MTV.com's Scores

  • Music
For 75 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 74% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 25% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 XTRMNTR
Lowest review score: 20 Songs From an American Movie Vol. One: Learning How to Smile
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 61 out of 75
  2. Negative: 6 out of 75
75 music reviews
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So ... How's Your Girl? ... mental infomercial, fashion Trojan horse, soundtrack to a movie we may never see, sheer genius ... uh huh, it's all that and so much more. Handsome Boy Modeling School is your ticket to a better quality of life.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One of the better pop albums of 2000, a multi-faceted offering that resists easy labeling while extending the band's mighty grip on the popular imagination.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    [A] tighter, indigo-deeper, more vision cohesive joint than its predecessor.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Spare as the overall sound of the album is, the interplay between the rhythms, samples and voices is vibrant and eloquent...
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghosts & Flowers, like Sonic Youth's landmark Daydream Nation album, forces the listener to listen very carefully for subtle moments of beauty amidst the near silence and the absolute chaos.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smith retains the Lennon-esque simplicity and quirky lyrical phrasing that earned him critical praise in the past even as he digs deeper into his psyche and attempts to work through an off-kilter world.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Remarkably mature and absorbing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jakob Dylan and his team have fashioned an album that's longer on big guitars, crunchy grooves and cool changes than overt confessionals. All told, Breach is a subtle, seamless effort with nary a lull or misstep -- in contrast to its multiplatinum predecessor, the second half of which suffered from a series of pedestrian songs.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trickle sounds-feels-smells like both artistic breakthrough and new millennial trip-hop watershed.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From the double album's first echoes of guitar and strings to its droning denouement, godspeed you black emperor! creates a musical soundscape that alternates between flashes of sonic brilliance and moments of quiet ecstasy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    13
    Despite all this experimentation, Blur still sneaks in perfect pop nuggets such as "Coffee & TV," where cheery harmonies share space with a squealing guitar.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Movement in Still Life is a wildly effervescent, effortless sonic bouillabaisse that works dance, rock, hip-hop, pop, new age, trance, house, you-name-it simultaneously and makes it look easy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An album far better than the last. It's full of clever, upbeat songs and comes close to blending the lyrical and melodic brilliance of their first album, Gordon, with the energy of their live album, Rock Spectacle.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gone is the preciousness of Elastica. Instead we get a confident and comfortable Frischmann, her voice, ever cool, fronting a rejuvenated punk-loving band.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A beautifully seamless ambient work full of lullabies and dreamscapes?
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The result (smells like the blues, bubbles like funk-rock, burns like hip-hop) is some strange new kinda rock 'n rhyme stew... Eat At Whitey's is like nothing else that's happenin' right now.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The seamless integration of acoustic strumming, post-collegiate lyrical references, crystalline ambiance and overall etherealness of the entire album make With Ghost an album that certainly stands on its own.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This time around, LL goes deep and scores with his most consistent, diverse, adventurous, dome blowing/SUV-bumping set of tunes since the Mama Said album...
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Januaries is a most promising first effort.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like any good party, it's the music and the guests that make Bridging the Gap so memorable.... Each track is so strong and willfully catchy that you may forget who's driving the soul train.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The collection of songs on Horrorscope is a rollicking batch of hooky tunes
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Probably the last good album we can realistically expect from Pearl Jam.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    At their worst, Deftones can sound almost like a parody of themselves. But at their best, the band fashions a heavy, claustrophobic atmosphere in which Moreno spins his dark, personal tales of misery and heartbreak against a backdrop of music that careens from the ugly to the beautiful. Most of the time, White Pony finds Deftones at their best.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Toward the end of Man or Astro-Man?'s A Spectrum of Infinite Scale there is a track called "A Simple Text File" which is nothing more than a recording of a dot matrix printer producing a hard copy of... a simple text file!... If only the rest of the album were this intensely cool.... Every great leap forward on Spectrum is accompanied by an equal and negative small step backwards...
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The slick strings and piano emphasized later in the album aren't as moving as the cascading guitar and Enigk's vulnerable-boy vanity.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    That's right, we're talking stadium rock.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gone is the sweeping piano and oozing horns of previous albums. Gone too is the pop sensibility that permeated Dusk, Mind Bomb, Soul Mining, and others. Matt Johnson has never been a pop artist, but he can craft amazing melodies. However, Johnson has hit a new level of menace here, like he's become a subterranean dweller since 1993. It's musically more free form and grittier. This takes some adjustment.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's clear that Air didn't spend a whole lot of time on these tracks, since most of the music here revolves around a couple of musical motifs and none are as densely complex as their previous work. However, this reductionist approach serves its purpose and, although conceptually a far cry from Moon Safari -- for obvious reasons -- The Virgin Suicides nonetheless fits well within Air's modus operandi.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Very unique and very, very good....the songs on Righteous Love are brimming with the sorts of influences that you don't hear too much on the radio today: gender-bending atmospherics... Sly Stone/bar-rock amalgams... Dylan's recent haziness...
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Amid R2D2-ish cutesy blips, pretty pulsing melodies, and lackadaisical effects, David rambles on about subjects he finds interesting, like a philosophical friend who's maybe had one too many glasses of wine.