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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    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    747
    Whatever chemistry singers Charles Kelley and Hillary Scott had fizzles on 747.... 747 also suffers from baffling sequencing, opening with three downbeat songs and closing with the train-track skip of kiss-off “Just a Girl,” a song with so much modesty and so little finality to it that the record seems to simply stop.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tomorrow's Modern Boxes
    In time, Boxes likely will be seen as belonging to Radiohead’s business-side innovations more than to its musical ones. It’s enjoyable yet slight, a hedged bet on a still-unproven concept.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rockabilly Riot! All Original
    The new effort often feels forced and rushed, with an overdose of stylized ’50s jargon.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    V
    Too often the trend-chasing sounds both tiring and tiresome; that weariness persists through the syrupy album-closing duet with Levine’s future “Voice” costar Gwen Stefani.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Barragán
    There’s plenty of occasion for beauty here throughout, but the band seems intent on disrupting the pleasant view.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Seen It All: The Autobiography
    Backed by mostly familiar trap music production, Jeezy is steady (“Been Getting Money” is especially fine), but hardly inspired.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Time Is Over One Day Old
    A good sound can only support wobbly songs so far, and the middle third of the album sinks into a deadly lull that suggests the band only sporadically knows how to pull off slower tempos.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beck Song Reader
    Many of the contributors give the material a rootsy, rattletrap approach, creating a flat consistency that drags a bit. It’s not until the second half that Beck Song Reader comes fitfully to life.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    5 Seconds of Summer
    The lyrics leave no room for subtext--“Good girls,” goes the kickiest song’s thesis, “are bad girls that haven’t been caught”--and the gleaming instrumentation sounds untouched by human hands.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Strange Desire
    Even the infectious energy of “Rollercoaster” can’t quite overcome a demo-like lack of polish that keeps the songs earthbound even as they reach higher.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Trigga
    Songz follows suit with these gratuitous songs about dominance and bedroom prowess. Unfortunately, he completely lacks irony and tips into caricature.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paula
    While still frequently predictable lyrically, Thicke also occasionally takes a couple of steps away from his formula. But even cursory knowledge of their split makes this public and emotionally messy and revealing ploy for reconciliation teeter on, and sometimes fall over, the borderline into creepy territory.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Is This Heart?
    What Is This Heart? often feels uncomfortably intimate, which cuts both ways..
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Lonely Hour
    The music does its best to couch Smith’s melodramatic overreach in swoonily supple adult pop, but only on “Like I Can”--a grand, reach-for-the-sky imprecation focused more on his rival’s shortcomings than on what he himself brings to the table--does it have enough conviction to counter what he is singing.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A.K.A.
    There is one half of a solid album in A.K.A., Jennifer Lopez’s first new release in three years.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stockholm
    She has her rock credibility to lose--and it’s in tatters after some of the mediocre material here.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nausea
    Despite the deluxe treatments, the tracks on Nausea tend to blend into a blur, and their richness sometimes seems at odds with Vallesteros’s maudlin charms. Fans of “Labor” may be left wondering if beige is really a step up from gray.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Meteorites
    Only a few tunes here--notably “Constantinople,” with brilliant Middle Eastern guitar by Sergeant--approach the energy of classic Echo tracks. Most are slow and labored with monotonously downbeat lyrics.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Animal Ambition: An Untamed Desire to Win
    The MC-entrepreneur smartly eliminates the bloated production that marred his latter-day work, yet the disc is undermined by a dearth of imagination and, ironically, ambition.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Me. I Am Mariah... The Elusive Chanteuse
    What is unfortunately not elusive on the album are a clutch of interchangeable slow-to-midtempo tunes long on pulsating atmosphere--several with distractingly fidgety rhythmic tracks--but short on melody or verve.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin
    While the ambition and musical dexterity is admirable, the work doesn’t feel fully realized.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ghost Stories
    There is, of course, beauty to be wrung from sadness, and Ghost Stories has several lovely passages of outright melancholy.... But it can get a bit dreary and a couple of dollops of other emotions--anger, for one--could’ve gone a ways toward varying the mood.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Turn Blue
    The best tunes are the first and last in “Weight of Love” (where Auerbach unleashes a two-minute guitar solo of vintage psychedelia) and the Stones-like punch of “Gotta Get Away.” Otherwise, most songs merely drift away.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nikki Nack
    Nikki Nack is ear candy, crammed with shards of looped instruments poking their heads above ground like skittish gophers and odd, counterintuitive vocal rhythms.... Unfortunately, too many songs have so much sugar-rush action, like the judder and clack of “Find a New Way,” that they fly apart.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Everyday Robots
    Clearly influenced by Brian Eno (who appears on two tracks), it is an ambient snoozefest marred by listless mood pieces.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pop Psychology
    If [a band] goes back to the well once too often, it can be derided for stagnating. If it takes a left turn, fans may bemoan the change of pace. Neon Trees, the Utah band behind the unavoidable “Animal” and “Everybody Talks,” seem to have split the difference on their third effort.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Do To the Beast
    The Whigs seem only capable of reclaiming their turf in fits and starts.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Looking into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne
    Unfortunately, the longtime troubadour of existential restlessness and uncertainty gets overly reverential treatments here from Don Henley, Lucinda Williams, and Bonnie Raitt, among many others.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sex and Love
    As always, he’s superb executing tender acoustic love songs.... His ventures onto the dancefloor are far less assured.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Louder
    While the turbo vocal bursts on “You’re Mine” and “Burn With You” blend nicely with the poppier elements, several of the tracks, including the burbling “On My Way” and the title tune, feel a bit too calculated and anonymous in their production approach.
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