Tiny Mix Tapes' Scores

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For 2,889 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 42% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Lost Wisdom pt. 2
Lowest review score: 0 America's Sweetheart
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,804 out of 2889
  2. Mixed: 961 out of 2889
  3. Negative: 124 out of 2889
2889 music reviews
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    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wilson Semiconductors [EP]
    Although Hagerty's mercurial inventiveness is occasionally electrifying, it's not clear who will have the patience to comb through experiments that generally fall flat.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Seeker Lover Keeper
    The performances are competent, but the songs, themselves, lack compositional ingenuity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    MU.ZZ.LE
    While MU.ZZ.LE isn't thrilling, in the suspense film sense, it manages to strike a rewarding middle ground between comfort and pain, simplicity and difficulty.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Horror
    As an unsettling exercise in pop terrorism, The Horror is a rare treat.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Attack On Memory
    Here, Cloud Nothings move past the slacker touches that marked their first releases, their gestures getting bigger and broader as they make attempts at emotional universality.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Future This
    If only conviction had been more successfully transposed onto their music, the band could have produced a follow-up that would not have had to contend with standing in its predecessor's large, looming shadow.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tragedy and Geometry
    The music in this album slowly shapes the surrounding substance of the listening space, building a reticulated, synth-orchestrated architecture with countless perspectives.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Golden Record
    As a palate-cleanser for those of us jaded on the overplay of St. Vincent or even the theatrico-folk-foray of Arcade Fire-esque energies, The Golden Record is sufficient and at its best sublime. At its worst, though, it's drifty, gossamer, and chilly.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stade 2
    An album that, despite its hallucinogenic tendencies, is painfully boring.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Let's Go Eat the Factory
    Let's Go Eat the Factory works as an offering to those obsessive enough to be satisfied just to see Sprout and Pollard up on the same stage and little else.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Undun
    The listener need be an equally astute one.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nothing [EP]
    Nothing can be a comfortable resting point, not only for Zomby, but also, symbolically, for the whole dubstep scene, a brief and peaceful pit stop for mental refueling and contemplation of the followed path in the vertiginous, intricate, never-ending electronic music circuit.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Daydream Repeater
    Where it is intellectually interesting, it may not be aurally satisfying.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges
    In Stetson's hands, the sax is no longer an expressive medium or even a madman's toy, but an artisanal tool, a machinic assemblage, designed for catching and releasing cosmic powers.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New Album
    The Boris of New Album never hesitate and seldom falter, realizing the potential they've left untapped for years.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Keep Your Dreams
    On most of Keep Your Dreams, Canyons are trying too hard to be everything all the time. It's obvious they have all the tools they'll need, but it'll be a little longer before they build something really worthwhile.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Spills Out
    The dichotomy between the agonies of face-melting and beatific singing has long been a Pterodactyl motif, but this time the guitar wizardry takes a nonetheless threatening backseat to the structure of the songs.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Narrows
    The sounds sometimes crash and collide rather than meld together, whereas elsewhere, paradoxically, they slide off the ear, a little over-anonymous yet falling short of the unique grey palette of an act like Japan.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bliss Release
    Although the album's been released in the United States a year after it was in their native Australia, the songs have held up quite nicely, memorable and unique as they are.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libre
    This is complex, life-affirming music that's both serious and playful, steeped in tradition yet as highly original and forward-thinking as anything you're likely to hear this year.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ersatz G.B.
    Contains a set of willingly - and often tedious - half-finished songs, forming a clumsy collage (cover art reference) that is actually more coherent and better enjoyed when contextualized within the band's 34-year trajectory.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Parodia Flare
    That Ward succeeds so well in capturing something akin to escapism while keeping things engaging enough to bypass passivity is perhaps the album's greatest strength.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With U [EP]
    It is music with palpable warmth, not nearly as cold as your average techno track.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bangs & Works, Vol. 2: The Best of Chicago Footwork
    It's good. Very good.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pan Am Stories
    Pan Am Stories is an early masterpiece for Knight, an ambitious photographic travelogue constructed out of the raw materials of bedroom psych-pop.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    200 Years
    On 200 Years, Ben and Elisa play their mortality out, unnerved and reassuring, wisely, beautifully.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Far Side Virtual
    Besides adhering to his familiar sonic longings and rather than dampening the message, Far Side Virtual succeeds in exciting the collective memory of that generation now so conjoined to its technological appendages.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Western Teleport
    All told, Western Teleport is an absolute victory lap for the punchiest axis of his 2005 sound
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Solitude of Prime Numbers
    Mike Patton's The Solitude of Prime Numbers stands for the most part as a collection of missed opportunities, which ironically is its triumph.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    50 Words for Snow
    It's human connection despite the odds that has been at the heart of Bush's music from the beginning. With 50 Words for Snow, she casts the theme in a bolder and bleaker light than ever before.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fuck Death
    Fuck Death will blow your mind.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
    In bringing to light these stillborn-again pleasures, The Caretaker reveals himself to be nothing less than formidably eponymous.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Those Who Didn't Run
    It involves not a disconnection from, but an exploration of the material potential in his instrument(s): an excursion to the outer limits of instrumentality, a commitment to resonance as the product of granular viscera: of throats and diaphragms and guts and lungs.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Extra Playful [EP]
    This set of witty pop songs fits perfectly in the musical panorama of the last 15 years: there are no underground rock references, no orchestral pop sensibilities, no vacuous attempts at updating a 'decades-old' sound to modern audiences.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Komba
    On Komba, their beats are deeper, darker, and more powerful than before, pointing the way towards a new direction for the band and, consequently, their audience.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Her Space Holiday
    Most of the songs here aren't even good enough to be considered for a knockoff commercial targeted at the "indie-inclined" twenty-something demographic.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Humor Risk
    Everything is still flawed and everyone unredeemable on this album, but as a whole it doesn't grip completely like past gems.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crazy Clown Time
    Crazy Clown Time isn't a groundbreaking work in the way that Lynch's films are, but that's not to say that there's not a lot of darkling pleasure for the intrepid and the curious.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hello Sadness
    Hello Sadness hits harder than any indie rock record in recent memory because it doesn't really sound like the gentrified indie rock I've grown so frustratingly familiar with.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Impossible Spaces
    There is a generative sense of the perpetual "to be continued" and "to be announced" in both the projects of Benjamin and Torontonian songwriter Sandro Perri.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Parallax
    Thankfully, such peeks of inhibition are brief, and Cox spends far more time confidently beckoning us into the glorious world he's created. For the first time, this is a place where we're to be cohabitants, not merely invitees.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Vision
    There isn't enough unforced spontaneity or meaningful pop-craft on The Vision to sustain a full-length album, and a smorgasbord of tasty synths isn't enough to inspire vision.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Trust Now
    This uncanny sound field suggests a different set of priorities from the usual transcendentalist rock seekers, and Trust Now is all the better for it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Replica
    It's unlike anything else in Lopatin's discography, not just a bold step sideways, but something like an epistemological break from an artist whose work increasingly bears the weight of something like hegemony.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bad as Me
    It's an album from a songwriter at the peak of his powers, having tempered his imaginatively destructive impulses with his affection for all things old, rough, and beautiful.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Animal Tongue
    At its best, when Bozulich is not just casting the spells, but stirring herself into the brew, In Animal Tongue ranks among the most provocative work she's done in recent years.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Lulu
    Lulu is a joyless mess, a grim, humorless record with no notion of when to say "when."
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bright and Vivid
    Bright and Vivid is a solid follow-up, one that delivers the same catchy songwriting as Calder's debut while simultaneously opening her work up to a broader instrumental pallet.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Scintilli
    There is a poise about Scintilli in its strongest moments that was absent even from those early blazed trails.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
    Because of its ambition and grandeur, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming might get criticized for its long runtime, for trying too hard to achieve aesthetic balance and thematic coherency.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ashes & Fire
    Its total lack of affectation is the album's biggest problem. It feels like it's sequenced to fit some expectation of what types of songs an album should have.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Looping State of Mind
    Willner may not have been able to affect us as deeply and profoundly as he does on Looping State of Mind, showing us not only that he has successfully moved past the confines of his early work, but also that he's presently at the top of his game.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mount Wittenberg Orca [EP]
    Fearing that these songs were indicative of indie-pop conformity would not only be ignoring the group's rich and varied history with melody and rhythm, but also underestimating the ingenuity and convictions that Longstreth has consistently boasted throughout his recorded career.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ruins
    Unfortunately, there's not much here to distinguish Ruins from the group's previous work, and too few of these compositions stick once the album is done.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Audio, Video, Disco
    Audio, Video, Disco is simply too unfocused, too half-baked, and too busy hiding its inadequacies with superficially interesting window-dressing to fit in either of those settings--or any other.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Things Will Unwind
    This album is a consistent, expansive collection of modestly experimental pop songs (covering familiar aesthetic territory, and exploring broad and intertwining personal/familial, political, theological, and philosophical themes), and well worth repeated listens and eventual internalization.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Coracle
    Ultimately, this album is a useful index to effects and samples you might want to import into Ableton Live at this moment, but not much more than that.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Emperor's Nightingale
    Emperor's Nightingale takes that smoky Stereo MCs sound to the stadium much more effectively than their previous attempts.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breaks in the Armor
    Breaks In the Armor ranks among the best Crooked Fingers albums.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Aabenbaringen Over Aaskammen
    Casiokids show a subtly deep thoughtfulness coursing their thoroughly joyous songs.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Starry Mind
    Starry Mind is both an effortless listen and a taxing one, blending easily into one's surroundings while also rewarding intense examination.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twirligig
    The album's distinctly lacking in structure or direction.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Creatures of an Hour
    With Creatures of an Hour, Still Corners prove that they can progress beyond this ubiquitous predilection for visual evocation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Original Colors
    Ultimately, High Places have succeeded in doing something that, on paper, seems an impossibility: they've managed to make an album that is undeniably focused around rhythms sound like an absolute slog.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Biophilia
    Biophilia the "Bjork album" stands with the best of them.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    On the Water
    Now, on On the Water, they've paced themselves, slowed down the tempos, and left room for ambience, such that the album's fevered points hit much more poignantly.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Grace of Your Love
    A flimsy and disposable album.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Conatus
    Stridulum was just a warm-up for Conatus, giving Zola Jesus the opportunity to gain confidence in traditional song forms so that she could burst out with a compositionally and emotionally varied set next time out.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Forever
    While Franciotti's work is far from unique in its revival both of lo-fi synth panoramas and of ambient experimentalism, the combination and alternation of the two allows Forever a certain originality beyond other musicians mining either one or the other vein.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    West
    There are certainly moments of well-crafted, spaced-out music, but West is not as overwhelming as it could be. And to be honest, even after several listens, all the songs in West still sound pretty much the same.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Violent Hearts
    Violent Hearts manages to tread the line between familiarly catchy and refreshing throughout.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    How the Thing Sings
    On his latest, How the Thing Sings, Orcutt summons from this compromised thing a droning, sputtering blues that is utterly personal, theoretically rigorous, skeptical of tradition, and completely enthralling.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Hunter
    The shorter form of most of the songs (none longer than five and a half minutes) means that you rocket through The Hunter at what feels like breakneck speed, strapped to an intergalactic, pyrotechnic rollercoaster of awesome.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Freaking Out [EP]
    2011 has yielded precisely one TyM release worth your time, and this is it.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Devil's Rain
    In the end, then, it's not that The Devil's Rain is a bad album, but it's by far the weakest link in the band's catalog, and coming at a time when faith in the group is at an all-time low.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Work (Work, Work)
    It may not be exciting, per se, but it speaks to the ultimate appeal of Work (work, work); even in its drugged-up, mournful state, it holds your gaze.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Winged Victory for the Sullen
    Composed by two musicians at the height of their craft, the album reveals itself, thus far, as the apex of a limited genre still forming and as one of our finest contemporary acts of remembrance and ascension.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Whole Love
    Wilco are just doing what they do best, and doing it better than ever.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Never Trust a Happy Song
    The more you listen, the worse it gets.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Only in Dreams
    No matter how likable all 10 of these songs may be, there's something missing here.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ancient Romans
    Despite these compelling, fidgety positives, those who bugged out to last year's On Patrol (i.e., everyone) will be forgiven for experiencing a sense of deja entendu.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In Heaven
    Twin Sister ultimately make music seemingly wired to appeal to our most intrinsic pleasure centers, and--as befits the album's title--it's nothing short of rapturous.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hysterical
    As good a distillation of pop's best qualities as I've heard all year.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Era Extrana
    It's an agreeable listening experience with moments of catchiness and beauty throughout, and hints of an evolutionary path that leave future expectations open-ended.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    An Argument with Myself [EP]
    Sadly, there aren't many moments on An Argument With Myself that register strongly.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dracula
    It's Nurses' funky dance pop album, and thankfully they've also conjured up some irresistibly catchy melodies to complement them.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Panic of Girls
    There is no sense of nostalgia here, only pure awkwardness and honest decadence that take the definition of 'kitsch' to unexpected artistic levels.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wander/Wonder
    As the album unfolds, there is a genericness of atmosphere that, while not unpleasant, fails to blossom into anything more
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gardens & Villa
    The album tries really hard to be the soundtrack to both your trip to the disco and your trip down the rabbit hole, but doesn't offer any particularly compelling reasons for why you should make it either.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lenses Alien
    As a sophomore set, Lenses Alien is daring and cohesive, layered and challenging.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Soft Metals
    With the exception of a few standout tracks, on one hand we are not engaged with memorable melodies that would lean the album toward the poppier side of 80s synth and its contemporary revival; but on the other, there is not enough complexity here to engage the deconstructive pleasure characteristic of long-form dance music.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Creature I Don't Know
    The strength of Creature rests in its ability to reconcile the energy of her debut album, albeit and perhaps unfortunately without the youthful spirit, and the growth of her second album, without sounding in the least bit labored.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Strange Mercy
    As advertised, Strange Mercy lets us off more easily than it should, but without the promised strangeness.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tha Carter IV
    We know he's capable of better. Whether it ever comes together on a Carter release is anybody's guess, but the prognosis isn't good.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Glacial Glow
    On Glacial Glow, flurries of compositional details accentuate a reassuring aesthetic, inviting us seamlessly into her world.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Coastal Grooves
    As a retro endeavor, this atmosphere may be lauded for its chronicity, but it keeps Coastal Grooves from scaling the memorable heights of synthed-up crooners straddling the art/pop divide (the likes of Bryan Ferry or Donald Fagen).
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Celestial Electric
    Ultimately, Celestial Electric could only have been made now, and it stands on its own merits. As the future sons and daughters of generations come to pass, the genius of Shawn Lee will be widely recognized. With AM up front, Lee is like The Funk Brothers of Motown.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tripper
    The fact that Hella are able to deliver the same thrills, same complexity, and same unopenable exploding package with two members that they do with five is both musically impressive and cognitively relevant to the experience of the music.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thursday
    But by continuing to relentlessly mine the same fundamentally limited descriptions of groupies and Schedule VI narcotics, The Weeknd risks coming off as bored as its debauched narrator.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    There's Always Another Girl
    In a time where it is possible for acts who made their careers in that early-90s cauldron of independent creativity to reform and remake themselves, it seems a cop-out to make such a risk-free album, especially since Hatfield had full creative control. Fan-funding could liberate, rather than stifle, even allowing experimentation; there's no boss to please, only fans to engage. But that doesn't happen at any point on There's Always Another Girl. Just more of the same.
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