Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 1,600 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 62% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 35% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 Chemtrails Over the Country Club
Lowest review score: 25 The New Game
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,362 out of 1600
  2. Mixed: 176 out of 1600
  3. Negative: 62 out of 1600
1600 music reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shadows in the Night
    His voice raw, pitchy and quivering, Dylan croons his way through elegantly crafted songs with seeming disinterest in flawless takes or perfect pitch. Yet it's profound, thematically devastating and so well curated as to feel essential.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Vulnicura
    Vulnicura is a serious, heavy journey through a rough ordeal, a work certainly too deep to fully absorb so quickly after its release. Like many of her recent records, it's not toe-tapping beat-based music. But fans like myself will find much to love as we explore its many peaks and valleys.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance
    Murdoch, Jackson and Martin treat lyrics as vehicles for dance-friendly expository narratives and snapshot moments.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World
    What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World is the Decemberists' seventh album and sees singer and songwriter Meloy in peak form.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    American Beauty/American Psycho
    The result, at least for the first half, is almost comically exciting, one fist-pump adrenaline rush after another.... Alas, Stump and his bandmates run out of steam by the end of American Beauty/American Psycho.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Title
    She doesn't give you the sense that she's thought through the opposing themes in her music: the individual versus society, modernity versus tradition, dependence versus independence. It all feels as unexamined as her use of certain vocal patterns typically associated with black singers.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Uptown Special
    [Ronson] crafts solid, instantly catchy pop songs, the kind that strive for an everyman universality while acknowledging a rich past of soul-inspired pop music.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Black Messiah
    Rife with the kind of sublimely loose grooves achievable only through instrumental precision, Black Messiah is as vital as it is sublime.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Pinkprint
    If the late-add dance track confuses things, it's hard to fault Minaj. Throughout The Pinkprint, she's intent on channeling her talent to explore and document her many moods. The combination is often, if not always, intoxicating.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    36 Seasons
    It's an urgent, soulfully steely album of hip-hop unconcerned with the genre's current twists into pop structures and woozy electronics.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    2014 Forest Hills Drive
    A deeply skilled empathizer, Cole can put you in his shoes too.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Art of McCartney
    If only the others brought aboard were extended as much freedom to do something other than trace outlines over the contours of this familiar canon.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Alpha Mike Foxtrot: Rare Tracks 1994-2014
    What could have been a random collection of odds and ends--or worse, a nostalgia grab--isn't so much a look at Wilco's alternate-history past as it is a glimpse at ground the band still has to cover.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Pt. 1
    Like the best of such collections, it connects enough dots to leave a listener sated and educated when it's over.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Four
    They're growing up not by going wild but--get this--by relaxing. And the result is their best work yet.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Endless River
    The aimless fragments on The Endless River, on the other hand, are so excruciatingly dull (even by Pink Floyd’s often-dull standards) that the band’s name on the cover feels like a straight-up bait-and-switch.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Broke With Expensive Taste
    Taken as a whole--and heard loudly and with great focus--it confirms Banks' promise, and her great reflexes in collaboration.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Man Against Machine
    His primary weapon--and the quality that most sets him apart from the country stars who’ve surfaced in his wake--is his earnestness. The singer’s aggressive sincerity remains intact.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Motion
    The presence of those strong women [Gwen Stefani and Haim] does wonders for Harris’ amped-up music. They bring out the man, not the meathead, in the machine.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    ...Honor Is All We Know
    Epitaph Records owner (and co-founder of Bad Religion) Brett Gurewitz returns to the producer's seat for this one, wringing a thrashy but precise performance out of the well-seasoned quartet.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    RTJ2
    Headphone rap of the highest order, tracks on this sequel hum and groove, laced with texture and hidden sonic accents.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pain Killer
    As freaky as the production gets, Little Big Town’s crystalline vocals (and sturdy structures by Nashville’s craftiest songwriters) keep the music approachable, even tidy; it’s always heading toward a catchy chorus.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    1989
    1989 is a deeply catchy, sleekly-produced pop record with the slightly juiceless quality of an authorized biography, a would-be tell-all bleached of the detailed insight she’s trained us to expect from her.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Melody Road
    Are these new tunes likely to move arena audiences in the same way? Nah. But Diamond sings as though they will. He's still a believer.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    ...And Star Power
    ...And Star Power is scattered, often silly and mostly inconsequential.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Trick
    While nothing on Trick feels incredibly urgent or revelatory, it's a rare late-night album that assumes you'll wake up next to someone you actually like.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Aquarius
    Aquarius heralds an essential new voice, one that coheres 100 current ideas about women, sex, sadness and musical restlessness in one excellent album.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault
    Whatever the arrangement, though, Nicks’ voice--that signature drone that’s gotten only more appealingly imperious with age--defines the music here. Her singing dominates as easily now as it ever did.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    747
    If Chapman restores some of Lady Antebellum's polish, he still keeps the group moving too fast with zippy pop-country arrangements that rarely allow Charles Kelley and Hillary Scott to harmonize as sumptuously as they're able.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Tomorrow's Modern Boxes
    For almost 10 years, Yorke has carved a determined, idiosyncratic path as electronic singer-songwriter. It’s just a bit disappointing that that path seems short on new directions.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cheek to Cheek
    Shallow, deeply unimaginative renditions [of standards out of the Great American Songbook].
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    PlectrumElectrum
    He and band move through riffs, guitar solos and drum fills with a compact tightness that shouldn't surprise; Prince is a legendary taskmaster. The problem, though, is that half the songs, most obviously "White Caps," don't pop, don't scream for replay and should have landed on the cutting-room floor.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Art Official Age
    If you're looking for a freaky good time, Art Official is your ticket.... An exquisite Prince R&B album.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Offering: Live at Temple University
    You want immaculate structure and production, there are plenty of albums available. You want the sound of life, of a voice summoning all its powers to shake a room and be heard, this recording is waiting.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Syro
    The artist has presented an utterly human, mostly nonverbal defense of his aesthetic: atmospheric, occasionally funky and meandering instrumental electronic tones, lovingly crafted, with imaginative internal logics.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Partners
    Most of the dozen tracks on Partners-- which features duet partners such as Michael Bublé, Andrea Bocelli and the singer’s son, Jason Gould--offer no such vantage [of a whole other way of looking at [a] song].... Yet there is strong work here--four songs that live up to the singer's stated ambition.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Reasonable Amount of Trouble
    His songs have been revered and recorded by scores of A-list rock, folk, country and pop acts, but rarely have his own versions ever been surpassed.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller
    Fats Waller never sounded like this, but he sounds more alive than ever.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Songs of Innocence
    Don't expect a record as breathtaking as U2 at its best. Rather, this is average-grade stuff with a couple essential songs.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Ryan Adams
    The handsome melodic hooks and sturdy roots-music grooves, some of which are downright Tom Petty-ish, provide a hard-won equilibrium in songs about searching for relief from unspecified ailments.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Everything
    What leaves an impression is Grande herself, deeply cheerful yet with guns blazing, an innocent newcomer no more.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Junto
    So much exuberance can be overwhelming when digested in a single sitting. Better to let the record seep in over a number of weeks.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Smokey & Friends
    If the all-star duets record is beginning to feel like a legacy-burnishing obligation, Robinson, 74, sidesteps that vibe on the breezy Smokey & Friends, a would-be museum piece with some real air in it.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Golden Echo
    A remarkable chameleon, at various points Kimbra swings her voice to suggest Chaka Khan, Amy Winehouse, The xx's Romy Madley Croft and Janelle Monae, and weaves her tone through music thick with structural experimentation.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss
    This funny, convincing, unembarrassed collection proves she's no cartoon.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    They Want My Soul
    There's nothing cheap or flimsy about Soul. Each song seems constructed from the finest notes, honed to their perfect shapes.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Breeze: An Appreciation of J.J. Cale
    Eric Clapton calls his new album of J.J. Cale songs an appreciation rather than a tribute, and that word choice gets at the appealingly modest vibe of this record.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Beck Song Reader
    As with any such collection of disparate voices, some of these renditions disappoint, others are inspired.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    5 Seconds of Summer
    Hemmings and his bandmates match these frank admissions with music that’s equally straightforward.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Yes!
    Eventually all this mellow reflection begins to resemble a retreat rather than an advance.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    World Peace Is None of Your Business
    In reality, his strategy was in place from the beginning: to embody the qualities of a villain--self-pity, megalomania, a flair for exaggeration — while presenting himself as a hero.... And it's the same calculated theatricality that powers his latest lashings on World Peace Is None of Your Business.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mandatory Fun
    Mandatory Fun is a stone cold masterpiece.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    1000 Forms of Fear
    1000 Forms of Fear benefits too from the singer’s squeaky, scratchy vocal tone and from ear-grabbing production touches by her creative partner, Greg Kurstin.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Paula
    The record is a failure, a virtual what-not-to-do guide for both songwriters and spurned lovers.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    High Life
    The team weaves electronic tones, human voice and hypnotic rhythms to create a beefy work designed for maximum volume.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Town Called Paradise
    This album is a purposeful move into Top 40 that misses the quirk of well written pop and the sonic inventions of EDM.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    X
    Well-crafted, generous and willing to lay it on thick when necessary, but fun to be around nonetheless.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    While(1<2)
    Deadmau5’s double-album leviathan While(1<2), however, makes room for many new moods while playing with his genre’s formulas.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ultraviolence
    It's a candlelit record, a 3 a.m. record. Turn it up loud and melt into the couch.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Stay Gold
    The group often sounds more derivative than it does inspired, and clumsy lyrics don't help.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    While You Were Sleeping
    In his determination to establish his own lane, though, James has let his once-strong songwriting sag.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lazaretto
    A confident, brash, inventive collection featuring songs that lock into the psyche after only a few listens, the White-produced creation is lyrically and musically challenging and filled with many fresh avenues of exploration, even as it nods to key tones and ideas from throughout the history of pre-rap American music.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Comet, Come to Me
    The music, sculpted by players including blues guitarist Doyle Bramhall and L.A. roots rocker Jonathan Wilson, keeps finding life in fresh sounds.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Sunbathing Animal
    As a whole, Sunbathing Animal sees the band adding more dimension to its wordy, sometimes abstract tales.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Animal Ambition: An Untamed Desire to Win
    The sonic equivalent of a blooper reel with a few solid highlights edited in to remind us of the player he once was, the 11-song album mostly rehashes ideas he's ruminated on with more focus and skill in earlier work.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Diploid Love
    Brody Dalle's first solo album begins with a bang.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    A Letter Home
    Is it essential? Not really. Get Young's "Unplugged" instead. Still, underestimate this would-be throwaway record at your peril.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Me. I Am Mariah... The Elusive Chanteuse
    This record really is enjoyably elusive.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Storyline
    At times this surprisingly strong album feels like a move away from country toward the kind of vaguely rootsy blue-eyed soul in which John Mayer specializes.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Be Kind
    Brash, polarizing, fearless and filled with a purity of vision that would make Col. Kurtz blanch.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Turn Blue
    A pronounced feeling of descent pervades Turn Blue.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Xscape
    Xscape offers a chance to once again be whisked back to his creative prime and recall the man before his flaws felled him, when he was untouchable.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    I Never Learn
    A compact, nine-song, 32-minute album that suggests an artist just hitting her stride, Li's new album seems to have pinpointed the locus of power in her voice.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sheezus
    Throughout, Allen and producer-collaborator Kurstin deliver a dynamic, if lyrically flatulent, album, one that harnesses the full force of the singer's tell-all verbiage in the service of songs built for popular radio with an almost schizophrenic desire for commercial acceptance.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Everyday Robots
    For an artist who has capably proved he can do pretty much anything, Everyday Robots is perfectly modest in its ambitions. But it's still full of winning surprises--even if they aren't as worthy as a pub band sit-in.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Z [EP]
    Tthe album's reach is as powerful as its depth.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Rite of Spring
    The Bad Plus mostly set aside improvisation in an effort to capture Stravinsky's modernist vision, but in some ways it's never sounded freer.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Here Be Monsters
    Langford’s cynical humor is a fixture on Here Be Monsters.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Shakira
    Predictable and flavorless, these songs seem to realize a fear that unfairly gathered around Shakira in 2009 when her album "She Wolf" led some critics to suspect that the Colombian-born star was attempting to Americanize her sound (or had been coerced into doing so by forces in the music industry).
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Recess
    Skrillex is good enough to kill the Brostep monster he created. He just didn't quite finish the job here.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint
    Akinmusire generally resists the swaggering shows of force that can mark some young talents, but the record is loaded with strikingly expressive highlights.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    English Oceans
    The results are muscular and more experimental than you might expect.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Mastermind
    Ross seems on auto-pilot here.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    G I R L
    This is pop music, and it's all in good fun.... I just wish the recipe would have included a touch more poetry.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Morning Phase
    True to his transformer's nature, the sequel is better than the original.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Oxymoron
    Both heavy with bass and filled with memorable hooks, Q's long-gestating major label debut is tight in length and rich with intent.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Blank Project
    Here Cherry proves that comeback [2012's That Cherry Thing] was no fluke.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Somewhere Else
    The drama chronicled on Somewhere Else isn’t just rowdy, it’s borderline illicit.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Music Speaks
    There are signs of individual life here.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Haden Triplets
    Cooder’s production is fittingly raw, putting no phony gloss on these songs brimming with heart-on-sleeve honesty.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Salute
    Here they sag under the weight of too many wind-swept piano ballads and booming productions seemingly modeled on Katy Perry's "Roar."
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Little Red
    Rarely does a single album capture so much of what's right in a country's current moment in pop music.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Have Fun with God
    Though hardly essential for anyone but hardcore fans, it's a solid stab at the subgenre.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    This Is Lone Justice: The Vaught Tapes, 1983
    The song selection suggests a band that had internalized a heck of a lot of country ideas at a young age.... Overshadowing all, though, is McKee, whose voice sounds like that of a young Dolly Parton fueled by Exene Cervenka's passion.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The River & the Thread
    It's an album we'll be looking at in December when it's time to single out the most powerful works of 2014.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    High Hopes
    When your Springsteen itch needs scratching, only a few of these even three months from now are going to pass muster. But it's not like you'll be starved for choices.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    There's a Dream I've Been Saving: 1966-1971
    As spread over four CDs and a DVD, "There's a Dream" is a lot to consume, especially if you're not into Hazlewood's in-your-face approach.... Best, though, are some of Hazlewood's sides with Ann-Margret, recorded in Nashville.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Beyoncé
    What’s exciting about the record, beyond its means of delivery, is how the music similarly blends the intimate and the extravagant.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Mary Christmas
    Mostly, however, she's operating in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir end of the musical spectrum, with arrangements emphasizing massed orchestral and choral forces often overwhelming the songs.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Black Panties
    So-so cuts like "Right Back" and "All the Way," a meandering duet with Kelly Rowland, give the impression that the singer might've padded the album in his determination to get it out in time to capitalize on the renown he's established this year. But then he'll bust out a steamy slow jam as gorgeous--and as generous in spirit--as "Crazy Sex."
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