All Music Guide's Scores

  • Music
For 7,904 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 67% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 30% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1 point higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score:
Lowest review score:
Critic Score 20
Score distribution:
7,904 music reviews
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    Archer Prewitt returns to the whip-smart pop sensibilities that defined his first two LPs, upping the ante to reveal an altogether new sophistication and complexity that spur his music to unexpected heights of brilliance.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 90
    An emotional and musical breakthrough.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    While The Civil War isn't as exhilaratingly disorienting as A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, it's another triumph; history may repeat itself, but Matmos never does.
    • Metascore: 72
    • Critic Score 90
    This collective has always represented the darker elements of McCaughey's personality, but the depression is kept in check here by Wilco's solid and often upbeat backing, thus playing a major role in the most enjoyable Minus 5 release yet.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 90
    If you say you've heard a better adult pop record this year, you are lying.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    The SoCal indie cowboys deliver an album completely displaying musical, songwriting, and repertory growth from their critically acclaimed self-titled debut.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 90
    McKee's High Dive is simply an awe-inspiring album and easily her finest recorded moment.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 90
    Malcolm Middleton's moody musical constructions -- sometimes punchy, sometimes hallucinatory and somnolent -- positively glisten in the live setting, and serve due notice that the most important trait of the band is its sound.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 90
    What's startling about Sea Change is how it brings everything that's run beneath the surface of Beck's music to the forefront, as he's unafraid to not just reveal emotions, but to elliptically examine them in this wonderfully melancholy song cycle.
    • Metascore: 63
    • Critic Score 90
    They sound more natural than they ever have on record, and Brian Vander Ark and Donny Brown respond by their best set of songs.
    • Metascore: 74
    • Critic Score 90
    Here, everything is balanced; the scope is small, close, and textured by pedal steel guitars, very organic percussion, and Lanois' voice way up front.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    Brainwashed isn't just a success, it's one of the finest records Harrison ever made.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 90
    Don't Give Up on Me leaves no doubt that Solomon Burke is still one of the finest voices of his time, and anyone who has ever been moved by the power of soul music needs to hear this album.
    • Metascore: 75
    • Critic Score 90
    This is a pure country album, loaded with fiddles, acoustic guitars, and close harmonies, but retaining the Chicks' signature flair, sense of humor, and personality.... An instant classic.
    • Metascore: 70
    • Critic Score 90
    #1
    Remarkably varied, lush, and fascinating from start to finish, #1 is a great album.
    • Metascore: 75
    • Critic Score 90
    The focus on a single mood occasionally threatens to lead only to a creative dead-end, but Out from Out Where arguably betters its successors by coming together as a single work.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 90
    Her calm, hushed, clear singing only emphasizes the emotional torment the songs trace. The result is an album on a par with her best work.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 90
    While Silver Lake sounds like a Vic Chesnutt album through and through, it's also a better than average introduction to the man's work.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Critic Score 90
    A truly twisted masterpiece that offers new rewards with each new listen.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 90
    Other records from 2003 have been more innovative and certainly heavier, but Easy Listening is so golden, so upbeat and so perfectly right out of the Midwest's sleeper hotbed of rock that it simply sounds bigger than life.
    • Metascore: 75
    • Critic Score 90
    The concept is brilliant and musically the Black Heart Procession have never sounded better.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 90
    Spoon's most mature, accomplished work to date and a fine balance of fire and polish.
    • Metascore: 67
    • Critic Score 90
    The album's subtle build from bleak electronica to ethereal alternative rock is a stunning accomplishment; his productions haven't maintained this kind of flow since the first Soul Assassins disc.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 90
    Smart, melodic, catchy songs that not only have strong, wonderful structures, but are graced with inventive, clever arrangements.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Critic Score 90
    Yours, Mine & Ours is a truly grand record, another in the string of classic releases by Joe Pernice.... The kind of record fans of intelligent pop music played with real emotion should purchase. Immediately.
    • Metascore: 91
    • Critic Score 90
    Offers up one superb song after another.... Even if you don't consider yourself to be much a Latin music fan, do yourself a favor and check out Canto.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 90
    Dilate proves that the members of Bardo Pond keep finding ways to reinvent their sound, surpassing themselves each time they do.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 90
    A truly passionate and expressive collection of songs that will live long in the memories of all who listen to it.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 90
    It's an album that reveals its charms through repeat listens, and makes a listener wonder how the band can master so many different musical styles via so many vocalists while still maintaining a fiercely cohesive sound.
    • Metascore: 75
    • Critic Score 90
    Shipp, whose restless vision is never clouded by grandiosity or pretense, has become the most important pianist on the scene today. Equilibrium is soul music for the mind.