The Quietus' Scores

  • Music
For 2,374 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 61% higher than the average critic
  • 8% same as the average critic
  • 31% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 76
Highest review score: 100 Promises
Lowest review score: 0 Lulu
Score distribution:
2374 music reviews
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The album sounds like the process of ripping away at one’s own humanity in search of some kind of core; the music is colossal, destructive and all-consuming. ... Extraordinary, turbulent album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Partly through technology, of course, but owing much to the composer’s own ingenuity, A Separation Of Being was made by just one person and an acoustic sideman, and makes densely assembled music sound feather-light and, yes, joyful.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rather than simply throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, together, the pair throw a lot, all while investing time and a marked sense of freedom to what each track could eventually become.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Everything is Beautiful/Everything Sucks is a fun album that allows Frasqueri to show both sides of her personality. ... The main problem with Everything is Beautiful/Everything Sucks is that it doesn’t contain anything as devastating as ‘G.O.A.T.’, ‘Tomboy’ or ‘Kitana’. The songs never quite hit the same vein of intensity, catchiness and lyrical abstraction. There are moments when it comes close.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Everything is Beautiful/Everything Sucks is a fun album that allows Frasqueri to show both sides of her personality. ... The main problem with Everything is Beautiful/Everything Sucks is that it doesn’t contain anything as devastating as ‘G.O.A.T.’, ‘Tomboy’ or ‘Kitana’. The songs never quite hit the same vein of intensity, catchiness and lyrical abstraction. There are moments when it comes close.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The music is cryptic, otherworldly, and uncanny. The dislocation of Smith’s voice from The Fall is jarring and thrilling at times.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Loom is a brave and raw document from the frontlines of grief, exhibiting the full range of its manifestations beyond sadness – its vacancy, rage and disorientation, delivered with a sweet disposition, enchanting you into a greater and richer awareness of what lies beneath, revealing deep beauty in the collision of exhilarating creativity and inevitable doom.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Navarrete is a versatile artist, and Salvador is a rare thing: an emotionally candid, melancholic album full of bangers.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Companion Rises is the sound of rattling shackles and tension not resolved but placated. The narrator rooted on earth by their surroundings still has a poetic awareness of the ethereal and the far-flung. Companion Rises is Ben Chasny’s valiant attempt to cast himself skyward.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tthe album plays out like a mood swing of rage, despair, and an ennui that threatens to consume. It’s in that ebb and flow that Sightless Pit as a trio have found their balance. There is space for softness and melancholy. The organic is allowed to creep amongst the distorted or the electronic. Noise is only meant as a temporary shock to the system, not as a punishment to be endured.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ultimately, this is a rather gorgeous and engrossing collection, that borrows stealthily from a rich history of sound effect and soundtrack to build a tender poem to the night time. It’s all big plate reverbs and shuffling drums.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    For those that need a bit of background music The Slow Rush is a competent record, but it’s impossible to actively listen to it for a prolonged period of time without despairing. At least now that this is out, there probably won’t be another one for a few years.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It’s an album that if you take it at face value will delight, but if you stick around and penetrate its surface, you’ll find one of the most transfixing albums in recent years.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Miss Anthropocene is a Kanye West of a listening experience. Strengthened by listening less hard and chilling out. Weakened by due diligence and the artist’s cerebral disconnect between what she's great at making and who she believes she is.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Only a few acts have really transcended local industry mores and enlightened amateurism to make something of truly wider, lasting appeal. And maybe none more so than The Homesick with this record, which should surely sneak through the gates of classic pop heaven.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The creation of an ever restless and fecund talent, Massive Oscillations is a beautifully bold and powerful album that should bring Wacław Zimpel to the attention of a wider and deserved audience.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    West of Eden is a flawed album, a patchy album, and an album with some really bad lyrics in it. But nonetheless a very fun record. It might lose its magic quickly, as most of the thrill comes from the band’s willingness to skip from genre to genre, but every so often you can forget the flaws and get lost in the many worlds it tries to create.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Labyrinth is strong, but dwarfed by connections to work which have made an indelible mark upon popular culture in a way this album likely won’t. There is still substance to these compositions however: it’s an electronic, neo-gothic record which brims with strangeness and decay.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Be Up a Hello is Jenkinson’s strongest album for a decade and is easily up there with his best work.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Algiers will always be big, bold and unapologetically earnest and while you’d stop short of saying something like they’re a vital band for our times, it’s good to have someone around who cares for them as much as they do.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    As the f-bombs scatter and sloppy seconds diss tracks land hard, Kesha’s integrity and emotional depth leans in too. She may be a Malcolm Tucker of chart pop but there is so much symbolism – and often raw courage – in Kesha’s creative reclamation of her self, it can be dizzying.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A joyous exposition of masters at work. OOIOO are still unlike any other band I can think of. They are resolutely themselves.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    UR FUN is as concise, focused, and sparkling as of Montreal have ever been.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With Mind Hive, the band continue to evolve, surprise and quietly inspire.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The result is very convincing; as much a young artist finding her voice as an AI besting the machine.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Although Seeking Thrills has many brilliant tracks, ‘About Work The Dancefloor’ is still Georgia’s signature song – and a neat summation of her mind set. It seems that while thinking about and working tirelessly on her songs, she can slip into dreams of their impact in a packed venue. Fortunately, Seeking Thrills is often good enough to take listeners to that delirious high with her.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It’s a spun-out, pastoral journey that attempts to unbox and contextualise the ‘now’ within the history of twentieth century Britain, after the end of the First World War. And yes, be warned, it only folds out to reveal itself at a careful walking pace. So you’ll need to buy in and have patience to get rewarded by its – real and significant – qualities.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    This is another incredible addition to Roberts’ Coin Coin project, and one can only assume that when the 12-album cycle is completed, it will be regarded as a singular masterpiece of twenty-first century sonic and narrative art.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An intriguing listen. Just when you think you have it worked out, Souleyman changes the script, and tempo, and you’re back to square one.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With Tunes, 2011 to 2019, a collection of songs released originally in EP form over the last eight years, sequenced by Burial himself and released to commemorate Hyperdub’s fifteenth anniversary, we are able to make cohesive sense of how Burial’s aesthetic grew more expansive and conceptually concise while mirroring our evolution through a decaying society.