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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    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New Life
    A slickly produced collection of largely generic, meandering songs about self-affirmation in the wake of heartache and romantic disillusionment.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Locked Down
    It is one of the best of his career.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Ugly
    At 14 songs and 53 minutes, Ugly is a workout, and there's nary a moment in which Paternoster doesn't seem at risk of losing control to her guitar.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded
    The result is a disjointed, artistically confused release that's not only way too long but also doesn't really ring true as an "album" at all, at least if your definition is a collection of new songs with a central premise or statement that one listens to from start to finish.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sonik Kicks
    It's not until everything slows down for the ballad "By the Waters" that classic Weller appears.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tuskegee
    Acoustic guitars replace glistening synths, bittersweet steel guitars slide in to provide the patina of rural rootsiness, yet Richie still never really steps away from the polished sheen that characterized his musical heyday.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    MDNA
    The album offers evidence that the singer has fallen behind, that she is no longer setting the conversation in a genre she essentially invented - blending Top 40 pop with club music.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The MF Life
    The songs are a bit stronger this time around, but few offer much in the way of great lyrics or real insight as they stick to themes of heartache, heartbreak and the occasional romantic triumph.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Family Man
    Other textures are so skillfully woven in that it's not till the record's last moment that we see all that could've been.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Port of Morrow
    At times, Port of Morrow greatly benefits from the filmy pop-electronica details that Kurstin drapes over the productions....On a few other songs, the weak melodies can't bear out the flourishes and they meander exhaustively.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Accelerando
    Accelerando is a rambunctious yet nimble celebration of the groove that turns as much on the fulcrum of drummer Marcus Gilmore and bassist Stephan Crump as it does on Iyer's restlessly inventive piano.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Sounds from Nowheresville
    The mediocrity taints the entire record and makes one wonder how it all went so wrong.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    One Second of Love
    Sometimes Nite Jewel's music feels so controlled, you can't help but wonder what would happen if she'd lose her head for not just one second, but one minute or more.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Love at the Bottom of the Sea
    The 15-track set reclaims the willfully dinky synth-pop sound the Magnetic Fields renounced in recent years in favor of fuzzed-out guitar rock and strummy chamber folk.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Wrecking Ball
    It'll be considered a late-period record that saw him in good, not great, voice.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    New Multitudes
    These concoctions have inherent charm both from Guthrie's typically pithy, sometimes deceptively trenchant writer's eye and from the foursome's fittingly earnest musical settings.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Black Radio
    Anchored by Glasper's masterful, hypnotic work on piano and Rhodes, and filled with cameos by the likes of Bilal, Lalah Hathaway, Yasmin Bey (a.k.a. Mos Def), Lupe Fiasco and more, it's a sensuous and smoky affair.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Leaving Eden
    The result is a rarity in the Chocolate Drops' world: roots music as useful as it is beautiful.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    All of Me
    The songs are a bit cluttered with cameos from Chris Brown and Trey Songz but they win her independence.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    1966
    A few private recordings have surfaced from the early 1960s, but none capture her essence like 1966.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Reign of Terror
    Nuance and volume are tough to pull off, and though Reign of Terror at times sacrifices the former for the latter, it's nevertheless an often thrilling experience.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Remember Me, Vol. 1
    At 78, Nelson reminds us that his deceptively effortless vocal style can still touch the heart.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Home
    Home may be where the heart is, but Bentley was a lot more compelling when he was poking around up on the ridge.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Paralytic Stalks
    Paralytic Stalks is downright exhausting.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tramp
    Much of that quiet sturdiness derives from Van Etten's singing, which anchors the music even as Dessner fills out his gloomy arrangements with dense indie-noir details.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kisses on the Bottom
    Gentle on the ears and soft on the heart, Kisses might be of no greater or lesser consequence than an easygoing golf outing among friends or a weekend spent digging a garden near the back fence, but its pleasures, though small and sleepy, can be gratifying.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    A Different Kind of Truth
    A Different Kind of Truth is actually not bad; in fact, it's pretty good, all things considered.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Ringo 2012
    His trips down Memory Lane, thematically and musically, yield some modestly charming results here.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Clay Class
    Clay Class, the band's second album, is an exercise in tension.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wonderland
    It's obvious Aoki is a better tastemaker and label boss than producer, but then, didn't we all dream so big in 2005?
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Bangarang [EP]
    The quick cuts that defined his early EPs are more skillful and sonically intriguing [here.]
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Emotional Traffic
    Emotional Traffic isn't dramatically better, worse or all that different from what he's been doing since the beginning.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Let's Go Eat the Factory
    As is the case with most Pollard releases, it's hard to pick a best moment, because catchy new favorites pop out with each successive listen, timed to explode in incremental bursts.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Voyageur
    This is still Edwards' show, though, with appealingly plain-spoken story-songs that share little (in a lyrical sense) with Vernon's willfully opaque word-music.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Which Side Are You On?
    Some of DiFranco's attempts to be baldly political hit their mark.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    For the Good Times
    Norah Jones and her country-music-loving buddies have reconvened for another side project that leisurely follows their sprightly 2006 debut.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Fallen Empires
    Yet for all the textural variety they provide, those welcome cameos rarely succeed in leavening Lightbody's pervasive gloom.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Collections, Vol. 1
    Teebs may not be as acclaimed as Flying Lotus or labelmate Thundercat, but he's making music just as inspired.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Honkey Kong
    Honkey Kong retains an essential lightness that keeps the music on the right side of parody.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [OST]
    Taken together, Reznor and Ross' score to "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" (available as a three-CD set and as a download) not only does its job in service of Fincher's vision, but it's also one more step in the ongoing evolution of a restless musical mind.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Dreamer/The Believer
    He continues to impress and regress.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    TM:103 Hustlerz Ambition
    What he sacrifices in innovation he compensates for with focus and precision.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges
    The album's impenetrable surfaces grow haunting after numerous listens: Stetson may never garner mainstream recognition like his Arcade Fire pals, but he proves undeniably compelling in his uncompromising musicality.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mac and Devin Go to High School [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    Snoop and Wiz make a sweet couple, but this lightweight trifle is unlikely to cement a committed relationship.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Back to Love
    Hamilton neither chases trends nor makes fetish of retro sounds and influences. Instead, he finds powerful common ground between vintage influences and modern production.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sacred Fire [EP]
    Buoyancy keeps "Sacred Fire" afloat.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Dead Son Rising
    Dead Son Rising feels watery and without a center; it reinforces Numan's legacy, rather than his potential.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Undun
    It's both bleak and unexpectedly beautiful.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    El Camino
    Sometimes, a CD scratches an itch you didn't even know you had, and El Camino is that record.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Lioness: Hidden Treasures
    The 12-song compilation is slight on new insights....But as vault-emptying collections go, Lioness helps rebut the tabloid qualities of her life and death, and return some of the focus back to what won her such allegiance--her voice.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Everybody Get Close
    An odds 'n' sods affair consisting of a tour-only EP release, some extant singles and remixes, Everybody Get Close still maintains the cohesion of a studio album.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Whatever
    You have to ask if the tween sector of the 1% just found their house band.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Live at the Royal Albert Hall
    Listening to Adele on these 17 songs recorded in her hometown earlier this fall is a bit like watching a pro running back score a touchdown.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Betty Wright: The Movie
    The entire record feels suffused with longing for an earlier era--or perhaps, befitting Wright's lengthy career, several earlier eras
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Immortal
    Immortal is also, at its worst, way cheesier than "Love," filled with easy-listening strings, spoken-word interludes buried in spooky echo, and curious pacing.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Radioactive
    The record's too long by a third, but Yela's smartmouthed, serpentine delivery (and it's hard not to make Eminem comparisons when Shady executive-produced the record) keeps the thing screwed together.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    50 Words for Snow
    With all seven of the songs clocking in at six to 10 minutes each, Bush takes her time, but the songs aren't built of different parts; it's more like mounting meditations on one theme.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Break the Spell
    This is by-the-numbers arena rock, played with muscular competence by a relatively young band showing off its chops by executing successful formulas.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Talk That Talk
    For all the innuendo and introspection, Talk That Talk contains little sweat, slobber or fluids and a lot of plasticized, inflatable insinuation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Sound of a Million Dreams
    Nail is plowing more fertile territory than so many of his peers who seem content to invoke stereotypical images and situations and then be on their happy-go-lucky way.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Take Care
    Drake shares [Kanye] West's love for mood and never-ending existential analysis.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1 [Original Soundtrack]
    As with all of the installments, half are good, half aren't--all depending on your mood and tolerance for soft rock.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Dreamer
    We get a career-twilight portrait of James and her darker-than-ever voice in a set of moody, bluesy and slow-jam groove numbers.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds
    Not as memorable as Oasis' best anthems in the '90s, or as nasally rock-ready as his brother's latest incarnation, Beady Eye, the album hovers within a melodic good-to-average middle ground.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The SMiLE Sessions
    He [Brian Wilson] more skillfully balanced inspiration and aspiration elsewhere.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Ceremonials
    She's found a way to honor her Bjorkian appetites for lavish orchestral spectacle while finding the depth and subtlety of her voice.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Four the Record
    This successor represents a further evolution of her talent as both creator and interpreter.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Clancy's Tavern
    An eminently dependable outing that's strong on solidly crafted, confidently delivered songs but nearly devoid of surprises or revelations about his artistry.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Audio, Video, Disco
    That push-pull creates a tension that makes Audio, Video, Disco feel like an exciting exercise on the way to something more developed but not a cohesive or particularly welcoming album.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Mylo Xyloto
    Every touch of lyrical bitterness is followed by enough sugar to mask the taste, which might be good in the short term but isn't a recipe for long-term health.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Great Escape Artist
    While the interplay remains incendiary, the textures freshly incandescent, there isn't much in the way of memorable choruses or hooks.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Revelation Road
    She's never tackled [her childhood tragedy in] such a head-on way and in such astonishing depth as she does on Revelation Road, a pathway that doesn't reach understanding so much as acceptance out of absolute necessity.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Soul Punk
    With its sleek club-pop synths, flowery R&B singing and ultra-earnest lyrics about economic hardship and hometown pride, Soul Punk fulfills no known stereotype; it never allows you to tune out, confident in your assumption of where the music is headed.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ashes & Fire
    Embedded in a world of crashing, pounding pop music, Adams' solo rawness brings with it sweet release.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Evanescence
    A livelier album seems to lurk inside this one, struggling to sneak past its creator.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    How Do You Do
    The production makes stellar use of his major-label money; the sound is refined and dynamic in a way that's wholly missing from pop radio.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams
    Though some of the singers struggle with adding fullness to lyrics that could sound overly simplistic in the wrong hands, the legacy of Williams seems most alive, in almost a ventriloquist form, in Alan Jackson's "You've Been Lonesome, Too."
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Metals
    What a beautiful record. Truly gorgeous, the kind that wins both hearts and awards--perfect for a dinner party, a drive along Pacific Coast Highway, or a good, healthy cry.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Working in Tennessee
    Merle Haggard may be 74 but he sounds utterly playful in the title track of his new album, one of his strongest collections in a couple of decades.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Conatus
    Toward the end of this thoroughly bewitching album, Danilova even dispenses with the security-blanket gloom, singing a stark piano ballad not far removed from Adele's "Someone Like You."
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Cole World: The Sideline Story
    The result of all that experience is the satisfying confidence with which J. Cole delivers his rhymes, in many cases over slickly inventive beats he crafted himself....But J. Cole's early-onset veteran status also saps some of the energy you'd hope to hear on a debut as feverishly anticipated as this one.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lady & Gentlemen
    Her leaner, meaner approach to a batch of classic country songs for her latest collection is mostly good news.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Whole Love
    The result on The Whole Love is a work by a group of exceptional musicians who, four years into their collaboration, have melded into one.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    SuperHeavy
    This collaboration between one unequivocal superstar and four bright lights from disparate fields--Mick Jagger, Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and A.R. Rahman--yields enough inspired results to ward off fears of any cross-cultural train wrecks.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Duets II
    Bennett fares better in gorgeous duets with k.d. lang and Aretha Franklin, and his romp with Willie Nelson is precisely as charming as you'd expect. But for an old pro like Bennett, there's a name for that kind of stuff: child's play.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Night of Hunters
    Not only is she an artist maturing and growing with her music, but in great Amos fashion, she is making sense of her past in a wholly original, intelligent way. And at this stage of her career, she's earned the right to a few spirit guides.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Worship Music
    On the (relatively) bright side, there's the root-level pleasure of hearing hard-boiled riffs performed with a minimum of fuss.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Relax
    Relax is Das Racist's first commercial release, yet it shares the dense sprawl and uncomfortable laughs of the group's previous Internet mixtapes.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Strange Mercy
    On her third work, Strange Mercy, her facility with song craft is no less compelling for its cerebral beauty, but too often that cool, constructed quality stands between its maker and the wild bramble of the song.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Own the Night
    Not surprisingly, everything sounds bigger, brighter and shinier than on Lady A's first two albums. That'll probably go over well with fans of grandiose country pop, but the all-stops-out production gradually loses impact.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Wild Flag
    The problem is that too many of these songs just don't swing - they happen and then they're done, but they don't stick in the head.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hurricane
    No one intones like the stentorian Warhol muse -- and then she breaks into vibrato-driven song, throbbing and strong.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Here for a Good Time
    Most of the rest of the material is classic Strait-style lite country, his eminently easygoing tenor effortlessly handling songs that skim the surface rather than plumb the depths of life. In doing so, at least he keeps the promise of the album's title.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Seeds We Sow
    Seeds We Sow is thornier than Buckingham's material for Fleetwood Mac, with an emphasis on his percussive, sometimes-discordant acoustic guitar playing and on his intimately recorded vocals, which in a stripped-down rendition of the Rolling Stones' "She Smiled Sweetly" push intriguingly at whatever border separates passionate from creepy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    In the Grace of Your Love
    This album might actually be a devotional record of sorts--to downtown New York's musical DNA, and to the idea that dancefloor hedonism can be its own kind of grace.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Keeper
    With Keeper, Doe beautifully balances a rocker's heart and a poet's soul.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    I'm with You
    The rest of it, though, is stuff that will probably sound just fine beneath NFL highlight reels but fails to gel when the volume is up and California 2011 beckons.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    World Wide Rebel Songs
    What Morello lacks in subtlety, he makes up for in visceral feeling.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    La Liberacion
    the atypical sincerity of La Liberacion suggests that something--whether the burdens of relentless sexiness or beating pop music at its own game too soon--still does.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Ghost on the Canvas
    The handsome arrangements only emphasize the vulnerability of Campbell's vocals, which flirt with a sense of exploitation that's difficult to shake while listening to this undeniably moving album.
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