PopMatters' Scores

  • TV
  • Music
Select another publication »
For 11,071 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 43% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 53% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 69
Highest review score: 100 Desire, I Want To Turn into You
Lowest review score: 0 Travistan
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7,414 out of 11071
  2. Mixed: 3,399 out of 11071
  3. Negative: 258 out of 11071
11071 music reviews
view
per page
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dirty Pictures, Pt. 2
    Dirty Pictures (Part 2) winningly shows the other side of life through open-eyes. While Dirty Pictures (Part 1) largely celebrated good times, the new album suggests that life is not always so grand, love can fade away, people can behave in ways against their self-interest, and such. The songs empathize with their characters, who often lack financial resources, self-confidence, and emotional stability.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Heaven to a Tortured Mind
    On Heaven to a Tortured Mind, Yves Tumor clearly relishes his shift to microphone caressing rock star. Whereas on previous albums, he would obscure himself behind the music, here he steps out of his sonic chrysalis, dons some shiny black wings and soars.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Patty Griffin
    The record's sparse instrumentation (the album was produced by Griffin and her longtime musical partner Craig Ross) enhances the personal nature of the project. It doesn't matter if these songs are literally autobiographical or clearly fictional. She sings them as if they were factual.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990
    The collection is a warm, poignant, deeply immersive set that is sure to please fans of the genre but quite honestly belongs in every home. It's that beautiful.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big Time
    While the set’s melodies are not pronouncedly hook-driven, they are indeed entrancing due primarily to Olsen’s consistently sensual tone and precise phrasing.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Complete
    Complete doesn't break any new ground, but it does allow you to have one of the most influential bands in all of rock music rounded up in one place.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1992-2012
    Both of these compilations [A Collection and 1992-2012: The Anthology] offer an embarrassment of riches, and in very different ways excellent overviews of one of the few long-running, still productive techno bands out there.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Your Turn
    The scary thing about Marc Ribot and his new(ish) band is that all of these styles and quirks are pulled off so convincingly.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Gathering
    It’s never derivative and always manages to sound fresh and new.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Originals
    That's the trick he managed to successfully pull throughout his career--making music that covered an enormous amount of stylistic range yet still sounded coherent and instantly enjoyable.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Valley of Heart's Delight
    Margo Cilker serves as a stand-in for all of us, which is why she can get her audiences to sing with her in concert or make listeners pay attention to the details in Valley of Heart’s Delight. She trusts in her visions of the outside world to tell the story of what she finds within her heart.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black America Again
    Whilst certainly not flawless, Black America Again sees Common deliver some of his most vital work and reaffirms his place in the discussion of greatest conscious rappers of all time.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Destroyer's Rubies
    Bejars songs have, in the past, sometimes seemed like vehicles for his lyrics, yet with Destroyer’s Rubies he seems to have made peace with the musical element of his work as well.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Where Shall You Take Me
    There's a core of strength running through this darkly unobtrusive music which lends it a coherence of vision, drawing as it does on place and character as it roams the less fashionable byways of an older America, hitching the frayed strands of the past to the lurching wagon of the present.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Magdalene
    Sometimes elegance and grace are enough to spark a transformative introspective journey. It is a rare occurrence, but that's what FKA twigs has delivered with Magdalene.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Undun
    Despite its various faults, undun is righteously solid.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Complete BBC Sessions [Remastered]
    From “Communication Breakdown” to “Stairway to Heaven”, nearly all the hits are here, making The Complete BBC Sessions a de facto greatest hits collection. New to Zeppelin? Start here. A longtime fan of the band? You don’t need to be told twice to check this collection out.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 13 1979-1981
    While Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love are considered by many to be forgettable aberrations in an otherwise sterling discography, there are even more who realize that this was a crucial period in the career of one of music's most exciting and revolutionary artists. Trouble No More provides plenty of evidence of this.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rejoicing In The Hands
    The 16 songs that appear on Rejoicing in the Hands, are so striking in their sound and so original, that no producer could've have imagined them. If anything, they affirm Devendra Banhart as one of the most unique musical talents to emerge in quite some time.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Vespertine
    The best album of Björk's career
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    From A Basement On The Hill
    Review #1: <A HREF="http://popmatters.com/music/reviews/s/smithelliott-fromabasement.shtml" TARGET="_blank">A decisive triumph, and probably a personal best for Smith</A> [score=90]; Review #2: <A HREF="http://popmatters.com/music/reviews/s/smithelliott-fromabasement2.shtml" TARGET="_blank">May be Smith's finest.</A> [score=90]
    • PopMatters
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Blueprint
    While The Blueprint falls short of his debut's brilliance, it is easily the best Jay Z recording since that release.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In Rainbows
    The album proves itself to be what we all thought Radiohead couldn’t make again: a masterpiece.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hey Panda
    Hey Panda is a bold update of the group’s sound—layered, complex, day-glow-colored with decidedly modern R&B and hip-hop influences. Here is a band that’s not done evolving.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Woods
    A record that sounds as if it would be very much at home on any AOR radio station in the 1970s.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Invisible Cinema
    It is fresh, original, and points the way.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The RCA Victor and T-Neck Album Masters: 1959-1983 [Box Set]
    With 23 discs to sort through what matters most is the main album cuts and not the odds and ends unique to this box with one exception: a 1980 recording from Woodstock, New York titled Wild in Woodstock. Recorded in a studio up there with the understanding that the band would add crowd noises later, this “live” album retains the best Isley sensibilities for the stage.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Kill The Moonlight
    Meticulously choppy and frequently free of inherent genre boundaries, it's an askew masterpiece of brains, brawn, heart, and soul.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lonerism
    It imparts that expansive happiness of catchy songs just at the margins of your memory, not quite in your grasp, a reminder of the pleasure of music, something beyond yourself.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monoliths & Dimensions
    With nearly three dozen guest musicians chipping in, the aptly titled Monoliths and Dimensions is far and away the band’s most ambitious project to date, but typically, the many guest contributions are so subtly performed and arranged, not to mention entirely in keeping with O’Malley’s and Anderson’s collective vision, that we hardly notice.
Page: