Pitchfork's Scores

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For 11,993 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 53% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Sign O' the Times [Deluxe Edition]
Lowest review score: 0 nyc ghosts & flowers
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,809 out of 11993
  2. Mixed: 1,877 out of 11993
  3. Negative: 307 out of 11993
11993 music reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    Reasonable Woman
    Reasonable Woman, the singer’s 10th studio album, continues the trend of inconsistency. Over manicured synth arrangements and beat drops blown up to eye-watering proportions, Sia belts out self-help anthems that stick to formulaic, dated sounds. It’s outsized feel-good music with little worth feeling good about.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 51 Critic Score
    Might Delete Later [Mixtape]
    Both would-be singles, “Fever” and the Bas-featuring “Stealth Mode,” feel like half a record abandoned before being rounded into its ideal shape. (The former is slinking and still mostly effective, especially after it recovers from a clumsy opening line that for a second recalls his infamous, room-clearing verse on Jeremih’s “Planez.”) Elsewhere, attempts at verbal pyrotechnics become indistinct.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT: THE ANTHOLOGY
    The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Those that stand out mostly do so for the wrong reasons.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Mother
    If it’s a bid for dance-pop stardom, then the big singles—finely crafted though they are—are too few, too timid. If it’s meant as a deep-house long-player, it’s paddling in the shallow end.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Evolution
    Evolution’s fatal flaw is conflating being ubiquitous and being generic.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Everything I Thought It Was
    Everything I Thought It Was brims with a misplaced confidence that can only be described as Timberlakean, laboring for such a long, long runtime under the misapprehension that a risk-averse mop bucket of last decade’s trending sounds is gonna hit through the sheer force of its performer’s waning charisma.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    2093
    I’d argue that 4L and Up 2 Më are bolder than anything here: Yeat’s older projects threw you into the deep end of his magma flows and fuzzy world-building and asked that you either get it or don’t. An album this safe and familiar will be great for packing out bigger concert venues but only makes his musical identity more nebulous.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Vultures 1
    There is an uncanny, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and set dressing and sound design just so, but you can’t shake the nagging sense that there is no center, just a clot of references without a referent.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    King Perry
    An unbowed creative spirit ran through Perry’s gloriously multifarious career; on King Perry he sounds frustratingly submissive, a passing supplicant in someone else’s court rather than a king on his throne.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 51 Critic Score
    Saviors
    Stripped of the urge to reinvent themselves, Green Day hope to ride into the sunset as America’s most affable punks. Even the album’s one sincere stab at acting the band’s age, a reflection on parenthood called “Father to a Son,” seems to give up halfway through, content to repeat its title rather than dig deeper.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 46 Critic Score
    INSANO
    He’s never sounded more checked out. Even Cudi doesn’t seem to believe his own hype anymore. To its credit, INSANO is trying to do something different—that different thing, however, is just having DJ Drama provide thin narrative window dressing to a spate of uninspired Kid Cudi songs.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Welcome 2 Collegrove
    The songs on Welcome 2 Collegrove too often resemble the tenth pass on ideas no one loved in the first place, tweaked and rearranged until they’re perfectly fine.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Think Later
    THINK LATER is full of homogeneous trap-pop ballads devoted to one-dimensional introspection.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Rockstar
    A dense and star-studded collection that sounds like the millennium’s most expensive karaoke party.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    One More Time...
    By the end of 17 tracks, they sound exhausted, as if worn down by their own charades.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light
    The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is baggy and unfocused. If he wants to sell a promise of salvation, he needs a better story to tell.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 45 Critic Score
    Hackney Diamonds
    They try and fail to reinvigorate themselves in the rock’n’roll fountain of youth they helped create, only to emerge with a dozen hackneyed duds.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Scarlet
    Scarlet should be a madhouse but instead it’s like a trip to the rap clinic waiting room.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 53 Critic Score
    How Do You Sleep at Night?
    It’s all so simplified, not only selling short teeangers’ ability to handle more complex emotions (hello, Olivia Rodrigo) but making Teezo look like a generic corporate vessel, genre-hopping to distract from the hollowness.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Unreal Unearth
    Hozier calls the album’s sound “eclectic,” but disjointed is more apt.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    World Music Radio
    Barring a few notable exceptions, World Music Radio is so beholden to its premise—so enfeebled by Batiste’s insistence on universality—that it offers up few opportunities to get to know Batiste himself: his stories, his struggles, his euphoric victories and devastating losses. That absence leaves the record feeling hollow, like a pretty house where no one lives.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Deliverance
    Deliverance might work best as something else entirely, perhaps as a beat tape filled with reference vocals for the sort of stadium-status UK indie stars that know how to squeeze the maximum amount of drama out of the minimum amount of wordplay.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Natural Disaster
    Cosentino sounds strongest when she gives herself permission to veer from her influences and find her own voice.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    Austin
    For some reason—fear of boring his fans, obedience to the preferences of the streaming services, a career focused on club bangers—Malone won’t let these songs breathe. The result is an album that’s overstuffed and undercooked.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Joni Mitchell at Newport [Live]
    Mitchell’s voice is gorgeous and rich throughout, a piece of high-pile cotton velvet warmed in the daylight. She renders “Both Sides Now” with the wisdom of survival, the “up and down” having still somehow delivered her here. But too often, her patient approach is swallowed by the tide of well-intentioned boosters, associates who make Mitchell feel like little more than an honorary guest at her own party.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Utopia
    All he has to back himself up is the production. Yet even that is so safe. He waters down the cutting-edge sounds of the past and, in the process, flattens his Southerness to the point that he feels like he’s from nowhere.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    Barbie: The Album
    True to form, the other Kens on the soundtrack contribute nothing—doze through Dominic Fike’s noodly, acoustic “Hey Blondie,” which exists halfway between “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” and “Hey Soul Sister,” and the Kid Laroi’s howling emo-trap ballad “Forever & Again.” But the girls often can’t prove they’re worthy of main character status either.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 45 Critic Score
    COI
    Leray boasted about introducing the younger generation to artists like Busta Rhymes through her use of samples. That’s a nice idea—introducing people to other music through her samples—but that’s basically the only idea she brings to COI.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Pink Tape
    At 26 tracks, Pink Tape is bloated and messy, with occasional flashes of excellence between grating screamo misfires and unremarkable songs that feel like retreads of Playboi Carti or Trippie Redd hits.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation
    Despite its razzle-dazzle, this is the rare King Gizzard release that actually sounds like it was composed as quickly as it was.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 43 Critic Score
    Feed the Beast
    Although songs like “King of Hearts,” a pummeling Eurodance stomper, or “Castle in the Sky,” another pummeling Eurodance stomper, might allude to urgency in their lyrics and music, they still feel totally anemic and bereft of passion.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    A Gift & a Curse
    The result is an album that is too vague to have much depth and too absorbed in real-life drama to have the feel-good vibes he wants to preserve.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent
    I cannot remember an album that suffered from such an extreme case of risk-aversion, nor demonstrated so little faith in an artist’s potential, nor any notion that their fanbase might be willing to grow with them. If anything, it shrinks his already narrow proposition.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Secret Life
    There are moments when these elements come together beautifully, as with the nostalgic dreamscape that surrounds Lola Young’s soaring vocals on “Trying.” At other times, Fred again..’s songcraft struggles, and fails, to break through.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Henry St.
    At the very least, it sounds terrific. With imaginative production from Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn and accompaniment from a sterling cast of (largely) North Carolina ringers. ... But across the 42 minutes of Henry St., Matsson rarely responds to them in kind. To put it plainly, the writing is just bad, as though it were some slapdash afterthought to the strong instrumentals already in place.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ben
    The struggle of the wealthy and talented white rapper was never especially sympathetic. And on Ben, his trials are mostly internal, the enduring struggle of man to find meaning and leave a legacy. This Macklemore is likely the most honest version we’ve seen to date.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Songs of Surrender
    Nothing here is unforgettable or in danger of replacing its original. The arrangements are formulaic, regressing back to the stripped-down candlelit era of the original MTV’s Unplugged. At worst, Songs of Surrender is an overindulgence. At best, it’s a pleasant interlude.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    UGLY
    Ugly sounds like something far less interesting: the sort of generically angsty guitar music that only a ’90s major label executive could love.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 41 Critic Score
    One Thing at a Time
    Thirty-six songs is too many. ... He seems to have lost a great deal of energy as a singer and performer, leading to a ton of uninspired retreads and some truly generic filler.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Strange Dance
    The dramatic crescendos and ostensibly cathartic payoffs of “Little Things” and “The Heart of It All” suggest profundity but mostly draw attention to its absence. Strip away the bombast and these are humble little songs. Humble treatment might suit them.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 44 Critic Score
    Let Her Burn
    Let Her Burn is so, so dry.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Queen of Me
    Twain’s team of co-writers and producers have past credits with Halsey, Justin Bieber, Pitbull, Fred again.., and Iggy Azalea, and too often the material they’ve assembled for Twain feels like third-tier scraps intended for other clients. Queen of Me’s bland and plasticine arrangements are a far cry from the energy and sizzle of hits like “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.”
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let's Start Here
    It’s all so easy to digest, so pitch-perfect, so safe. Let’s Start Here. clearly and badly wants to be hanging up on those dorm room walls with Currents and Blonde and IGOR.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    AudioLust & HigherLove
    Lewis’ singing is one of the few novelties on AudioLust & HigherLove. The rest is all breezy grooves and cabana jams, frictionless and blemish-free.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lobes
    Pastiche is the entire point of Lobes. Maybe its period recreations provide some surface pleasures, but it’s not enough to erase the suspicion that We Are Scientists have turned into indie-rock journeymen, content to dabble in sounds and styles that have just fallen out of fashion.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Five Easy Hot Dogs
    Though each track is named for where it was recorded, there’s not much to distinguish one stop from another, and though you could connect the locations into a journey, these tracks don’t form an arc but play as if stacked atop one another.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 53 Critic Score
    Myself in the Way
    Love’s rapture is on full display on the lyrics sheet, but throughout Myself in the Way, the chemistry feels lab-sterilized.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Cometa
    He’s got undeniable talent, refined taste, and a studio of cool friends. Yet, despite it all, Cometa fails to leave a lasting impression, convey a guiding sensibility, or, worse, clarify anything remotely idiosyncratic about Nick Hakim.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Girl of My Dreams
    There are shards of intriguing ideas buried in the album’s plodding acoustics and garish rock-pop confections, but Fletcher fails to excavate them.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    Dirt Femme
    Tove Lo herself often sounds lethargic while singing these songs. She is contending with far more serious subject matter here than on, say, Sunshine Kitty; she is not enjoying herself. She is less daring, less awake, less alive to the pleasures of sex and love than she ever has been.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022)
    Actual Life 3 has moments of brilliance and will certainly connect with big festival crowds. ... But music that focuses on reality tends to work best when it is doggedly cinematic or highly relatable; Actual Life 3 is neither, instead frequently slipping into mundanity.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    I Got Issues
    A YG album should have a higher success rate, which just isn’t the case on I Got Issues. It’s frustrating because the worthwhile moments are obvious.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    It's Only Me
    The nuts and bolts of the singsongy rhythms matter. Lil Baby is at his best when he’s using those tricks to switch between moods, but there’s just one on It’s Only Me, and it’s indifference: not in the too-cool-to-care kind of way, but in the way when words have no weight behind them.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 51 Critic Score
    The Trouble with Fever
    The album isn’t bold enough to commit in any one direction, offsetting whispery synth-pop with saccharine country ballads.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    (self-titled)
    Mills’ production gives the recordings dimension and depth, inevitably tempering the pain at the heart of the songs.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    SPARK
    Whitney’s music is starting to sound better than it is. A little more songwriting, and a bit more leeway for that old, bracing strangeness, would go a long way.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 45 Critic Score
    Yungblud
    On Yungblud, Harrison leans almost exclusively into saccharine pop-rock, making this his most monotonous and least distinctive record.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    God Did
    He stays in the background for most of God Did’s 18 tracks—but once in a while, he finally tiptoes out of his usual templates. It’s not enough to salvage a bogged-down album, but coming from him, even a little experimentation is surprising.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 47 Critic Score
    Keep on Smiling
    Keep On Smiling’s glossy veneer never disguises its particle-board center.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    DRILLMATIC Heart vs. Mind
    Drillmatic is plagued by the tracklist bloat typical of the streaming era. Neither fun nor profound, the album is almost impressive in the sense of collecting so much talent to create something so mediocre.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Painter
    You suspect The Painter may ultimately have been more rewarding to create than it is to listen to. It comes off as a therapeutic act from an artist who, assuming he’s managed his royalties, never really needs to work again, rather than an album that simply had to be made.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    RZA Presents: Bobby Digital And The Pit Of Snakes
    A minor record that would be far more engaging if it better embodied its author’s eccentricity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    What I Breathe
    The problem is, he’s not a compelling enough presence to hold his own. Seven years into a career spent flipping familiar references into crowd-pleasing shapes, it’s still not clear who Alexander really is, beyond the sum of his influences.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Last Slimeto
    The Last Slimeto suppresses the knottiest and most uncomfortable aspects of his music, the moments when it feels like you’re hearing him process his darkest thoughts in real time. As a result the album is easier to digest, the songs less likely to stick out on a playlist, but at the price of the individuality that has made YoungBoy impossible to replicate.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Funk Wav Bounces, Vol. 2
    Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2 simply demonstrates competence. Harris may say that this album is powered by fuck-you juice; it is as threatening as an Erewhon smoothie.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Panorama
    The pop genre is in control of Kiyoko rather than the other way around. Instead of defining a unique sound, Panorama carries the unmistakable metallic tang of reverse engineering.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Last Goodbye
    The constant malaise keeps these songs from generating the ridiculous, heart-swelling feeling of transcendence that the best big-room dance music can achieve, while the duo’s relentless approach keeps the music from feeling particularly intimate.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Melt Away: A Tribute to Brian Wilson
    Toggling between merely pleasant and overly precious, Melt Away is such a low-stakes endeavor that it never even registers as a comeback.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Wasteland
    Thankfully, the execution often surpasses the ideas—these are intricate tracks, twinkling through layers of texture. But they get clogged in swerves and side-steps.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Give or Take
    The Giveon of Take Time experimented with melody and challenged himself vocally; Give or Take stunts that growth in favor of secluding himself in his comfort zone.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    Life Is Yours
    If it doesn’t achieve the long-promised outcome of “filler-free” Foals, Life Is Yours unexpectedly thrives when it reintegrates the studio trickery that used to weigh down previous side Bs.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Up and Away
    The best moments on Up and Away reinforce what’s missing in the worst ones.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    graves [EP]
    Two years after WOMB, the graves EP is firmly rooted in the same subtle reconfiguration that comes with each new Purity Ring release. Some songs even sound outright regressive, which isn’t always bad.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 48 Critic Score
    Raw Data Feel
    Raw Data Feel might be the most confident album Everything Everything have ever released, but in a way that feels deeply hubristic. If this album were a person, it’d be that pompous, motormouthed philosophy undergraduate who treats seminars like extended soliloquies.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dropout Boogie
    They’re the sort of tunes that the Keys can pull off with ease, as satisfying as a perfectly tossed curveball landing in a beaten-up catcher’s mitt. But they also make you wish the Keys didn't spend the rest of Dropout Boogie lobbing underhand pitches right down the middle of the plate.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Headful of Sugar
    At no point does Headful of Sugar come off as cynical, though the central premise falls apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny: This is a largely beloved, well-connected, and unabashedly accessible rock band trying to be convincing as the voice of outcasts obeying their most reckless impulses.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    How to Let Go
    Although Sigrid sings each line as if it’s eye-openingly profound, anyone looking for depth on How to Let Go will quickly find themselves in the shallow end.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Alpha Games
    The album’s best hooks feature Bartle duetting with Okereke, a new trick in Bloc Party’s repertoire. These strengths are even more frustrating because they reveal an alternative path to the binary rut in which this band has been stuck for 10 years.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I NEVER LIKED YOU
    His latest album I Never Liked You—the title sounds like a breakup note passed in the back of a middle-school classroom—has the ingredients of a really good Future album but lacks the depth of one. It plays it safe by continuing to lean too hard on the schtick.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    B.I.B.L.E.
    Besides a handful of catchy verses, though, there aren’t enough standout moments on B.I.B.L.E.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Mainstream Sellout
    Tickets to My Downfall was memorable for the way it treated pop-punk like a natural palette for his emotions, but this too often feels like a concept album about rock, a stodgy record that’s too busy using “real instruments” to do anything interesting with them.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 44 Critic Score
    SZNZ: Spring [EP]
    That’s how Spring feels: a lot of planning, a shrug to finish. Like OK Human, this is a product of the pandemic. Unlike OK Human, it actually sounds like it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Oxy Music
    For how clearly smart, ambitious, and upsettingly tuneful Cameron is, it’s a pity that he uses his talent for these exercises in sophistry, music that feels so vacuous and fleeting that it becomes one with the very modernity it seeks to lampoon.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    Diplo
    Diplo is surprisingly low on innovation, adventure, and emotion. It feels less like a triumphal homecoming and more like another tourist trap. Lately, no matter where Diplo goes, it feels like he’s visiting.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 43 Critic Score
    Donda 2
    Every now and then, he can still crank out his signature sweeping production or drop a line that stops you in your tracks. But no minor edit or revamped version of Donda 2 can conceal the album’s inherent flaw: It is presented as a revolutionary work but it is decidedly a non-event.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 47 Critic Score
    Give Me the Future
    Give Me the Future is almost perverse in its inability or unwillingness to develop its premise beyond the most basic and obvious elements.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Let the Festivities Begin!
    Let the Festivities Begin! is music to dance to, to roll a joint to, to solve a decades-old mystery to, but it isn’t a masterwork that unfolds with multiple listens. It’s exactly what it promises, and that’s a party.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Strictly a One-Eyed Jack
    Despite the overt bleakness, Strictly a One-Eyed Jack shines when Mellencamp invites other people into his world—proof that he can still surprise us this deep into his career.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Shoals
    Leo Abrahams’ stylish production steers the discussion toward his previous work with Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins, even if Shoals just as often makes me think of a weighted blanket or paint roller soaked in aloe vera.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    DS4EVER
    Too many songs feel like items on a checklist. The mandatory back-and-forth with Lil Baby proves their chemistry hasn’t waned, but the formula to their joint tracks is due for an update.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    on to better things
    Dior stays vague and vacant throughout the album, invested in his feelings but short on interesting ideas.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    From A Birds Eye View
    Although Cordae can be an engaging writer, on songs like “Momma’s Hood” his delivery is as dry as a teenager forced to read in class. “Jean-Michel” shows his competence as a rapper, but the song sounds like it’s reaching to be a classic ’90s rap interlude and landing at a Big Sean freestyle from L.A. Leakers.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    Fragments
    In its endless, flavorless drift, the album amounts to little more than a modern-day take on easy listening, with all the signifiers of lush, aesthetic experience and none of the stakes.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Live Life Fast
    Most of LIVE LIFE FAST plays out with this kind of energy: forced, obvious, its best ideas obscured in a haze of self-satisfaction.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Scenic Drive (The Tape)
    Scenic Drive feels like a detour because it is: Khalid announced his next studio album, Everything Is Changing, last summer. For now, though, he seems content to take a step back, sounding like he’s singing and shrugging at the same time.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Cahoots [50th Anniversary Edition]
    It’s still a fundamentally flawed album, and those flaws were symptoms of a larger ailment within the Band. Perhaps that explains the overriding nostalgia on these songs, that sense of having something beautiful and essential. Cahoots is a eulogy for a Band that was already in the past tense.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    At My Piano
    What is unexpected is how Wilson sounds almost anonymous here. As he drifts through his greatest hits and personal favorites, he doesn’t invest his playing with much personality, so these smooth sounds are about as memorable as a piano twinkling away in the background of a department store.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 53 Critic Score
    Bloodmoon: I
    Thrills are few and far between amid this hour-long morass. Bloodmoon suffers from two problems that seem as though they should preclude one another: It is thin on fresh ideas and unexpected twists. Its hard rock-meets-hardcore permutations are familiar to anyone who has ever heard, say, Evanescence and Breaking Benjamin.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Hushed and Grim
    The band known for continually surprising listeners ultimately falls short, mostly hiding behind unexceptional, diluted alt-metal. Instead of letting this bold idea guide the way, it’s offered up as an apology affixed to the end of their least ambitious collection yet. Mastodon, once transgressive in its refusal to be put in a box, has shaved off its sharp edges and crawled inside.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Morning Jacket
    My Morning Jacket is their least adventurous album yet. When they riff, they’re squarely within a July 4th classic rock block; when they vamp, it’s the fog-lit, psychedelic soul that’s invigorated their most recent work. In either form, they occasionally hint at their soaring, festival-ready populism, heady instrumental exploration, or fluency with the American songbook, but never the fusion that once came so organically.
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