Boston Globe's Scores

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For 2,093 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 66% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 31% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 72
Highest review score: 100 City of Refuge
Lowest review score: 10 Lulu
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,670 out of 2093
  2. Mixed: 412 out of 2093
  3. Negative: 11 out of 2093
2093 music reviews
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mosquito
    It’s the group’s most far-flung album, supporting Karen O’s recent claim that Mosquito offers something for everyone.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    English Electric
    It’s comfortable, familiar, expected, and joyful.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wheelhouse
    Per usual, the writing is sharp and the guitar playing impeccable. Paisley cooks through honky-tonk, country swing, the blues, rockabilly, and weepy ballads with assured command.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stories Don't End
    The stories may have familiar contours (love affairs, self-reflection, observation) but the details pack the joy of surprise.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake
    They all take some liberties with the music, but Drake's lonely outcast vibe is well-preserved.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thorn in My Heart
    She wanders back to Nashville for her seventh release, Thorn in My Heart, and doesn’t miss a step.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thr!!!er
    There are a couple of strutting blues-rock winners, a couple affected synth-rock stinkers, but most of the rest, like the infections “One Girl/One Boy,” flash new-wavy funk moves reminiscent of late Chic, early Prince, and prime Rick James.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Life on a Rock
    Chesney returns to that reflective, often acoustic, place for Life on a Rock and again hits a high-water mark.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Modern Vampires of the City
    Now there’s an expansiveness in the music, borne out of a confidence that allows the songs to unfurl rather than rebound like pinballs.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Volume 3
    Deschanel comes from the tradition of singers not technically impressive but charismatic enough to cast a spell. Ward’s fretwork is excellent throughout, and it’s nice to hear his voice on a spirited duet of “Baby.”
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Golden
    Golden puts some welcome bite back into the proceedings with a more minimalist approach to production and a more substantive approach to the lyrics, which gives the whole album a crisper, more present feeling.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mother
    Her return to music is a quiet triumph. For the most part she has flown the Chicks’ country coop for this solo debut, which is a well-curated mostly covers affair.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    More Than Just a Dream
    The group wisely broadens the musical palette here and goes full-bore pop by adding bigger choruses, alluring sonic textures, and electronic rhythms.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Random Access Memories
    There’s definitely an epic heft to it, aided by a deep, varied bench of guest talent.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Once I Was an Eagle
    You’d be hard-pressed to name another songwriter who sounded so fully formed at such a tender age.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wrote a Song for Everyone
    With help from a diverse coterie of peers, fans, and friends, Wrote a Song for Everyone offers fun and fresh takes on well-worn tunes.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Evil Friends
    While the writing has a tight focus and singer John Baldwin Gourley sounds like he’s whispering his thoughts directly to you, the rest of the record bursts with all manner of sonic color.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Partygoing
    Few bands are clever enough to make you feel giddy singing a song called “Keep Your Children in a Coma.” Gonson, as usual, is a refreshingly natural singer, bringing heart and soul to songs that would seem to be bereft of such qualities.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon
    This elegant, elegiac disc is filled with emotionally direct, expressive songs confronting loss and mortality.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Olympia
    Stelmanis’s voice, as ever, remains the focal point, swooping down hard on notes with a tremor that belies just how sturdy her songs are.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With Love
    Hopping from house nods to drum-and-bass winks and into spells of bottomlessly deep garage and bass, With Love isn’t so much a trip down memory lane. It’s more like a really wild shortcut.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fantasy
    Both the pleasure and frustration of Lightning Dust’s first two albums derived from how scattershot the songs were. Brooding and despondent one moment, they would suddenly spike in tempo and mood the next. Maybe that’s why Fantasy, the third release from the Vancouver indie-rock duo of Amber Webber and Josh Wells, is so satisfying as a whole
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sound the Alarm
    Sound the Alarm is the sound of summer.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Every Man Should Know
    The album closes masterfully with “Time to Go,” a look at an older musician and the indignities he’s facing as an opening act far from his peak. It is one of several tracks making this an album that every Harry Connick Jr. fan should own.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Electric
    [Producer] Stuart Price coaxes the best out of the Boys here for some of their finest dancefloor work since 1993's limited edition "Relentless."
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big Sur
    There are 19 songs here, and at some point one feels replete, but they are concise--some in the manner of a sketch that leaves options open, others more decisive, like the sharp coastline vista once the morning fog has cleared.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Big Dream
    It’s a vastly superior record, drawing you in with its electronic, murky ambience and the impression that these songs are coming to you from a singer submerged in water.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amelita
    The multi-instrumentalists expertly weave the country flavors of their fiddles, dobros, and banjos into a beguiling folk-pop-singer-songwriter sound that could appeal equally to fans of their main gig and of artists such as Indigo Girls or James Taylor.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Walk Through Exits Only
    Despite his place among metal royalty, Anselmo remains a convincing outsider, partially because he doesn’t exclude himself from his own rants.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Body Music
    Moving from urgent dance-pop (“Bad Idea”), to minimalist pillow talk (“Friends to Lovers”), to bassy underground undertows (“Lost and Found”), Body Music is the sound of AlunaGeorge just getting started--and they could go anywhere from here.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nothing Can Hurt Me [OST]
    Nothing Can Hurt Me consists of rejiggered mixes of performances released on the band’s original albums. That makes it unessential, but it somehow reveals more new angles on the power-pop standard bearers’ perfect songs than 2009’s “Keep an Eye on the Sky” box set managed over four discs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jessica Pratt
    Pratt’s home-recorded songs are quiet gems cradled in the rudimentary but delicate fingerpicking of her acoustic guitar.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Favorite Picture of You
    In other words, classic Guy Clark.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bakersfield
    Bakersfield gives us two current masters paying homage, not through note-for-note reproduction, but by putting their own reverential take on the music of two country music titans.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Civil Wars
    The tension that fills The Civil Wars, giv[es] the songs a sense of weight and purpose that wasn’t apparent on their 2011 debut, “Barton Hollow.”
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pushin' Against a Stone
    As debuts go, this is a marvel by a singer and songwriter who has no desire to fit snugly into one category. Her talent isn’t that easily contained.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action
    This is the album for people who used to be Franz Ferdinand fans but strayed. It gives them a reason to come back.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Loud City Song
    Nobody else is doing what Holter is doing, and it’s well worth following her lead.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dig Thy Savage Soul
    This isn’t complicated, just tasty, and performed with wit and expertise.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Doris
    It’s the work of a talented rapper who takes palpable pleasure in the possibilities of language.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trap Lord
    Ferg reaches beyond the boroughs and borrows from various regional musical and linguistic influences to create a set of songs laced with introspection, menace, and smartly conceived verses.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Made Up Mind
    While they may stretch out for improvisational flights in concert, Made Up Mind is concise and compelling.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Another Self Portrait 1969-1971: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10
    Arriving toward the end of summer, Another Self Portrait feels perfectly suited for the type of reflection that accompanies autumn.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hesitation Marks
    There is nothing hesitant about this collection of songs which manage to be fraught with heated emotions while simultaneously composed of chilly, fidgety grooves.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
    This is the unusual album that’s beautiful and ugly, tender but tough, and that much more rewarding because of it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tales of Us
    The album has a movie score feel, but this time every track is its own short film.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love in the Future
    All of Legend’s strengths are present: keen melodies, smooth vocal understatement, and artful arrangements.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Electric Lady
    She’s the star of her own movie--and that’s very much what this album feels like--and she’s in charge.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Diving Board
    The Diving Board succeeds where the others did not. It does so by putting John’s piano and voice front and center, offering memorable melodies, and scraping off the production glop to reveal again the musician, the vocalist, the emotional artist still alive under John’s shiny shell of professional fabulousness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mechanical Bull
    The three brothers and a cousin reconnect the dots of their career and interrelationships in an impressively catchy set of 11 songs.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seasons of Your Day
    It’s prime Mazzy Star, the work of a band that knows what it does well. And then does it beautifully
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nothing Was the Same
    Desolation becomes part of the landscape, the canvas on which Drake puts his words front and center. Guests appear on occasion (Jay Z drops by on “Pound Cake/Paris Morton Music 2”), but no one draws focus quite like Drake.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    R Plus Seven
    On tracks like “Americans” and “Along,” this reverence for the synthetic is almost indistinguishable from his zeal for the real, and it’s a tension that gives all of R Plus Seven a unique sheen--and some potent fumes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pure Heroine
    This is the rare debut that’s smart and disarming and instantly catchy.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Old
    What unifies the album is the superb production, which marries indie-rock values to street-rap style.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One Breath
    It’s hard to say what is more ferocious on Anna Calvi’s new album: her voice, her guitar, or the interplay between the two of them. Together they launch a formidable assault on One Breath.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lightning Bolt
    Pearl Jam’s not just still alive, it’s kicki
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New
    While there are a few silly love songs in the batch, some of us still haven’t had enough.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Static
    It’s the love-struck youth of their typical songs striking out against the disappointment, and, like the album itself, coming out on top.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prism
    It is Perry 101: heart-on-sleeve ballads, bouncy party anthems, and brawny odes to respecting yourself.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Do You Love the Sun
    The Boys still sound like nobody but themselves, and to hear them making music again is an unexpected delight.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Samson & Delilah
    Samson & Delilah casts the English singer and songwriter even further afield, a mesmerizing right turn into the murky waters of throbbing R&B and ambient dance pop.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Radio 2
    The follow-up to Robert Glasper’s Grammy-winning breakthrough builds on its predecessor by reframing the sound of contemporary urban music.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Matangi
    The middle of Matangi, including the masochistic grind of “Bad Girls” and the hard dancehall influence of “Double Bubble Trouble,” contains uncommonly straightforward songs that would’ve fit easily on Rihanna’s last two albums. M.I.A. doesn’t stint on the bangers, though.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mug Museum
    This Welsh singer-songwriter wears her love of the Velvet Underground proudly, particularly on Mug Museum, her third album, which jingles and jangles even when the subject matter turns dark.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Under the Covers, Vol. 3
    The whole set is a treat.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Purgatory/Paradise
    The album was 33 songs a year ago, and it’s 32 now, yet it unfurls cohesively like a film.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jet Lag
    Upon first impression, Milosh’s latest solo effort appears somewhat slight, but it deepens and reveals multiple layers with each listen.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Desert Skies
    These “lost” recordings are generally better than anything the band has done since.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love's Crushing Diamond
    Despite comparisons to Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens, Lee creates folky, orchestral, synth-pop soundscapes that are uniquely his own. Where similar music can sound overproduced, Mutual Benefit has an organic, intuitive quality, more like a hearth-side jam session with friends in a woodsy cabin.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Drive All Night [EP]
    The result is a soulful reading that, driven by the sax of the Big Man’s nephew and exhibiting Henry’s characteristic resonant ambiance, ends up on a corner where the Boss and Van Morrison meet.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Because the Internet
    The production is as rich as the raps, spanning pop, underground R&B, club music, and psychedelic experimentation. The project is further heightened by Glover’s knowing irony, his gift for hooks, and his visionary theme.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Grohl Sessions, Vol. 1 [EP]
    In addition to producing the set with an ear for warmth, Grohl plays drums on “Let It Rain” which definitely gives the band some extra snap. And the group’s signature harmonies are lush throughout. Given the title, we look forward to a possible “Vol. 2.”
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Give the People What They Want
    Jones and company sound at the top of their game.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    That Girl
    While several tunes could appear on a Sugarland album, it is a less commercial, contemporary country-sounding release and there is a sense of individuality stamped on the songs.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After the Disco
    Another beguiling collection that merges New Wave and dance sensibilities with winsome pop melodies.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Gloaming
    Appropriately, each track on the debut from this masterful quintet of Irish and American musicians feels like a freshly flipped spade of sod--its ripe turf’s most ancient facets made new just by touching air.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Too True
    Sleek and sophisticated, this third full-length careens from muscular blasts of ’80s guitar rock (“In the Wake of You”) to spectral ballads (“Are You Okay?”).
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eve
    The songs are crisp, uptempo, concise.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles
    A great overall effort.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Burn Your Fire for No Witness
    ["Windows"] sort of upends the rest of Burn Your Fire, an otherwise intensely focused record that sounds like it was written and sung through clenched teeth.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Morning Phase
    Morning beautifully captures what makes this album so rich: that delicate divide between grandiose and intimate.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blank Project
    Recorded in five days with producer Four Tet and musical duo RocketNumberNine, the disc maintains a raw, improvisatory feel.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oxymoron
    This isn’t a blockbuster--no Drake cameo, no Dr. Dre co-sign--but that’s the beauty of it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Riser
    Those elements [musicianship, emotional integrity, and hard work] again make themselves known on his stirring seventh album, Riser.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Slow Phaser
    Atkins’s songwriting has since mutated, so that even songs that would have fit on “Neptune City” (the remix-ready disco track “Girl You Look Amazing”) or “Mondo Amore” (the stomping country-gospel “Sin Song”) represent a progression.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Guilty of Everything
    The 40 minutes of Guilty are a storm of shoegaze, noise-rock, and slow-core, surging together into something lovely and lethal.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dean Wareham
    They recorded this in James’s studio in Louisville, Ky., and nearly each song has a compelling depth.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lost In the Dream
    Tone is everything for the War on Drugs. You hear tone, a silvery shade of effortless cool, in the electric guitars that ring out in ricocheting patterns and in singer-songwriter-visionary Adam Granduciel’s expansive vocals.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mess
    The group deftly submits to the forms and tropes of electro-pop and vintage EBM.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Teeth Dreams
    The rock quintet wastes no time reestablishing its high-energy bona fides on Teeth Dreams.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Arc Iris
    Arc Iris puts Adams through the paces, as a composer of mercurial melodies, a nimble singer, and a force to be reckoned with.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Dotted Line
    The time away has done the California-spawned group good, as the conversation is familiar--intricate instrumental phrasing, pristine harmonies--but also full of fresh energy that lends everything from the buoyant gospel bluegrass of “21st of May” to the joyously bleary “Rest of My Life” an air of excitement.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Future's Void
    When the fireworks gently pop and fizzle out in the last breath of EMA’s new album, it feels like the only way to close such an emotionally visceral set of songs.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wasted Years
    When everything coalesces to take the songs up a notch, especially on “Death Trip on a Party Train” or “Meet Your God,” they prove punk rock knows no age limit.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carter Girl
    This may be the best record this Carter girl has ever made.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Both
    The duo’s self-titled debut’s greatest strength is the pair’s hand-in-glove harmonies. Coupled with Mann’s gift for a pop melody and Leo’s penchant for spiky, urgent guitars, the end result is a best-of-both-worlds situation.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Food
    As Kelis herself once said, “Tasty.”
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lights Out
    You might expect a schizoid clusterbomb from Lights Out, but instead it’s an impressively seamless mix.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love Without Fear
    Even better is Wilson’s return as a performing singer-songwriter on his second solo album.
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