The Telegraph (UK)'s Scores

  • Music
Select another publication »
For 1,238 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 63% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 33% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 77
Highest review score: 100 Hit Me Hard and Soft
Lowest review score: 20 Killer Sounds
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 882 out of 1238
  2. Mixed: 354 out of 1238
  3. Negative: 2 out of 1238
1238 music reviews
view
per page
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Joni Mitchell at Newport [Live]
    There is no real attempt to deliver definitive readings, with the vocal interplay between Mitchell, Carlile and Mumford on A Case of You shifting from the original’s romantic intensity to loose and cheerful celebration. Nonetheless, there are moments that cut to the core, particularly when guest vocalists back off to allow Mitchell space to possess the song in a voice that may be lower and grittier than of yore, but remains supple, powerful and resonant.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ballad of Darren
    Here, in the company of his oldest colleagues, he [Damon Albarn] takes stock of his past in the most finely crafted songs of his later career. It is the sound of Britpop all grown up.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    You & I
    While You & I doesn’t break any new ground, it’s a spirited and smartly produced – if brief – album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beautiful & Brutal Yard
    As a generation of UK rappers comes of age, Hus still leads the pack with his pitless charisma, linguistic inventiveness, and musical curiosity.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    IRL
    Though certain tracks like In My Head leave you wishing she’d cut through the glistening sounds and breathy choruses with some power vocals, Mahalia’s pen is sharp, and her raw take on relationships and self-development is delivered with the diva attitude of Mariah Carey and the raspy cool of Erykah Badu.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Angels & Queens
    The Gabriels are making thunderous, thoughtful music with commercial snap.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Inside the Old Year Dying
    Here’s what I Inside the Old Year Dying is: beguilingly atmospheric, beautifully crafted, and yet more proof that PJ Harvey is one of our most idiosyncratic artists. It’s wyrd, for sure. But it’s also lwovely.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Speak Now (Taylor's Version)
    Amid all the delightful nostalgia comes one glaring disappointment. When Swift committed to the re-recordings, she promised they wouldn’t lose the heart of the original – and the lyrics would stay the same. But on Better Than Revenge, a bitter rebuke to a love rival, she’s done just that.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stories From a Rock 'n' Roll Heart
    Now 70 years old, she is back on form with her 15th album.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Good Witch
    This is smart, relatable break-up music for Gen Z listeners. But a more moot question, and one to which this reviewer suspects he knows the answer, is whether we need our own Taylor Swift when the real one seems to be doing a pretty good job as things are.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King of a Land
    King of a Land is unlikely to bring in legions of new fans – Yusuf’s Pyramid appearance will hopefully do that. But it’s a lushly beautiful album from one of pop’s master songwriters. Indeed, the medium is perfect – it’s just the message that is a little monothematic.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In Times New Roman...
    QOTSA now know what is expected of them after a decade of commercial appeal: rock ‘n’ roll that’s not too heavy, lyrics that aren’t too vicious. Then they decide to stick their middle fingers up and make what they want regardless.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fountain Baby
    Amaarae – real name Ama Serwah Genfi – has crafted and compiled 14 captivating and refreshing tunes, touching on topics from sensuality to spirituality.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Joy'All
    Above all, Joy’All seems like the work of an artist content with floating through life, just having fun – and she’s brought us along for the ride.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Show
    Horan’s sound of choice is much more understated, typically revolving around folky, acoustic strings and soft vocals. The Show, his third solo offering, is more of the same.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Paranoïa, Angels, True Love
    There are many absolutely gorgeous moments, including a reconfiguring of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major as a ballad of gender fluid love, melancholy dance song Tears Are Soft, the lovely piano ballad Flowery Days and delicate electropop True Love (featuring 070 Shake). But the overwhelming mood is oppressive as it proceeds at a relentlessly mid tempo pace like a kind of stately march towards ecstatic sexual release.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Age of Pleasure
    If I have a caveat, it is that it is all so single minded, it lacks the dizzying splendour of Monae’s earlier epics. But on its own down and dirty terms, The Age of Pleasure is sheer pleasure.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Real Back in Style
    What comes forth is disarmingly honest music that indicates a newly mature era for UK rap.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Council Skies
    Its 10 tracks offer a timely reminder of just why Oasis resonated so widely, empowered by a melodious and snappy songwriter with plenty of heart and soul.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shadow Kingdom
    What an absolute joy it is, in which the grand old man of songcraft flips through his own back pages with genuine relish, a man in his 80’s revisiting the words of his firebrand youth and finding entirely new meanings there.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Mind Wanders and Sometimes Leaves Completely
    Her songs may be about growing pains, but they’ve got timeless appeal.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Soft Machine
    On the whole, My Soft Machine lacks the clarity of Parks’s exceptional debut, and can veer too often into repetition; there’s a lack of journey in the individual songs, meaning you end in much the same place as you started. Her lyrics are, as ever, expertly crafted, but they deserve much more musical supporting oomph.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    But Here We Are
    Unsurprisingly, loss and grief lie at the core of the Foo Fighters’ most succinct and intense album.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seven Psalms
    It feels remarkably intimate: a half-shuttered window into the world of the man behind some of the world’s most famous songs. If only Simon were to pry open said window slightly wider, one would feel more fulfilled – but there’s always future albums for that.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent
    His overdue follow up is absolutely stuffed to the rafters with another round of big, weepie ballads about how miserable his love life is.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Romance of Being
    It's a journey in which you don't need to know the words: this music is a licence to feel without prejudice. Like prayers or poetry, the potency is in the cadence, the rhythms, and the stirring of memory and imagination.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Love Invention
    Her command over that mass of bodies remains.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    - (Subtract)
    Subtract still sounds like an Ed Sheeran album, just one that is not trying so hard to be everything to everyone all at once. Sometimes less really is more.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darkadelic
    By the time Roderick closes out with a fully orchestrated baroque dismissal of a former associate (“I’d like nothing more than you darken my doorstep nevermore,” Vanian politely croons), there can be no doubt that Darkadelia lives up to its foreboding title. It also represents one of Britain’s most idiosyncratic and enduringly excellent rock bands, in thrilling form.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    First Two Pages of Frankenstein
    First Two Pages of Frankenstein is up there with Boxer, the band’s 2007 album on which they thrillingly found their musical feet. This is the sound of a band who’ve honed their sound to such an extent that they’re now towing a whole new generation in their wake.
Page: