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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    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Under The Boards
    Chris Conley's juvenile lyrics and whiney vocal tone submerge the band's music.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Field Manual
    Field Manual is, on the whole, pretty solid and the vocals, on the whole, are pretty terrible. In other words, the album sounds exactly like a solo record by a guitarist/producer.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Slick Dogs And Ponies
    Sick Dogs never coalesces into anything more than the sum of its noisy, jagged parts.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Discipline
    Jackson's decision to recycle the nympho routine one more time is just boring.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Another Country
    More coffeehouse than roadhouse, it recalls the tasteful country-pop of her debut, "Bramble Rose," which makes it a step backward in more ways than one.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Last Night
    Last Night is a remarkably impersonal work.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Welcome To The Dollhouse
    Unlike their modestly appealing and tuneful debut, this disc from the girls of the "Making of the Band" series is generic and vapid, seemingly geared more for the strip mall than the strip club.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Anywhere I Lay My Head
    The balance is tenuous, and the "Tinkerbell on cough syrup" effect that Sitek describes in the liner notes as his aesthetic brass ring sometimes comes off more like Scarlett out of her league.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Declaration
    After four years away, Ashanti declares that she's back, but this middling, familiar set of songs is unlikely to reclaim her spotlight.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    T.O.S. (Terminate On Sight)
    After sifting through the storyline, it's just hard to figure out why these guys are important anymore.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Look What You Made Me
    As an MC, Berg is workmanlike with few crisp rhymes and bereft of ideas beyond lining his pocketbook.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    L.A.X.
    LAX spins beautifully at first, but, like a '64 Chevy with chrome rims that hasn't paid a visit to the mechanic in 20 years, it doesn't take long before the wheels come off entirely.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Alphabutt
    Alphabutt doesn't do Dawson many favors by putting her twee infantility into its proper context.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Everything Is Borrowed
    His delightful sense of narrative is virtually missing, and a lot of the verses meander and build to banal choruses.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Red Letter Year
    Much of the album sounds like she's simply going through the motions, occasionally picking imagery seemingly just because it rhymes.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Futuristically Speaking...Never Be Afraid
    A lot of these songs will have people bouncing off club walls with the rhythmic shifts and frenzied beats that merge electro with crunk and house. But this adds up to nothing more than party music with a bit of attitude and sex-obsessed defiance.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Little Honey
    For an artist whose reputation for painstaking perfectionism and poetic acumen is legendary, Little Honey is too much saccharine and not enough substance.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Damn Right Rebel Proud
    Cliché-ridden and full of awkward rhymes and stilted phrasings, his songs are too often fixated on his own bad self, on celebrating his excesses, romanticizing their dark side, and asserting his outlaw bona fides.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    808s & Heartbreak
    It is by far the strangest record he's ever made: a willfully sullen and uncompromising electro-pop album from one of hip-hop's biggest stars.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Universal Mind Control
    Not many of the Neptunes' beats really challenge Common, and his rhymes seem uncharacteristically empty.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    iSouljaBoyTellem
    This follow-up to his commercially successful debut is a mind-numbing bore that has a few well-produced club tracks by Mr. Collipark and Polow Da Don that slightly mix up the successful formula (chant, be inane, repeat).
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    MPLSound
    'Dance 4 Me' cribs the throwback electro beat of 'Erotic City,' while 'Here' should be served with a tall glass of wine to wash down all the cheese. 'Valentina,' the album's most unintentionally hilarious song, is a musical valentine to actress Salma Hayek.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Battlefield
    Safe is only good in baseball, but in pop music it can be numbing, and such dull tunes like 'No Parade' or 'Let It Rain' find the singer trying to inject some life into music even she must realize is D.O.A.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    No Baggage
    She retains a beautiful voice, but this sophomore solo album is undone by a batch of not-so-great songs. She wallows in more melodrama than might be expected, while trying to be self-consciously profound.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In Living Cover
    Jay Brannan means well on his first collection of cover songs. Problem is, he doesn’t bring much of himself to the proceedings on In Living Cover, aside from a dead-serious delivery set against a spare folk backdrop.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Everybody
    While she seems like the twee offspring of Lisa Loeb, she lacks any of Loeb’s quirkiness and charms while retaining the annoying preciousness. Michaelson’s fourth disc, Everybody, puts all her limitations on display.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Circle
    Slick production and beer-ad bombast grease these 12 tracks. Singer Jon Bon Jovi has yet to meet a cliche he can’t work into a song.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My World
    Bieber is indistinguishable from any of a thousand prefab pop aspirants with musical inadequacies that need glossing over in the studio.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Malice N Wonderland
    Snoop Dogg returns on the resurrected Priority label, and the savvy businessman and MC has his ears attuned to the charts with few surprises and only momentary bursts of inspiration.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Goon Affiliated
    He has repeated the same formula on successive sets, and here he simply runs out of ideas.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    F.A.M.E.
    Brown needs to bring the undeniable every time. Unfortunately that's not what he's done with this middling fourth album. Instead, only a handful of tracks truly showcase Brown's strengths.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Here and Now
    The fist-pumping earnestness of the Bon Jovian "Spaceship" is less objectionable and far more bland. Say this about Nickelback: It knows what works.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Papercut Chronicles II
    A lot of this, though, is mired in generic rock/hip-hop fusion that feels dated and forgettable.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Break the Spell
    Unlike Nickelback, Daughtry offers recognizable human emotions, even if they are rendered clumsily.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Purple Naked Ladies
    Syd's uninterest in the topic on the dreary, sporadically interesting Purple Naked Ladies is disappointing, if not unforgivable.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sonik Kicks
    The album finds Weller throwing sounds against the wall and seeing what sticks. Unfortunately, not much does.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Start the Revolution Without Me
    Two songs aren't enough to prop up this Revolution.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Picture Show
    The album feels artistically rudderless.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Believe
    Lyrical awkwardness abounds.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Overexposed
    It marks the first time Maroon 5 has completely receded into its songs' glossy production.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fortune
    "Don't Wake Me Up," a thumping club cut that's irresistible on an otherwise forgettable album.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    No Love Lost
    He sounds completely adrift here, struggling to articulate vulnerability or trying to figure out relationships. More problematic, he seems to have cherry-picked beats off a thrift store rack.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    What About Now
    The best way to enjoy What About Now is to not listen too closely, ignore the clumsy lyrics (“I feel just like Picasso, and you’re my masterpiece”), and ignore that it’s watered down U2 flirting with pop-country.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being II
    Despite two potent blasts, “Gunwalk” and “No Worries,” the disc is both numbingly haphazard and inconsequential.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Reincarnated
    Intentions may have been good, but the result smacks of carpetbagging.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros
    Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros finds the band/collective in the less useful act of simply aping a style, in this case the electric praise music of feel-good Christian hippies.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blurred Lines
    Double entendres are commonplace in pop, but here he descends into wink-and-nod juvenilia.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Moon Landing
    Most of this is too wan to give Blunt a career boost.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    What The...
    By its second track, “Down in the Dirt,” this album has already sunk into undifferentiated aural mud, with 19 more doses of thin drums, buried vocals, and shredding guitar to come.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    ...And Star Power
    This is a mostly meandering, unfocused collection of half-finished sketches.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Motion
    Most of the drops on the 15-track disc disappoint; too many songs never truly take off.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sonic Highways
    Sonic Highways isn’t a bad album, merely a disappointingly bloodless one; after all, one thing Foo Fighters have never lacked in the past is immediacy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hood Billionaire
    The disc ends timidly with two sentimental songs, in an attempt to inject soul into this mostly hollow affair.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Listen
    Guetta’s signature throb--so loud in its way that it almost loops back around to silence--is inescapable, overpowering almost every other song with a booming lushness that’s used seemingly by numbing default.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wallflower
    Save for “Superstar,” which falls just short of being tranformed into a Julie London torch ballad, Krall’s darkly sultry voice isn’t enough to enliven her material.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Full Speed
    The infectiousness and jagged, bass-heavy production in some of the songs (“Like a Hott Boyy”) can’t compensate for the disc’s hollow core.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bush
    All of the things that made Snoop Snoop--his effortless, laconic flow, clever wordplay, and narrative skills--are almost completely absent.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Monsanto Years
    “Living With War,” his 2006 album about President George W. Bush, was a dud, and so is this new one.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Midnight
    It’s a cheesy plunge into dance-pop that shows a crass haste to grab Top 40 radio play. Many of these synth-driven, computerized songs land with a thud.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kidsticks
    Kidsticks swings back toward electronica; the problem is that it’s poorly done. It’s the first time she’s written on synthesizers, not guitars, and frankly it’s a mess.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Day of the Dead
    The few gold nuggets too easily get lost among the many chunks of lead.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mania
    The reworked M A N I A never coalesces into a satisfying or particularly listenable whole; in spreading themselves between sounds even more disparate than on 2015’s maximalist “American Beauty/American Psycho,” Fall Out Boy have only succeeded in diluting their strengths.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Call the Comet
    Songcraft is a problem throughout the album’s 12 bloated tracks, but the fact that they’re long isn’t the issue--Marr can, and has, held our attention before. It’s more that they lack conviction and structure.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    American Standard
    The ghosts of more well-known recordings hover over “American Standard,” and they’re enough of a distraction to make one think that a better tribute to these compositions might have been a Taylor-curated playlist of the versions that originally captured his imagination all those years ago.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Third Hand
    For someone who has dazzled with his sonic imagination in the past, Rjd2 sounds very tentative here.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dumb Luck
    Everyone seems tired on this album: The songs meander, and the guest singers (including Conor Oberst) speak or moan lyrics they don't seem to care about.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Animal
    It’s hard to remember the last time an album so flat and vacuous generated such a buzz.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    BAYTL
    A tired, impotent album for sure, but between dumb and dumber, dumb wins every time.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    O.N.I.F.C.
    He's less dexterous and creative on this interminable 17-song, 73-minute disc as he indulges in all of rap's worst impulses.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Britney Jean
    Nowhere does Britney Jean sound like Britney Spears.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Blacc Hollywood
    The popular rapper’s fifth record is an alarming regression and a head-shaking misfire.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Monuments to an Elegy
    These songs are failed epics in miniature.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Everything Now
    It leaves you yearning for an album that would have expanded the mature melodicism of those three tracks [“Electric Blue,” “Put Your Money on Me” and “We Don’t Deserve Love”]. Instead, their presence magnifies the smarmy, sophomoric awfulness of everything else here.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Duke
    The Duke is an awful, awful record.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Lulu
    The godfather of avant-rock and the popular metal band don't click on any level.
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