Chicago Tribune's Scores

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For 566 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 51% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 I Like to Keep Myself in Pain
Lowest review score: 25 Graffiti
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 456 out of 566
  2. Mixed: 97 out of 566
  3. Negative: 13 out of 566
566 music reviews
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    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Golden Hour
    Nashville pros help with the production and songwriting, and they keep this album from becoming quite as radical a statement as it might have been. Tracks such as “Wonder Woman” and “Velvet Elvis” drag “Golden Hour” back toward assembly-line country-pop. The singer is best when she upends convention.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Historian
    As good as “No Burden” was, Historian is better: songs like short stories; sneakily hard-hitting arrangements; dreaminess and catharsis, often in the space of a few verses.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    What a Time to Be Alive
    What a Time to be Alive roars.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Little Dark Age
    Little Dark Age does return to some of the “form” of “Oracular Spectacular” with its greater pop accessibility, but it also embraces a less obvious and more intriguing path on several songs.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Freedom's Goblin
    With 10 tracks spread across a mere 36 minutes, Segall’s self-titled 2017 album functioned as an instant career overview. As the longer, less-focused sequel, Freedom’s Goblin comes off as almost too much of a good but increasingly overfamiliar thing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life
    The merger of a furrowed-brow intellect and hip-freeing rhythm has been a Tune-Yards constant since Garbus made her 2009 bedroom recording, “Bird-Brains.” I Can Feel you Creep into my Private Life is both more refined and yet more raw.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    POST-
    His most accomplished album yet.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    No One Ever Really Dies
    A typically diverse, trippy ride.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Savage Young Dü [Box Set]
    Savage Young Du contains nothing less than the foundation of that towering legacy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Utopia
    It’s tactile and visual as much as aural, a continuation of her richly rewarding collaboration with Venezuelan-U.K. electronic artist and producer Arca.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Dusk in Us
    If anything, the songs are more dramatic than ever, making greater use of near-silence and dynamics to underline hooks and refrains.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    reputation
    But the Swift who used to treat her fans like confidantes instead of a marketing demographic resurfaces only as the album winds down.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Revelations
    On Revelations, he serves notice that his sound and vision have returned intact.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Turn Out the Lights
    An album that turns its predecessor’s intimacy into something far more ambitious.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Masseduction
    She drops some of the emotional armor on her fifth studio album, Masseducation, which comes off as not only one of her most ambitious works, but also her most transparent.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Relatives in Descent
    With each album the Detroit quartet retains its deceptively casual air while pulling triumphant moments out of the noise. It can also conjure surprising tenderness when you least expect, or turn darkly comic in one verse, and lash out in the next.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Invitation
    It’s a convivial though seldom revelatory collection of straight-up verse-chorus-bridge pop-rock songs.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    American Dream
    The album gets personal, but in a more low-key way than ever before.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Villains
    An album that makes a virtue of its uneasiness, its unwillingness to settle down. Homme turns his restlessness into a virtue.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Cost of Living
    The Providence, R.I., group’s third studio album, Cost of Living (Sub Pop), marks a step up in production clarity, with Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto slightly altering the band’s balance of power while retaining its not-having-it attitude.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dark Matter
    The 73-year-old songwriter shows no sign of being at a loss for words about the dark comedy known as the human condition. He even puts a new twist on his already unconventional approach to song form.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Nothing Is Quick In The Desert
    Nothing is Quick in the Desert--its 14th studio recording--flexes the group's stadium-rap muscle. This was an album specifically designed to be played live, and some of the subtlety and nuance that informs Chuck D's most incisive raps is missing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Crack-Up
    Most of the songs are not nearly as immediate [as "On Another Ocean (January/June)" and "If You Need to, Keep Time on Me"], with elaborate and often pretty arrangements that hold the listener at arm's length with too-similar tempos and sparing hooks. Pecknold clearly has a lot on his mind, but he pays a price for stuffing all his ideas into suites.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Melodrama
    This is a personal singer-songwriter album outfitted in pop colors. Strings swoop, backing vocals become percussion beds, keyboards are smudged and distorted with dance club grime, beats ascend and then dissolve.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    CHUCK
    The singer goes on autopilot for "Jamaica Moon," a thin rewrite of his Caribbean-flavored '50s composition, "Havana Moon," and "She Still Loves You," a cousin to his forlorn "Memphis." When Berry wanders outside his songwriting safety zone, stranger sides of his personality emerge.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Witness
    Booker soundtracks his anxiety with music that feels more textured and spacious than any he has made previously.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sacred
    The bulk of the 14-track album is more than just a rehash of past glories. Notably, this latest incarnation of the Obsessed benefits from the cleanest production on just about any Wino-related project.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dirty Pictures, Pt. 1
    Dirty Pictures (Part 1) (Contender) comes close enough often enough to qualify as a worthy substitute for one of the Philadelphia quintet's bar-room blowouts.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Humanz
    Amid a series of electronic soundscapes that incorporate club, dance hall, R&B and hip-hop rhythms and textures, Albarn packs the album with songs that speak to the instability of uncertain times.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    Damn. strips down the rhythms to their essence, flavored with the occasional cameo (notably Rihanna and U2). Lamar’s voice does most of the heavy lifting, playing multiple roles and characters. His supple singing complements a variety of rap tones and textures.
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