (even if you’re sleeping with your “key in the door.”)