Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 1,598 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 Dear Science,
Lowest review score: 25 The New Game
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,360 out of 1598
  2. Mixed: 176 out of 1598
  3. Negative: 62 out of 1598
1598 music reviews
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    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Everything You've Come to Expect
    The complicated result plainly contradicts its title: For a rock-star victory lap, Everything You've Come to Expect is anything but.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mind of Mine
    A moody, deeply textured R&B album with vibe to spare, Mind of Mine sounds as if it was designed to showcase the effort and inspiration that went into it.... With 18 tracks on the deluxe edition, the album can wear you down with all its finely wrought sophistication, even when Zayn is singing about taking your clothes off.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future
    Barbara, the duo's first album of original material together in five years, often stacks up with their best work and suggests that the ideas they pioneered in the '90s aren't just back en vogue--they've held up amid decades of fast-moving techno.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Is What the Truth Feels Like
    If these Top 40 fixtures make the album feel in keeping with current radio pop, they don't crowd Stefani with unnecessary bells and whistles. Her singing--and, more important, what her singing is saying--is always front and center, which gives the music an intimate quality even at its most polished.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Emily's D+Evolution
    The album is an artistic statement album with a capital "A," complete with an alter ego and theatrical flourishes that hint toward something of a funk-rock opera about death, spirituality and personal identity.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anti
    Her most adventurous by far.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    This Is Acting
    In almost every way This Is Acting feels safer and more ordinary than “1000 Forms of Fear,” with familiar (if sturdy) melodies and lyrical clichés about houses on fire and footprints in the sand.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Blackstar
    Focused on bass, percussion, saxophone and various odd electronic punctuations, the new work is equal parts thrilling and devastating.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New View
    Like avowed influences Van Morrison and Neil Young, Friedberger on New View travels in fluid, seamless melodies, and uses them in service of lyrics that revel in poeticism.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Malibu
    Taken together, Malibu builds on the skills .Paak introduced on his first album, called "Venice."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Buffet
    Overstuffed as it is undercooked.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Royalty
    The music carries a convincing bad-guy energy that’s all the more potent for its sweet, often luscious textures. Its recklessness travels in a clear direction.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    HITnRUN: Phase Two
    A proudly organic companion to the EDM-inflected "Phase One," Prince's latest album shows that he hasn't lost his interest in (or his knack for) the creeping funk and lush R&B balladry he was making in the early 1990s.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Loaded [Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition Box Set]
    The release, available on the major streaming services and as a CD package with bonus DVD (featuring a high-resolution surround-sound remix and two other alternate mixes), offers rich perspective on the evolution of Reed's approach, highlighting an artist in transition, looking for a hit or two and adapting to a new decade.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    25
    Adele’s fans have been waiting for years for new Adele songs to explain their experiences to them. And they get a worthy batch on 25, an album so full of heavy-duty drama that it makes a more lighthearted peer such as Katy Perry seem like a Pez dispenser.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Made in the A.M.
    On Made in the A.M. the group takes advantage of its nothing-to-lose position with a handful of cuts that feel even loosey-goosier than usual.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966
    For anyone remotely interested in how great art is made, [the deluxe edition] is the equivalent of an audio master class as Dylan works, reworks and reworks again the song until it sonically captures the energy, defiance, outrage, empathy, celebration and liberation embedded in the lyrics.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Too
    This quartet appreciates dynamics, surprise noises and curious structural diversions to go with the fury.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Over and Even
    Most everything on Over is built with measured precision.... Equally striking is the musical depth.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Revival
    Far from a scorched-earth rebranding a la Cyrus’ 2013 raunchfest “Bangerz,” Revival turns out to be surprisingly modest, from its midtempo pacing to its thoughtful introspection.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Meow the Jewels
    Meow the Jewels deliver emotional depth befitting nature’s most psychologically elusive creature.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unbreakable
    Together on Unbreakable they [Jackson with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis] create grand-scaled but meticulously detailed songs that almost sound as though they’ve been under construction since 2008.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crosseyed Heart
    Crosseyed Heart could have been issued at any time in the past four decades. It’s full of influences he’s spent his creative life exploring, and there’s nothing viral or meme-worthy about them. That Richards keeps discovering nuance within those original texts is a testament to his seemingly infinite muse.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1989
    The crafty alt-country singer reimagines Swift’s blockbuster pop album as a polished roots-rock disc.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz
    This album is not very good--and what makes it even worse is that it’s by Miley Cyrus.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beauty Behind the Madness
    An impressive and revealing new album full of expertly crafted pop songs with clear-cut commercial goals.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kill the Lights
    Bryan, never a particularly flexible singer, sounds even more wooden than usual in these tracks; for the first time, this 39-year-old father of two seems a bit embarrassed here, which threatens to topple the whole enterprise.... The singer is far more convincing in the album’s slower, quieter tunes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Star Wars
    Nothing ever quite feels certain on Star Wars, an album in which one of pop-culture’s most recognizable phrases--and a 20-year-old band--is flipped into something wholly unpredictable.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Monsanto Years
    This is Young the aged bellwether, raging about the state of the world with the focus of someone with little left to lose.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Covered: The Robert Glasper Trio Recorded Live at Capitol Studios
    Amid so much rewarding yet familiar ground, Covered sounds more like a step sideways rather than forward.
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