The Quietus' Scores

  • Music
For 2,394 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:
2394 music reviews
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It’s a boundary-pushing work that, depending on the listener, could be considered either powerfully engrossing or deeply alienating.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It’s not bad, sometimes it’s even very good, but it ought to feel much more significant than this.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The good news is that BMB still tear it up. These recordings hit like the gut-troubling, sub-bass fists of a sonic pugilist.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heavily drenched in the pursuit of nostalgia, Prismatics is hypnagogic pop at its most loyally rendered, the pixelated synthscapes encapsulating a temporal exploration of an envisioned utopia that has since been lost.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever can be regarded as a lighthearted counterbalance, yearning for both innate and planetary peace while making no concessions concerning personal and artistic perspective.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This latest release, Mosaic, is Fennesz at his most cinematically emotional. The catharsis at times risks spilling into soundtrack-type material, but Fennesz’s trademark textural warmth keeps the music immersive and involving at all times.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    By deconstructing their identity, Saint Etienne have created a coherent sequence of remarkable songs which sound like everything else they have done and nothing else, at the same time. It is a very impressive achievement.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The result is a collection that, while it lacks the retrospective finality of the song-driven True North, a meditation on the passing of time that closed Chapman’s career as a singer-songwriter, nevertheless underscores the idea of Chapman as a guitar player who didn’t need words to express himself. And that’s no mean feat on Tuttle’s part, especially as, coming to Another Tide cold, you could easily believe it was the work of younger artists pushing into new territory.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    While Stein’s arrangements are frequently simple, they are never sparse. Despite the minimalist approach to the songs, the production still sounds full, allowing distant echoing sounds to emphasise what’s there rather than imply what’s missing.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nobody Loves You More is the sound of an all-timer breaking vast new ground while holding her head high.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ballads Of Harry Houdini is more like a spiritual sequel to the rockier and cross-genre Highway Songs from 2016. It feels deceptively slimmer with just six songs, rather than nine. In fact, its total running time is ten minutes longer. Maybe more focused, then?
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    If the start of Too Cold To Hold is faintly predictable, the rest of the album opens up into something rather more unexpected. The band have always weaved elements of hip-hop and jazz into their messed-up punk-funk but here they’ve refined it and pushed it forward. The sounds seem richer and more ambitious.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It is a gorgeous, masterly and strangely addictive album.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The band’s twisted takes on dub, electronica and popular music find transcendence through the contributions of guests, like vocalists Chen and Ben Eberle, live strings, horns and piano, and the nuanced production of Seth Manchester.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Natur stands out in that it is less about the conflict between the two and more about their mutual evolution. Nature and technology are not dueling forces to place against each other, but a continuum that needs to be reckoned with.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cannell’s music thrives most when she takes the airy, washed-out sound of her bass recorder and mixes it with the twinkling, prickly textures and harmonies of a twelve-string harp to make mysterious palettes. .... Much of the music on The Rituals starts to feel monotonous. Most of Cannell’s melodies slope upward, made of ascending slurs that recede into a pillowy bed, yielding little variation. But with closer ‘A Lost Nightingale’, her ideas coalesce into a sombre yet optimistic meditation.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rhetoric & Terror is a multi-textural album, constantly swinging in different directions, resulting in a less immersive time than Nonpareils’ debut. The album is constantly in flux, moving between different states like Hemphill’s mind.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From Kobza’s “trad walz inflected” ‘Bunny’, released in 1971, to Ihor Tsymbrovsky’s wonderfully melodramatic chanson, ‘Beatrice’, from 1996. Along the way we get gems like The Hostilnia’s marvellously doleful rap, ‘Sick Song’, from 1992 and work by the remarkable Svitlana Okhrimenko from Sugar White Death.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    It would take a hell of a reinvention to pull back Primal Scream from this stinking brink. Come Ahead is a record that fails, fatally, to recognise that Bobby Gillespie was always Primal Scream’s least compelling element.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    With Chromakopia, Tyler, The Creator crafts an album that is as much an exploration of identity as it is a sonic masterpiece. .... Collaborators – Childish Gambino, Willow, Doechii, GloRilla, Lil Wayne, Sexyy Red, Solange, and Teezo Touchdown – each adding distinct textures and perspectives that enhance the album’s emotional complexity.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Their eleventh album proves there’s plenty of life in the old dog boys yet.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The songs on Rong Weicknes are also longer than the rapid-fire tracks of their previous two albums. Giving the songs space allows for tricks like the kaleidoscopic way instruments morph into each other. Without a frenetic pace to keep up with, singer Ma Clément also has more of a showcase for her vocals.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The haunting nature of these stripped-down demo versions is reinforced by the spectral presence of the singer, whose persona has inevitably undergone mythologisation akin to other prematurely deceased artists.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Machine is an album of military rhythms, deep sub pressure, rasping bass synths heavy enough to take chunks out of the earth, and massive, driving, low-end drones that occasionally sound like weeping hairdryers. Yet, through all of that, there are glimpses of a melodic melancholia.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One of their most rewardingly mysterious and perplexing releases in quite some time.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The spirit of ‘Pussy Power’ percolates in OneDa’s searing lyricism and rapid-fire flow all the way through Formula OneDa, underlining exactly why she represents an exciting and inspired future for the Mancunian hip-hop scene and beyond.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    For all the proggy flights of fancy here, Absolute Elsewhere still resolutely retains what made the band’s unique take on death metal so fascinating in the first place. Once the novelty of hearing them bust out Rick Wakeman-esque synth flourishes amidst churning blastbeats has worn off, repeated listens reveal the band’s songwriting skills feeling more finely honed than ever, with a consistent (if entirely surreal) logic underpinning the structure of both these side-long movements.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    While Memorial Waterslides (the title itself a perfect juxtaposition of the bleak and the playful) is shot through with a sense of longing and an awareness of the passing of time, it’s also a joyful celebration of creativity, and of a band who appear to have ideas in abundance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A shining, distorted, expertly constructed, open-ended record, that might be Xiu Xiu’s best.