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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    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Beauty Behind the Madness
    He's aiming for harder truths, creating pop that also works as a commentary on choice and consequence.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    No One Ever Really Dies
    A typically diverse, trippy ride.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Blak and Blu
    The guitarist's musical openness is admirable. But Blak and Blu sounds like he's just trying on different styles
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Egypt Station
    The vulnerability is one of the album’s most endearing features. It skirts the-great-man-stares-into-the-abyss-of-mortality melodrama that has become a late-career-album cliche for many of McCartney’s peers. Instead it presents a plainspoken realism, an earthiness in keeping with his working-class upbringing.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ultraviolence
    Ultraviolence almost qualifies as a parody. Unfortunately, there's not enough punch in the songs to make listeners care whether she's joking or not.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Let's Go Eat the Factory
    This time the hits outweigh the misses.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Do To the Beast
    The album plays more like another iteration of Dulli's solo career than the next chapter in the band's history.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Glastonbury 2000 [Live]
    Bowie at his best was both a crowd-pleaser and provocateur, a pop visionary and an avant-garde subversive. The crowd-pleaser is on full-force display at Glastonbury 2000, but the facets of his stage persona that made him the most unsettling of rock stars are nowhere to be found.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    False Priest
    The hooks are more pronounced and the bottom end beefed up, which gives Barnes' R&B leanings a lot more dancefloor appeal and makes songs such as the buttery Solange duet "Sex Karma" sound better than anything Prince has come up with in years. But the affectations remain troubling.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive
    Maybe working on a novel distracted Earle, but the feisty dust-kicker of old appears to have taken this one off.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hardwired...To Self-Destruct
    It's an album that would be far improved if it were chopped in half.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Caracal
    Pleasantly executed exercise in retro dance pop.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Volume Two
    Like its predecessor, Volume II stands outside current production trends, and it’s built to last on its own modest terms.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Falling Off the Sky
    "Falling Off the Sky" sounds like the work of a band still very much at the top of its game.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns
    Every album contains a few moments of mastery, and Dirty Jeans is no exception.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Seeds We Sow
    Unencumbered by the commercial and ego demands in Mac, Buckingham affirms his talent for turning eccentricity into twisted pop songs.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Write Me Back
    Listeners may find themselves toggling between questioning Kelly's sincerity and admiring his facility as a producer and singer.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dark Night Of The Soul
    Unfortunately, the ambitious concept proves too unwieldy to work as a consistent album.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What We Saw from the Cheap Seats
    Most of the songs are so flat that the singer sounds constrained.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Here Before
    "Is it too late to do it again?" Clearly not.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Jazz Age
    Ferry’s best songs bubble with double-edged nuances and pastiche-style textures, drawing on influences from many eras. The Jazz Age diminishes that complexity, turning many of these brilliant tunes into period caricatures.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Heartworms
    After a decade-plus in which they've evolved from cult heroes to respected major-label denizens, the Shins still prove capable of delivering a few surprises.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Oxnard
    Bedroom jams, cameos and gimmicks pad the album’s second half. Paak resorts to a corny-sounding Jamaican patois on “Left to Right,” a cheesy saxophone disrupts “Cheers,” and Snoop Dogg appears like the avuncular ghost of G-funk’s past on “Anywhere.” After raising the bar with “Malibu,” Paak doesn’t quite reach the same heights this time.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lightning Bolt
    Three brisk, blood-pumping rockers pick up where the band's previous album, "Backspacer," left off.... Things falter when the band's love of '70s classic rock turns musty.... Inspiration returns on the title track, which rides Matt Cameron's roller-coaster drumming and richly layered guitars and keyboards.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Invitation
    It’s a convivial though seldom revelatory collection of straight-up verse-chorus-bridge pop-rock songs.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Welcome Oblivion
    Much of Welcome to Oblivion feels like a 65-minute placeholder akin to a remix album rather than a major new direction for Reznor to pursue.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook
    The album definitely could’ve used a little more friskiness; as it is, a horn-spackled version of Derek and the Dominoes’ “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad” and a brisk run-through of the Beatles “The Word” are the only moments where LaVette busts loose from her always heart-felt, but sometimes overly earnest, introspection.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Fall
    The Fall is ultimately a mildly more adventurous art-pop take on her piano-based cabaret style.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood
    The freshness of Shifty Adventures owes to his love of surprise and subversion.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Wilderness Heart
    Previous albums saw the band go for a murkier, more spaced-out vibe, but this time it's more about concision and songs.
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