Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 1,599 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 0.1 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: 1,361 out of 1599
  2. Mixed: 176 out of 1599
  3. Negative: 62 out of 1599
1599 music reviews
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Out of Range
    The band’s fifth album both honors the ideals of classic country rock and rages against it with a freewheeling reflex to push at the genre’s edges.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Thrill of It All
    For all its familiar emotion, though, The Thrill of It All demonstrates Smith’s impressive growth as a vocalist and a songwriter. His singing has gotten deeper and richer.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take Me Apart
    Like kindred spirit Dawn Richard, Kelela veers from the requirements of mainstream R&B to explore her own course, and the result is a portent on the genre’s future.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Colors
    Featuring synthy dance beats, electronic flourish and propellant energy, the record sits alongside similarly infectious endeavors from his impressive discography such as “Odelay,” “Midnight Vultures” and “The Information.”
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Aromanticism
    Breathtakingly beautiful.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Out of Silence
    Yet another compelling collection of expertly and inspiringly crafted songs that remind us just how wondrous pop music can still be.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    1992-2001
    Though Acetone wouldn’t seem a likely band for such a treatment, the project makes a solid case for a historical update.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tell Me You Love Me
    The songs aren’t hackwork--they’re catchy and funny and sexy and daring.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I'm a Harmony
    Perhacs sings of universal truths and natural wonders, pondering sad winds and spiritual growth through lush, layered vocals and gusts of sound. “Eclipse of All Love” swirls with folk guitar and a sung duet between Perhacs and Sansone. Best are the Holter collaborations.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brick Body Kids Still Daydream
    Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is Eagle’s seventh solo album, and builds on his hot 2014 work, “Dark Comedy.” The difference? Scope. Like the composer Stew did in his 2006 rock musical “Passing Strange,” Eagle makes grand narrative connections across “Brick Body Kids ...” and does so through his skills as a storyteller and rapper with a sublimely confident flow.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hitchhiker
    Some songs from Hitchhiker found purchase on Young’s 1979 electric record “Rust Never Sleeps,” but gathered as they were originally intended, Hitchhiker is a profound addition to Young’s canon of campfire classics.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Luciferian Towers
    If you’re familiar with Godspeed’s work, this is far from a reinvention, but it’s also not a record of mourning, as much of the collective’s music has been described. Instead, it feels more like a call to action and creation, even if only to assemble an hour or so of music.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Plum
    “Blue Cloud” vibes like a prog-rock jam minus any pretense. Elsewhere on the album, the five-piece creates gentle beauty during “Charles De Gaulle,” a work that, like many Wand songs, shifts gears two-thirds of the way through, this one with the introduction of tribal tom-toms and bells.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hippopotamus
    Even when the subject matter starts out a little more sober, their unflagging wit isn’t far away.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Dream
    Murphy skillfully layers his sounds for tracks that somehow feel dense and airy at the same time.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Add Violence [EP]
    The five new songs that make up this extended play give it the heft of a full album. Like synth-rock pioneer New Order's early EP, "1981-1982," it contains as many engaging moments as lesser artists' full-lengths.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rainbow
    It’s a vivid account of a woman’s unwanted confrontation with a powerful tormentor--“a bogeyman under my bed putting crazy thoughts inside my head,” as she puts it in “Learn to Let Go”--as well as her determination to leave the resulting damage behind.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dark Matter
    Produced with his usual team of Mitchell Froom, Lenny Waronker and David Boucher, it’s a masterful collection so rich with sonic detail that you almost hope he never gets around to making “The Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 4.”
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Arthur Alexander [Reissue]
    If [the cover of Dennis Linde’s “Burning Love”] the first reason to check in on this collection, which went largely unnoticed when Warner Bros. released it, the reason to stay with it is the exquisite melancholy the Alabama-reared musician invests in just about everything he sings.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything Now
    “Reflektor” lacked killer tunes to go with its propulsive grooves, whereas this album is filled with them--including two separate tracks that recall Abba.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Sounds of Crenshaw, Vol. 1
    The 13 tracks further confirm Martin's limitless inspiration.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Something To Tell You
    The record makes you believe in the image in the “Want You Back” video of three women sharing a vivid private language. It also makes you believe that rock might have a future (even if it’s only the genre’s past).
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    4:44
    As remarkably immediate as it is, though, 4:44 feels durable in a manner that few tweets do; it’s a collection of songs--sly but moving, both intricate and lucid--that we’ll be coming back to for years.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Melodrama
    Melodrama is so much more potent when Lorde is owning her newfound authority, as in the album’s dizzying opening track, “Green Light,” in which she urges a lover to follow her “wherever I go” over a surging house groove that keeps escalating in intensity.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Joan Shelley
    Like her excellent previous album, “Over and Even” (2015), Shelley’s new one is a subtle venture that requires focused listening--put down your phone--to fully appreciate.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gone Now
    These are grand-scaled electro-rock anthems that recall the fist-pumping likes of Arcade Fire and Bruce Springsteen even as they confess to an introvert’s anxieties.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    CTRL
    The music is equal parts aching, brazen and gorgeously honest.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie
    Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, the album finds a pair of consistently evocative artists in full control of their powers.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You're Welcome
    What follows is a weird tangle of backward orchestral samples, bleeps and big-beat drumming. If the record seems messy, in fact it’s the opposite. There’s intention in every measure.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Is This the Life We Really Want?
    Occasionally the music wells up into something noisier and more rhythmically intense; “Bird in a Gale,” with Waters’ image of a loon howling at the sea, openly echoes the trippy deep-space psychedelia of “The Dark Side of the Moon.”
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