For 5,917 reviews, this publication has graded:
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34% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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62% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.1 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 67
| Highest review score: | Magic | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest review score: | Know Your Enemy |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 3,632 out of 5917
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Mixed: 2,245 out of 5917
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Negative: 40 out of 5917
5917
music
reviews
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Here Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg hook up with indie boy Andrew Wyatt, manhandling his plaintive love ballads until they explode into freewheeling electro fantasias.- Rolling Stone
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Dinosaur Jr. set the standard for convulsive indie-rock guitar fireworks in the Eighties. Incredibly, the band's original lineup--guitarist J Mascis, bassist Lou Barlow and drummer Murph--hasn't lost a thunderous step.- Rolling Stone
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It's engrossing and organic in a way other all-star drive-by projects rarely are.- Rolling Stone
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With help from Rick Rubin and Bright Eyes producer Mike Mogis, Yorn has found his voice on Back and Fourth, a mostly acoustic beauty recorded in Omaha, Nebraska, with musicians heard on Conor Oberst's Saddle Creek label.- Rolling Stone
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The biggest fun is hearing Diplo and Switch go off the leash, mixing surf guitar and horse whinnies, bong burbles and air horns. By the end, they're Auto-Tuning a baby's wail, clearly high enough, artistically, to try anything.- Rolling Stone
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McCauley sounds no less lonely, staring down abandonment and death in gentle waltzes and country-rock rambles.- Rolling Stone
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Never the most convincing singer, Moby wisely farms out vocal duties to friends--of them unknowns and ripe for discovery. It's a return to form but with a wider romantic streak. Age will do that.- Rolling Stone
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Any addition to his tiny catalog is notable. But this live DVD/CD set is more than barrel scrapings.- Rolling Stone
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A charming indie-pop ode to the rootlessness of the permanently hot-tubbed.- Rolling Stone
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The best bits feel like being chased through a moonless night by a sexy moor witch.- Rolling Stone
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The brainy duo--hot-shit remixer Jona Bechtolt and singer/science writer Claire Evans--holed up in a thrown-together studio in rural West Texas and ended up with what might be their breakthrough record.- Rolling Stone
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Blur went from wanna-be's ("Popscene") to provocateurs ("Parklife") to artistes ("Beetlebum") to world travelers ("Good Song"), and, rare moments of torpid dross aside, remained fascinating with each mood change.- Rolling Stone
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When George Harrison planned the reissue of "All Things Must Pass" in 2000, he fought the urge to simplify the original mixes. So he might well have loved this EP of his songs, most from All Things, recorded in 2001 by Jim James shortly after Harrison's death.- Rolling Stone
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Her music floats exhilaratingly outside of time, blending thumping garage-rock rhythms, doo-wop chords, Spectorian girl-group stylings.- Rolling Stone
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On the majestic closer, alongside a sad cello, he insists, "There is no sun." With sound this blazingly bright, who needs it?- Rolling Stone
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Benson's fourth solo jam is his first since the Raconteurs introduced him to the masses, which means now everybody gets to play catch-up with his skewed acumen for classic power pop in the Seventies AM-gold mode of Wings and ELO.- Rolling Stone
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I Look to You spends little time looking back. It is a modern soul record, a collection of sleek, often spunky love songs that aim at something more immediate and tangible than nostalgia or catharsis: Houston wants back in the diva stakes.- Rolling Stone
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You get a little sick of hearing the crowd between songs (we get it, there's an audience!), but in many ways this is the album the Crowes have been meaning to record for years.- Rolling Stone
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Playing like a welcome sequel to 2006's style-hopping "I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass," Yo La Tengo's 16th studio album finds the New Jersey trio bringing out Farfisa solos and celebrating ongoing couplehood.- Rolling Stone
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He moans echo-caked utopian incantations, hustles some groovy conspiracy theories, spins a stolen Dylan melody into a elegiac space jam and ponders the nature of "circular time." But there's as much Sonic Youth doom in his band's guitar explorations as there is folky grooviness.- Rolling Stone
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There's a campfire vibe, though given the heat put out by even the acoustic jams, bonfire is more like it. The electric guitars flash like lightning, the looping melodies and Tamashek raps hypnotize.- Rolling Stone
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Their "1-2-3-go!" rush--built around Cassie Ramone's scratchy guitar and Ali Koehler's insistent drums--is a thrill.- Rolling Stone
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There are bits of jazz and dub, but mostly these guys want to rock. When they do it their way, they sound like nothing else.- Rolling Stone
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Fogerty plays it too safe on sleepy tunes like John Denver's 1974 'Back Home Again,' but you can't deny his scratchy growl on deep cuts like the rockabilly barnburner 'Haunted House.'- Rolling Stone
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With his thin but sweet croon, Mayer Hawthorne floats over the ballads, but the two best tunes are uptempo.- Rolling Stone
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On Girls' debut, Christopher Owens' made peace with his past and crafted ace tunes to go with his tales of redemption.- Rolling Stone
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The result is Carey's most sonically and tonally coherent release, a mix of love ballads ('Inseparable') and sassy breakup anthems ('Standing O') that might have been her best album had it been several songs shorter.- Rolling Stone
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As the album title suggests, the scale is intimate--confessions and metaphysical ruminations, delivered in a weathered rumble, punctuated by the sound of harmonica and fingers scraping on fretboards.- Rolling Stone
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For their major-label debut, producer Rick Rubin has turned the group into a lush chamber-folk outfit. I and Love and You is packed with complex, piano-based beauties.- Rolling Stone
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The lyrics feel a bit tossed off, but they don't get in the way--that wall of fuzz is good for something.- Rolling Stone
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He takes cues from R. Kelly, slyly mocking the self-parodying excesses of boudoir R&B while supplying the utilitarian goods: the sumptuous vocal harmonies and sultry beats upon which long nights beneath ceiling mirrors depend.- Rolling Stone
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Those seeking the naive concision of earlier records will be disappointed: Most songs sprawl near five minutes or longer. But their components are all about simple melodic beauty, writ large--prog-rock for pop purists.- Rolling Stone
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O is like a baby sitter who plays kids Joy Division records before lights out: kinda scary, but they'll wake up cooler in the morning.- Rolling Stone
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The woozy slow-jam "Julia," among other tracks, proves the group's polyglot street jams are plenty catchy unassisted.- Rolling Stone
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Cox's second solo disc as the Atlas Sound brilliantly channels spaced-out folk balladry through hazy chamber pop à la Panda Bear or Stereolab.- Rolling Stone
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The music on New Moon lives up to the story because it captures the day-to-day bleakness, along with the sexual obsessions seething under the surface.- Rolling Stone
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The sixth studio album by Devendra Banhart is the best he's ever made. What Will We Be is also great enough in patchouli-scented spurts to suggest that the 28-year-old singer-songwriter's defining classic is one more record and a little more focus away.- Rolling Stone
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On Strict Joy, the duo deliver with their most dynamic set yet, with hot Irish soul segueing into energetic folk rock and dream-pop-touched balladry.- Rolling Stone
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Here, the girls just wanna have fun: With squawking synths, clipped vocals and head-snapping New Wave drums, their latest is an Eighties dance party.- Rolling Stone
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His willingness to make fun of his psychosexual damage only makes it more poignant.- Rolling Stone
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Her second LP, re-tweaked after a leak and a label change, refines her Euro-disco with more flavors and fewer hooks. Still, the music remains rapturous and cheeky.- Rolling Stone
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Homme and Grohl are old hands at this kind of thing--see their excellent Zeppelin homages on the Queens' "Songs for the Deaf." But they definitely seem inspired by Jonesy's presence, and he helps them keep it light.- Rolling Stone
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Singer Martin Courtney's mumble is barely audible, and it all sounds like it was recorded on a boombox in someone's mom's pool house, but the band gets a lot of mileage from a silvery sunbeam of inspiration.- Rolling Stone
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Waits' second live retrospective plumbs his later LPs, especially 1992's Bone Machine and 2004's Real Gone; it misses classics like "Time" but shows off a deep oeuvre and a brassy, mischievous sextet.- Rolling Stone
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She covers her conceptual bets by rolling out sturdy club-thumpers, and this eight-song EP (included in the reissue and sold separately) is largely on point.- Rolling Stone
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With an exceptionally well-preserved voice, Macca plows through Beatles and Wings hits, plus solo gems.- Rolling Stone
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Unlike many similar projects, this one doesn't seem overly impressed with its own novelty. A good thing.- Rolling Stone
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Doomsday is brutally emotional, but Perkins' band adds a sense of defiance, making it safe for closing time.- Rolling Stone
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The star is Gucci, with his deep grab bag of rhymes that aim at funny bones ("AK hit your dog, and you can't bring Old Yeller back"). It's a winning combination: a heavy ego and a light touch.- Rolling Stone
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Pavement noise scrimmages, warped Pixies surf rock, fresh-faced Weezer tuneage, it's all the same mess to them. But they dress up their guitar-mad escapades in a stadium-echo kick that Nineties indie kids were too grumpy to try.- Rolling Stone
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Transference is Spoon's seventh album and, at times, sounds like their best.- Rolling Stone
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Actress Charlotte Gainsbourg may be the daughter of the ultimate Euro-glam couple, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, but her Beck collaboration, IRM, is a tough-minded trip through some serious adult trauma.- Rolling Stone
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Lacking many new moves, Romance doesn't feel as revelatory as Los Campesinos' killer 2008 debut. But its exuberant din is hard to deny on songs like the gorgeous existentialist meditation "In Media Rest," which mixes triumphal horns with lyrics about vomit and corpses.- Rolling Stone
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They're more radiant than ever on their third disc, particularly on songs like "Zebra," with background chorales swooping over stately guitar plucking.- Rolling Stone
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Hot Chip's excellent fourth record shows how compatible those sentiments can be.- Rolling Stone
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She's clearly listened to Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu, but the production on Concrete Jungle, by DJ Farhot, is both inventive and inviting.- Rolling Stone
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Soldier is sumptuously melancholy, exquisitely beautiful R&B, perfect for crying on a very expensive sofa.- Rolling Stone
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Nobody really knows if Bowie is hanging up the spacesuit for good, since the man has been periodically announcing his retirement since 1973. But if so, this is one hell of an exit.- Rolling Stone
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The excellent beats by G Unit vet Jake One are full of smacking snare hits and soul samples. But the real music is Freeway's tricky rhyme schemes and his gravelly full-bore attack.- Rolling Stone
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The actor dominates this soundtrack, not just in the number of tracks he sings but in the quality of his husky burr. It doesn't hurt that he has a great producer (T Bone Burnett) and good material--courtesy of Ryan Bingham and the late Stephen Bruton, who co-wrote the songs for Bridges' character.- Rolling Stone
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You can hear that Cash is closing in on the end on Ain't No Grave; his basso profundo thins out in spots to a ragged wheeze. And yet he is unmistakably sprightly and alive, delivering each song with a master-vocal stylist's gift for phrasing, and turning the Hawaiian standard "Aloha Oe" into a sly, sexy come-on.- Rolling Stone
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Her latest firmly establishes her as a singer-songwriter to be reckoned with.- Rolling Stone
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His latest packs it all in: grand ballads, punchy power pop, a smutty song about a girl who "likes hair bands."- Rolling Stone
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Plastic Beach proves that he's most truly himself when he turns into a cartoon.- Rolling Stone
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Lyrically, history and modern anxiety morph into freedom songs for an age where, then as now, "the enemy is everywhere," and neither whiskey nor "a pretty good GPA" will save you. But an album this excellent just might.- Rolling Stone
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Are these tracks "finished" as Hendrix would've intended? Probably not. But as a glimpse of the guitarist extending his reach beyond the Experience trio, it's thrilling.- Rolling Stone
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The geeky technique on Roaring Night occasionally trumps its simple pleasures. But it's sort of like a serious foodie restaurant: Take time to savor it, and you'll be transported.- Rolling Stone
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Per usual there's no flash whatsoever--just seasoned professionals delivering doggedly tuneful, meticulously detailed vignettes that are part Lynyrd Skynyrd and part Raymond Carver.- Rolling Stone
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The band's third disc is the sharpest distillation of its neo-college rock yet, with Animal Collective producer Ben H. Allen's arty, wall-of-sound approach brightening singer-guitarist Parker Gispert's underdog anthems while rarely slowing them down.- Rolling Stone
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It's the sunniest sad record you'll hear all year--pretty love songs set in a "nation" where summer never ends.- Rolling Stone
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The Philly quintet futz with Seventies rock like gearheads restoring an old El Camino.- Rolling Stone
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On Allison's first LP in 12 years, producer Joe Henry sets him up amid unfamiliar backing instruments like Weissenborn slide guitar and mandola; Allison's leathery voice, sharp wit and jaunty piano improvisations remain remarkably undiminished.- Rolling Stone
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Early-Eighties jams like the P-Funky "Out Come the Freaks" and the Ronald Reagan-sampling "Tell Me That I'm Dreaming" were avant-disco classics. Later, semihits threatened to make the group pop stars, but its taste for unmarketable weirdness (say, Leonard Cohen croaking about "Elvis' Rolls Royce") won out.- Rolling Stone
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Barnes is a clever lyricist with a punk-rock past who understands the raw simplicity of a good country tune.- Rolling Stone
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The whiplash reverberations of the 1964 Kinks and '65 Who on the LP3's third album, Pictures--the metallic thwack and buzzing sustain of singer-guitarist Glenn Page's Rickenbacker; the fast martial step and chrome-glaze harmonies in "I Don't Believe You" and "Nothing Like You"--are authentically vicious.- Rolling Stone
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Ghostface Killah is weirder, Raekwon is gruffer, Method Man is zanier, and here the three kings of Staten Island hip-hop return to their classic-Wu roots like nothing's changed since 1995 but the sports references.- Rolling Stone
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With co-producer Rob Schnapf at the helm, Dr. Dog don't sound like mere imitators--they sound like an unusually hook-savvy indie band whose taut, touching songs about friendship ("Jackie Wants a Black Eye") and life on the road ("Station") begin as straight pop rock and take thrilling turns into psychedelia.- Rolling Stone
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Just voice and piano, uncluttered by his hallmark orchestral bigness, it's Wainwright's most nakedly emotional music yet.- Rolling Stone
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Longing for a woman's kiss, f-bombing a girl for selling herself short, and tasting the barrel of a gun, Nash is an oversharing spitfire who won't be ignored--not to mention a huge talent.- Rolling Stone
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Everyone is on point: Accordion and fiddle rock as hard as guitars and drums; rhythms from Brazil (frontman Eugene Hutz's new home) blend with breakneck Eastern European dances and D.C.-style hardcore.- Rolling Stone
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Fearless Love, Melissa Etheridge's feistiest disc since her 1988 debut, blurs the difference between hard-earned personal experience and social commentary.- Rolling Stone
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Here, Canada's indie rock A-Team hasn't just reunited--it has border-hopped, aligning with kindred Great Lakes huddle-for-warmth art-rock communards in Chicago, where Tortoise leader John McEntire produced an antsier version of a great BSS record.- Rolling Stone
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A.C. Newman wanted his band's fifth album to "bridge the gap between Led Zeppelin and [Sixties psych-soul band] the Fifth Dimension." Together doesn't quite pull that off, but it is the Canadian-American group's best since 2000's Mass Romantic.- Rolling Stone
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Technically, these 11 tracks are songs, with titles and hooks. The effect, though, is more like a precisely arranged parade of spasms, blasted at you in a kind of aural IMAX.- Rolling Stone
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Singer Matt Berninger's gorgeous baritone is still the band's main selling point....Yet the tension comes mainly from composers Aaron and Bryce Dessner.- Rolling Stone
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He sings with renewed strength and even sweetness in these new versions of songs from the Seventies height of his troubles.- Rolling Stone
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You can also hear some Fleet Foxes, a soft-rock shift that may bum out older fans. But for tuneful chilling out, it's like a fine old couch.- Rolling Stone
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His fourth solo album is a disc of elegantly warped love songs: Cut with help from Beck, Feist and Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor, Compass keeps up Lidell's blend of creamy come-ons and fuzzy beats.- Rolling Stone
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Her full-length debut--about a robot-populated utopia based on Fritz Lang's classic 1927 film Metropolis--is so ambitious, so freighted with sounds and ideas and allusions, it threatens at times to sink under its own weight.- Rolling Stone
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Their debut suggests the White Stripes' White Blood Cells by way of M.I.A.'s Arular, noise that's friendly and cute, primitivism that masks pop smarts and respect for tradition, from New Wave to Sixties rock.- Rolling Stone
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Not that long ago, STP would have struggled to hit the simple sparkle of "Cinnamon," with its falling jangle and "Yeah, c'mon, c'mon" chorus. The sunshine is overdue, but it suits them.- Rolling Stone
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