Boston Globe's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Good Kid, M.A.A.D City
    The Compton MC's long-awaited major label debut is a breakthrough, as he both resurrects and reinvents West Coast hip-hop.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do
    Apple has been here before, but it makes her new album no less arresting.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Love Surreal
    This sensual song suite about the ephemeral nature of love and what it takes to sustain happiness should end up among this year’s finest efforts.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    The album is a 55-minute blitz of thumping beats and head-spinning rhymes that blur by you before you have a chance to process them.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    To Pimp A Butterfly
    Where “good kid” was a perceptive look at Lamar’s adolescence in a small part of Los Angeles, Butterfly is a weary assessment of his adulthood, and a world that’s bigger, more complex, and more flawed that he knew. If the albums share anything, it’s that they’re both cinematic. But the movie Lamar is shooting now puts the current era into a more fitting frame.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Consolers Of The Lonely
    Not content to merely shake up the music industry by releasing Consolers with only one week's advance notice, the Raconteurs have also had the nerve to drop a near-classic album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    25
    If there are no uptempo blazers on the order of "Rolling in the Deep" or "Rumor Has It," the album doesn’t suffer in quality for the lack.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    We'll Never Turn Back
    [It] seems like the album the 66-year-old singer was born to make
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Divers
    On Divers, her breathtaking follow-up to 2010’s “Have One on Me,” the singer, songwriter, and harpist affirms her stature as a visionary. It’s the most streamlined of her four albums.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Ship
    Simply stated, here’s the experimental-listening event of the year.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Radio Music Society
    It is a stunning achievement in contemporary pop. Yet, unlike so much of contemporary pop, it's timeless.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wildheart
    If there are no obvious radio-ready hits on par with “Adorn,” his massive hit from 2012’s “Kaleidoscope Dream,” there is something more potent in their place: a stone-cold classic not tethered to time, genre, or expectations.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    About Farewell
    It’s a brave account of how you can fall out of love just as easily as you fell in. Like the first blush of a new romance, it is intoxicating.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Way Down Low
    Way Down Low, is one of the greatest vocal albums I've ever heard.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Let England Shake
    Her latest album marks yet another sea change, a clanging, clamoring work of art that's as disturbing as it is moving. Let England Shake is staggering, from its seasick melodies to its visceral imagery of soldiers falling like "lumps of meat."
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Suburbs
    You barely detect it at first, but something miraculous happens on Arcade Fire's revelatory third album. The songs breathe--occasionally in long exhales, sometimes in staccato gasps.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Have One On Me
    Much like a riveting movie keeps you in your seat, you’ll want to pay close attention to Joanna Newsom’s astonishing new album for fear of missing too much of the plot.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Dusk in Us
    The Dusk in Us is, then, a 44-minute master class in wielding extreme art toward human ends, using hardcore’s berating heft as a foundation for dirging experimentalism.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Different Ship
    The result is a stunning reboot.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tomorrow Morning
    An “anything goes” approach to recording, which included opening up to let his bandmates collaborate on the songwriting, pays off in this captivating collection.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    No Cities to Love
    Thrilling and joyous, fierce and focused, the women sound like they’re having the time of their lives sinking their teeth back into the music together.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A New Career in a New Town (1977-1982) [Box Set]
    Even now, more than four decades after being recorded, it still catches your ear as one of the most wholly original sounds in pop music.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Utopia
    Utopia is both resolutely avant-garde and absolutely beautiful, a combination those who associate experimental music with dissonance and ugliness will find utterly paradoxical.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lady Killer
    Anyone who doubted that Green is one of today's most commanding vocalists simply needs to hear how he negotiates moods here and turns phrases with subtlety, wit, and style. Killer stuff.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    My Name Is My Name
    Pusha T is at the top of his game with sharply defined autobiographical tales and defiant, self-aware verses. He often dazzles with his smooth, cold-blooded flow and connects on virtually every song.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sun
    Ripe with propulsive tempos, drum machines, and electronic embellishments, the album sounds like nothing else she's ever done.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Backspacer
    Backspacer, the band’s ninth studio album [is] one of its most cohesive and satisfying in terms of brevity, crisp production, and a sharp focus.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    blackSUMMERS'night (2016)
    His deeply felt meditations on matters of the heart and the soul are matched by the meticulously detailed, gorgeously rendered music that surrounds them.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The 1966 Live Recordings [Box Set]
    The set list for most of these shows was identical, so you get as many as 20 versions of certain songs. For all that, listening through the whole of this box set is an exhilarating experience.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rome
    The great, and only, disappointment with Rome is that once you've heard the album, you'll want to watch the movie it accompanies. Except there is no movie.
Page: