The first half of the feature lists the best bands of the decade (Spoon's #1) and then examine the best acts in each genre. The second half lists the 40 best reviewed albums of the decade, which they've had up on the site for as long as I remember.
Metacritic doesn't hold up well to retrospectives. Besides the fact that it makes no distinction between a 90 with 7 reviews and a 90 with 37 reviews, all the scores are based on listening to the albums a week after they came out. Plus since it's a straight mean, a few bad reviews can drag a score way down.
Metacritic is better used as more of a broad sweep to find things you might want to look into.
Metacritic doesn't hold up well to retrospectives. Besides the fact that it makes no distinction between a 90 with 7 reviews and a 90 with 37 reviews, all the scores are based on listening to the albums a week after they came out. Plus since it's a straight mean, a few bad reviews can drag a score way down.
Metacritic is better used as more of a broad sweep to find things you might want to look into.
Agreed. Remember Van Lear Rose? But the rating is not a straight mean; it's a weighted average. Although the weighting--she's a mystery to me :) Sometimes I can't figure, given the individual ratings, exactly how they came up with the final score. But, I will say that most of the most acclaimed albums of the decade did have initially high metacritc scores. That's got me thinking....new thread!
Edit: To get back on topic, what I always wonder is how they come to certain high scores. Let's take Devil's Halo for example. No matter how you weigh the reviews available for this record it's impossible to attain the final rating.
