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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    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Str8 Killa [EP]
    As this accomplished one-two punch attests, Gibbs boasts the rare ability to be both crude and refined.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    I'm Having Fun Now
    I'm Having Fun Now distinguishes itself from Lewis and Rice's solo efforts, or hers with band-on-hiatus Rilo Kiley, by going for a very specific tone.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Red Velvet Car
    Thirty-four years after the band's debut, Heart's dreamboat sails on.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Grinderman 2
    Cave's skill at crafting work drenched with the blood and tears of human flaws remains unparalleled, and makes Grinderman 2 an essential rock and roll document.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Le Noise
    Le Noise is not an epic -– if it were a book, you could read it in an afternoon -– but it's statement enough from a man who's already said so much.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Clapton
    Clapton and Bramhall also have pulled off a minor miracle in assembling an ad hoc group that manages to sound like a blues band whose members have been absorbing one another's abilities to the point of musical osmosis.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Sinners & Saints
    For all its stylistic variety, though, Sinners hangs together thanks to Malo's consistently remarkable vocals. Listening to this guy sing--listening to him sing anything--is an act of pure pleasure.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Age of Adz
    Stevens ventures widely on this 85-minute disc to find the best way to express what turn out to be basic home truths.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Small Craft On A Milk Sea
    Though it might sound like a cold place, Eno's primordial milk sea is often choppy and warm, the kind of rough and imperfect environment where ideas ignite.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Coal Miner's Daughter: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn
    Most songs here emphasize Lynn's signature feistiness, but Williams zeroes in on the deep heartache she's also adept at, choosing her 1976 hit "Somebody Somewhere (Don't Know What He's Missin' Tonight)," one of 16 singles Lynn took to No. 1. There's a full record of this soul-scorching facet of Lynn's music lurking somewhere, for somebody.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Northern Aggression
    L.A.'s veteran indie rocker is on a tear in his third outing with the up-for-anything Miracle 3 - guitarist Jason Victor, drummer Linda Pitmon and bassist Dave DeCastro - fusing Wynn's penchant for Americana rock, psychedelia, brutal punk and extended jams into an intriguingly seductive blend.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Love Letter
    On Love Letter, he does away with the freakiness and lays down a full record of slow-simmered, grown-man emoting. And it feels like a wayward husband who's finally come home for good.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Apollo Kids
    Apollo Kids shows that one of rap's company drivers is still on the speedway--zooming slightly slower than before, but with better pacing and control of the wheel.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Low Country Blues
    It's haunting, often harrowing stuff, but Allman knows this territory well, growling, yearning, pleading for some sense of peace that seems as if it will ever elude him--and maybe anyone who walks the eart
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Kiss Each Other Clean
    Now with his fifth album, Beam may not have abandoned his roots, but he's certainly stretched far beyond them.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Kaputt
    Kaputt is hallucinatory and unstructured, grabbing for whatever it likes in the moment -- it's the radio of Bejar's mind, floating off to sleep.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    100 Lovers
    DeVotchKa creates music that explodes with the desperate passion of someone standing at the end of a pier, or lost in the middle of a desert.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    White Wilderness
    This music reminds us that subtlety is sometimes worth the time it takes to comprehend it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Kmag Yoyo (& Other American Stories)
    Carll is every bit as expressive a singer as he is a writer, drawling his trenchant observations with deceptive ease.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Smart Flesh
    The soul-endangering threat of our current man-machine moment is unlikely to register.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Wounded Rhymes
    She's a mediocre singer with a very interesting voice, a fan of classic handmade pop and the ways laptops can serrate it, and a writer obsessed with sex and with sexing up obsession.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang
    Shaolin Vs. Wu-Tang is his successful quest to return to the days when it was simple, blessed with the wisdom to know which philosophies work.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    First World Manifesto
    More than 20 years in, Screeching Weasel is providing tuneful evidence that one can be childish without coming off as adolescent.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Angles
    Best of all, Angles captures that now-all-too-rare excitement of musicians playing off of one another.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Holy Ghost!
    As a result, Holy Ghost! has created a classic pop album, albeit one dressed for dancing in hipster finery.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Paper Airplane
    Most contemporary country musicians steadfastly bypass the dark territory Krauss and her mates mine here, missing out on the deep emotion lurking within it. The loss is theirs.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Sing It Loud
    Playing with a band of her own (an alt-country collective dubbed the Siss Boom Bang) for the first time in a couple decades, Canada's sometimes strings-besotted crooner has found her guitar groove again.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    So Beautiful or So What
    For Simon, the divine isn't in the persistent hook of pop music but in the most far-reaching of global folk, where sounds, structures and techniques long ago abandoned can be employed in the service of something new and unknown.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Nine Types of Light
    Any TVOTR fans hoping for a return to the band's heavier early days might have trouble with Nine Types of Light, an album full of such a brilliant clarity that the title could be referencing its track listing.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive
    Producer T Bone Burnett and his ace crew of musicians help Earle with masterful skill and deft subtlety.
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