The Quietus' Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 2,109 out of 2374
  2. Mixed: 244 out of 2374
  3. Negative: 21 out of 2374
2374 music reviews
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    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    EUSEXUA
    Excellent. .... The single guest vocal comes on the album’s only misfire ‘Childlike Things’, which bizarrely features vocals from North West, the eleven-year old daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who contributes a rap in English and Japanese. With its sing-song chorus, brattish chanting and self-consciously zany lyrics (“Like a chocolate teapot / Melt ‘em down and burn ‘em up”) it sticks out on an otherwise sophisticated album, and is just plain annoying.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Broke With Expensive Taste
    Just 16 exceptional tracks full of glowing wordplay, instinctively catchy intonation, and effortless genre whisking.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    American Standard
    American Standard is, paradoxically, perhaps the band’s most straight-up listenable record while also their hardest to process thematically. .... It focuses in large part on a life lived with bulimia nervosa. Like the band’s four previous albums and sundry collaborations, these experiences are examined under a harsh, bright, unforgiving light in a manner that’s deeply unflattering but also cuttingly incisive.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)
    For all its conceptual maximalism, gen(r)e-splicing and densely irregular time layering, the compositions here are supremely considered pieces of continuously mutating gracefulness, spacious and expansive, stretched like a long fade-out into timelessness. Equally grounded and spaced out, on Seeing Through Sound Hassell has found an ideal balance of psychoacoustic and compositional values, the most sublime synthesis of tone magic and artistic craft.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Unsound
    Mission Of Burma are excellent, their new album is equally excellent, and an easy contender for best rock album of the year.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Innocence is Kinky
    Innocence Is Kinky is a remarkable album, one which delves beneath the surface and returns with something both seductive and strange.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tranquilizer
    Lopatin doesn’t just wring moments of grin-inducing audacity from the archive, though, but a startling degree of emotional range too. .... It’s a magic trick he pulls off again on Tranquilizer: sifting through the graveyard of our computers’ dreaming and conjuring something enchanting.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Big Fish Theory
    Vince Staples doesn’t care for being labelled a rapper, perhaps, but in just "being himself” he has created one of the finest exponents of the genre this year. Hip hop is punk, it’s poetry, but also it’s party music--Big Fish Theory is an outstanding album that potently shows all of these exquisite possibilities. What’s more is, Staples makes it seem like the easiest thing in the world.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    1985: The Miracle Year [Box Set]
    A vital artefact, 1985: The Miracle Year catches Hüsker Dü at their most inventive, straddling the line between hardcore ferocity and pop accessibility while revealing a potent mix of raw power, emotional maturity and musical ambition that helped pave the way for alternative rock’s emergence from the underground into the mainstream.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Hunter
    The Hunter is an example of how to crossover without selling out--something Metallica never learned--and no matter how many copies it sells, this is the mainstream heavy rock album of the year.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Push the Sky Away
    Cave is always the first to give fulsome credit to his band, and they aim true here in the most explorative, coherent and well-realised Bad Seeds album in years.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Masseduction
    MASSEDUCTION defies expectation, defies definition and defies the very idea that definition can exist. It’s an album detailing the mess of identity politics and power structures, and yet it hits serious cohesive highs. There is no cookie-cutter remedy, no rallying cry, just a baker’s dozen viewpoints of the chasm where we once thought order, power, and meaning lived.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    International Teachers of Pop
    It is the kind of album you can listen to 1000 times, and on every single play a new intricacy will be revealed. The mark of genius is that despite this it never feels overburdened or complex. It is, put simply, an extremely ace pop record.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Terminal
    Circle have reached many great heights over the last two decades, but this new album again attains a new zenith.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Golden Age of Apocalypse
    It's that mix of astral expensiveness and strict artistry that makes Thundercat's debut LP The Golden Age Of Apocalypse as grand and visionary as its title.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Psychic
    The sound of Psychic is meticulous and luscious.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Pearl Mystic
    Pearl Mystic is the best British psychedelic album since the 1990s; maybe more than that.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Thin Black Duke
    By rights no group should be peaking after 30 years of making music together, yet that is the situation in which Oxbow find themselves. Will they ever transcend Thin Black Duke? Such are the ideas and attention to detail on this record, only a fool would bet against them.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Hollow
    A couple of tracks have endings so abrupt they feel artificial. They definitely have me wishing for longer codas and wig-outs. Does she ever let it go on longer? Is this instinct, or discipline? A plan, or just how songs came out? But crucially, where Limbs felt like someone still developing their sense of direction, The Hollow sounds like someone nearing absolute mastery.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    They Want My Soul
    They Want My Soul is focused, tight and impeccably produced. The songwriting is crisp and tight, Daniel's ear for a catchy and upbeat riff have resurfaced.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tago Mago [40th Anniversary Edition]
    When it comes to Kosmische classics, this is an essential. If you don't have this in your record collection, you're doing yourself a massive disservice.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    You Want It Darker
    Sonically, there isn’t the same sense of startling reinvention with the stately sound of You Want It Darker, although it’s undeniably grander, lusher, more beautiful than its forbears; its melancholy mixture of string laments, orchestral flourishes and sombre choirs virtually compel you to bow your head in hushed reverence.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    We Buy Diabetic Test Strips
    Meticulously structured yet fuzzily abstract, cloudily claustrophobic yet aurally vast, it sounds nothing like a traditional rap LP yet definably and definitively adheres to the most crucial characteristics of the genre. It’s certainly a marvel and may well be a masterpiece.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis
    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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Full Moon
    Full Moon is a distinctive and exuberant snapshot of an exceptional journey. It offers yet more proof that Moonchild Sanelly is a singular artist whose colourful aesthetic is not only discernible via her trademark blue mop of braids but in the joyous, sexy and defiant nature of her sound.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sing to the Moon
    The album--an immaculately drawn piece of jazz-inflected pop--is loaded with such originality that Mvula's carved out a niche of her own in 2013's musical landscape.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Old Fabled River
    The Old Fabled River is an exceptional record, a powerful example of a living folk music based on exchanging stories and remaking cultures in the process.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    For the World
    Spare, affecting and hauntingly melodic, For The World is a timeless record, looking back only in a human, personal way--not to some lost golden age, but over a life lived, with all its ups and downs, losses and gains.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    No Geography
    It’s a bold claim to suggest No Geography with its reasonably brief (for them) 46 minutes is up there with the controlled chaos and warped psychedelia of their earlier work, but it is. With its unifying themes of freedom, unity and attack, channelled via the medium of boom and sirens, it really is. After the best part of 30 years, there’s still no one else like them. Amazing.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Weirdo
    That anyone could craft work so head-spinningly euphoric, so joyous and life-affirming, as a deliberate response to the unmooring felt following the death of their partner and amid an ongoing war with their own mental health, is a kind of miracle. But that’s just the start of what’s marvellous about this magnificent record.
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