Uncut's Scores

  • Music
For 11,994 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 72
Score distribution:
11994 music reviews
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    BAG's core values remain intact, but it's an exhilarating advance. [Feb 2019, p.24]
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Memories Are Now is built on stacked voices, sparse rhythm and twisted folk shapes, but the execution varies pleasingly. [Mar 2017, p.32]
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    But though much of the record revels in freaky electronics--'Chores' and 'Winter Wonder Land' rush through as though played by pixellated marching bands--there’s an overwhelming sadness to the undertow
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The result is typically elegant and--perhaps surprisingly, given the circumstances--uplifting work about the affairs of the heart. [Mar 2016, p.80]
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's safe to say this is the most endlessly playable comedy album of the new millennium. [May 2008, p.95]
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A remarkable, genre-defying album. [Mar 2012, p.86]
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These are thoroughly modern songs--and very much Harding's own. [Jun 2017, p.30]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's an exhilarating racket, to say the least. [Sep 2009, p.88]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Andrews' deft touch with an insidious melody and candid phrase extends whatever solace she finds to her audience as well. [Jul 2020, p.27]
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The mess is the whole point. It's a fascinating place to be, largely because she finds so much meaning in everyday observations and mundane ironies, in the small moments many other songwriters might overlook. [Mar 2024, p.30]
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    As frustratingly close to perfect as ever. [May 2014, p.73]
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    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Here are miasmic, dizzyingly gorgeous songs built on the grandest and most romantic, but steadied by the hand of hook-loving classicists. Bravo! [Mar 2010, p.90]
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    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A 21st-century alienated soul album that slips the Eels back into your heart. [Jul 2003, p.120]
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fans of Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal will find more than enough reminders of their glory days. [Mar 2022, p.36]
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Overnight is their most ambitious record, as well as their most accomplished. [Dec 2016, p.26]
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ben Glover makes his fifth album a bringing-it-all-back-home beauty. [Oct 2014, p.73]
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An intriguing new artist has found his voice. [Nov 2012, p.76]
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The overall mixture of anger and longing, fierceness and calm, is breathtaking. [Nov 2014, p.68]
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take Me To The Land Of Hell is one of Yoko Ono's strongest efforts. [Oct 2013, p.72]
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    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bad As Me is the sound of a supremely confident artist convening a raucous celebration of his own myth, and is multifariously marvellous. [Nov 2011, p.78]
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    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's unmistakable, unsettling, classic Linkous. [Oct 2006, p.120]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    They may have defined a genre, but Low can clearly still move forward. [May 2007, p.99]
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lux
    Lux works on a pragmatic and egalitarian level as more or less the ideal ambient record. [Dec 2012, p.66]
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    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dolorous, soulful, a voice that speaks of total commitment--Best Coast are The Crystals of the blogosphere. [Sep 2010, p.90]
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    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zeitgeist comes on with a vicious energy, a jugular-grabbing intensity.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Surprisingly experimental. [Mar 2018, p.28]
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    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The band maintain their impeccable standards for muscular riffage and structural sophistication while still making the occasional flourish that further confirms their shame-free allegiance to prog. [May 2017, p.35]
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The disparate elements feel abstract and abrasive in places, yet the whole is sumptuously melodic and sonically rich. [May 2016, p.75]
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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eating Us is a litle too tidy, their frazzled wildness cultivated into ordered orchards, but on tracks like the typically titled 'Bubblegum Animals,' BMSR still conjure a ravishing, stoned cyber-soul pinic. [Jun 2009, p.83]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    As ever, Case finds room for expansive manoeuvres in the gap between her lusty, orthodox pop choruses and droll, deadpan voice. Still a singer-songwriter like no other. [Jul 2018, p.24]
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She immerses listeners in the remarkably wide range of textures and timbres she explores on chamber organ, Mellotron, oboe and other instruments rarely combined in such fashion since prog's golden era. [Oct 2021, p.27]
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There's so much tunefully wild enjoyment on offer it's hard to pick highlights. [Jul 2010, p.110]
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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Hours knowingly and passionately charts a journey through make songwriting archetypes, from doomed fatalist to well-adjusted realist. [Jun 2014, p.84]
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mountain Moves is a brilliantly executed synthesis of tag-averse weirdness, orchestral pop and easy grooves, stuffed with earworms and whimsy-free. [Oct 2017, p.26]
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    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Both Crutchfield sisters sound more comfortable in their own skin, more confident in their lyrics and vocals, as though bringing all those years apart to bear on the sessions. [Review of the Year 2025, p.20]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There's a surprising warmth to his work here as he gradually fills and empties out these eight immaculately sculpted soundscapes. [Dec 2020, p.36]
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    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There is so much on Nashville Obsolete that impresses, but what lingers longest is rare and persuasive ability to tap into the ageless mythos of true American folk. [Oct 2015, p.85]
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    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    His voice must be heard to be believed. [Apr 2005, p.105]
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bridges high- and low-brow without ever being anything less than exhilarating. [Jul 2005, p.99]
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In this live setting, fascinatingly, the brutality to which the songs are subjected only serves to underscore their poignancy. [Dec 2005, p.100]
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sermon On The Rocks is a wild ride, with producer Trina Shoemaker adding vivid colours to the singer's rolling rock gospel. [Dec 2015, p.78]
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Several tracks are up with their best. [Jul 2006, p.88]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The period-perfect production is a little Dukes Of Stratosphear, though as with Partridge and co, the songs are so well crafted as to avoid any sense of prissy homage. [Nov 2013, p.79]
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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    [Hames] combines the stately emotionalism of '60s torch singers with the all-caps exuberance of a particularly sharp garage-rock band and the eloquent twang of late-period Replacements. [Apr 2017, p.30]
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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Skinner's brightest, punchiest and most eclectic in memory. It's a welcome return. [Dec 2023, p.36]
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The band's love of jamming bears fruit when they find a real groove on "Bulldozer Love." [Feb 2014, p.71]
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    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The manic, galloping "Susie Mullen" proves Anderson's still got a nose for fun. [Dec 2023, p.31]
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nothing feels remotely ‘phoned-in’ here. [Aug 2021, p.28]
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What sounds showy on paper is, in reality, a respectful, atmospheric tribute to the Bard. [Jun 2016, p.82]
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Inspired concept, superlative execution. [Apr 2014, p.76]
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    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The band's core strengths--Loz Colbert's hyperactive drumming, Steve Queralt's incisive basslines, Mark Gardener and Andy Bel's grasp of melody--are all intact. They continue to wear their influences with endearing frankness. [Jul 2017, p.36]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With an empathetic band featuring strings, keys and pedal steel, Castle alternative;y pulls the songs into focus with her clear, honeyed voice and lets it drift free inside them. [Jul 2018, p.24]
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tuscaloosa is an incredibly valuable document of Neil Young in 1973, battling his demons in front of thousands and delivering some of his most deeply felt music. [Jul 2019, p.42]
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    [A] neoclassical treat. [May 2015, p.78]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Last Days Of Oakland is a polished--but not too polished--set of soulful blues. [Aug 2016, p.75]
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Listening to the array of styles, from the Jim O'Rourke-like folk of "Psyche", laced with Martina Topley-Bird's cosmic incantation, to "Splitting The Atom"'s opiated rocksteady or Hope Sandoval's dusky ballad, "Paradise Circus", it's conceivable Del Naja and Marshall needed every minute of those years to concoct such alluring material.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Here [on "Yesterday Is Only A Song"] and on the best tunes of Interplay, Ride feel wonderfully, unexpectedly, younger than yesterday. [Apr 2024, p.36]
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mostly they don't sound like anyone except themselves, multiplied by a thousand. [Mar 2023, p.36]
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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This time the compositions are still thoughtful and exploratory and, although a tendency to emphatic angst dulls on the over-earnest, producer Mark Hutchinson is fully attuned to Dunlop's musical resourcefulness. [Jun 2014, p.75]
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is vintage Roberts, rich poetry couched in spare, beautiful, quietly adventurous arrangements. [Oct 2019, p.36]
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amid the murk, there are still magnetic, rough-hewn fight songs about heartache and ambition. [Aug 2013, p.69]
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    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A weird and wonderful record. [Jul 2002, p.120]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Made for uncertain times, Optimism is funny, clever and elegant, but it’s not a record that seeks approval or constructs a tidy narrative.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album, reminiscent of Jon Spencer at times, exudes a deep love of rock 'n' roll on each track. [Nov 2012, p.77]
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alive As You Are, then recalls a lot from the past, and recent past, but beyond that is simply crammed with great tunes like "Split Minute" and 18th Street Shuffle," the benign spell of which is more than the sum if the material's 1960s parts. [Sep 2010, p.91]
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tame Impala/Pond and Unknown Mortal Orchestra are kindred spirits, but it's KG's hyperactive tendencies that distinguish them. [Jan 2015, p.74]
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You’d be even more surprised to hear that it features 'songs'--proper, beautiful, well-crafted songs.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The edges may be sharper, the outlook less austere and self-contained, but Villagers are still defined by songs which deliver hook upon hook. [Feb 2013, p.82]
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    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This album is made with care, love and expertise and it shows on every song. [Mar 2012, p.80]
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    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Even when the songs feel light, when the stylistic havoc and production is almost absurd, you have to admire the glorious gall. [Dec 2008]
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A modern new-age gem. [May 2016, p.79]
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It sounds, to its considerable credit, very much like the record that might have followed. [Jun 2018, p.24]
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The music is bewitching enough to seduce even those with the severest crystal allergy. [Jun 2020, p.36]
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's an understated yet absorbing work, full of delicate arrangements that are elegantly swept along by Stables' gloriously tender vocals. [May 2015, p.83]
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    They deliver a debut of confidence and conviction. [Oct 2009, p.112]
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So distinctive and confessional is Eska's voice that she's created a British pastoral music that defies classification. [May 2015, p.73]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The south of France motorik and funk bass of "Protéïformunité" similarly reassure, before "Don't Forget You're Mine" charts choppier waters and communication breakdowns. "The Inner Smile" returns to Sadier's central quest, propelling her mantras of sexual and global reg=integration with eruptive, flute-heavy prog grooves. [Feb 2024, p.35]
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Molina's downhome style and tender vocals coalesce with Johnson's frugger voice on minor marvels like "Almost Let You In" and "Twenty Cycles To The Ground", while the tidal hum and strum of "Now, Divide" is moodily unusual. [Dec 2009, p. 103]
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    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Meticulously crafted, haunted and hypnotic. [Sep 2025, p.31]
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    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Muttered vocals and jazzy trumpet combine on the unsettling “God Save The Queen”, and even Mary Lattimore’s harp and Lonney Holley’s graceful voice can’t disguise “Guilty”’s uncomfortable challenges. [Jun 2024, p.37]
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    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Negro Swan sees Hynes thoughtfully explore themes of racial and sexual identities and anxieties within songs that can be a s gorgeously vaporous as "Take Your Time," as ecstatically funky as "Charcoal Baby," or any state inbetween. [Oct 2018, p.24]
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's not hard to work out that these two albums really do function as a double, and certainly represent the group's most complete work to date. [combined review of both discs; Feb 2004, p. 68]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ace
    Incorporates orchestral flourishes and ambitious compositions into a full-bodied, emotionally bruising documents of divorce, betrayal, new love and self-discovery. [Review of the Year 2025, p.23]
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It’s a deep, melodic record, preoccupied – as you might expect from a sixty-something punk troubadour – with dreams, small kindnesses and the end of the world; all of these things feeling suddenly more prominent. [Review of the Year 2025, p.22]
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Proves that even when their studio work was in the doldrums, REM were never less than a compelling live band. [Dec 2018, p.47]
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    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A “Time Of The Season”-like Latin groove powers standout “It Ain’t Over”, syncopated by percussionist Sam Bacco, whose tambourine and shakers are the album’s secret sauce. [Jun 2022, p.25]
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This quartet have honed thier lumbering heaviness into something both glorious and at times funny. [Aug 2010, p.82]
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The effect is kaleidoscopic, as the music constantly moves and morphs to reveal new shapes, colours and meanings. [Jul 2022, p.31]
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    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Several nuggets of power-pop excellence here that rank with the best on 2002's Lapalco. [May 2020, p.23]
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A revitalised rock’n’roll soundtrack for a push towards the brightening of the light. [Sep 2022, p.33]
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Now, at 52, Gelb’s music seems to have found a renewed vigour, a sharper focus. ProVISIONS not only has some lean 'n' lovely boy-girl ballads, wild mood swings and a frequent groove, but also a sense of intent.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The writing, revealing literary influences and the deep, weird old America depicted by, say, Merle Kilgore, is astute, while stripped-down, archaic Appalachian arrangements play tricks with time. [May 2016, p.73]
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    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It all proves that Seasick Steve is at his strongest when he’s playing solo.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wilco (the album) picks up more or less where 2007’s mellow and soulful "Sky Blue Sky" left off, but subtly expands that record’s parameters.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Definitely a return to psyche splendour. [Oct 2002, p.122]
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    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    His playing is smart but no flash, though he does show off his six-string chops with some acid blues bending on "rock And Roll". [Oct 2025, p.24]
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A collaborative project that's all over the map--delightfully so. [Sep 2019, p.29]
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Healy's songs have always been suffused with nostalgia; now, far removed from those innocent days, the poignant pull is overwhelming. [Nov 2020, p.37]
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A cleaner operation than their previous LP, but no less unorthodox. [Apr 2002, p.95]
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    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    he power of Landless lies in their own exquisitely intertwined four-part vocal harmonies, which add spine-tingling beauty to even the most fatalistic lyric, from an achingly gorgeous rework of traditional Celtic heartbreak lament “Blackwaterside” to the adventurously chosen Slovak-language ballad “Ej Husari”, a radiantly lovely murmuration of swooping, cooing, chirruping voices. [Jul 2024, p.35]
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