Rolling Stone's Scores

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For 5,917 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 34% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 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: 100 Magic
Lowest review score: 0 Know Your Enemy
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,632 out of 5917
  2. Mixed: 2,245 out of 5917
  3. Negative: 40 out of 5917
5917 music reviews
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    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    If I'm Honest
    It can be tempting to hear Shelton's new breakup songs--the bitterly comic "She's Got a Way with Words," the coolly regretful "Bet You Still Think About Me"--as targeted toward Lambert, or to imagine Stefani as the someone new he flirts with tipsily on the first single, "Came Here to Forget." Shelton's warmly confident delivery makes those romantic twists and turns sound both lived in but universal.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    To Record Only Water For Ten Days
    To Record lacks the flashes of experimental brilliance found on Frusciante's earlier albums, but it quietly reaffirms the promise of a songwriter who can be simultaneously impenetrable, strange and oddly magnificent.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Double Cross
    On The Double Cross--the title is a sly reference to their 20 year career--they play to their strengths with a succinct set of tunes that seamlessly blend the sensibilities of the band's four distinct songwriters.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thankful
    Her high notes are sweet and pillowy, her growl is bone-shaking and sexy, and her midrange is amazingly confident for a pop posy whose career is tied for eternity to the whims of her American Idol overlords.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Digital Ash In A Digital Urn
    The good songs don't start kicking in until about halfway through, after many synth glitches and botched break beats. But once it gets going, it's phenomenal.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lulu
    Things can get ponderous once Metallica start impatiently stomping, but often they turn Reed's pretensions into something muscular.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Prism
    Perry has always done a great job of letting us know she's in on the joke of pop stardom. Sadly, she doesn't always bring that same sense of humor and self-awareness to the joke of pop-star introspection. The album's raft of ripe-lotus ballads is larded with Alanis-ian poesy she can't pull off.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Eclipse
    The more muscular approach nearly always suits Lewis' strengths better; his contemplative moments, like "Alone," tend to get drowned out by pompous synths and howled pleas.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    0304
    Essentially a wanna-be version of Madonna's American Life.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love Is Here
    Starsailor are the U.K. equivalent of the Goo Goo Dolls.... You may well like Love Is Here, but it could take a while before you admit it to yourself.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Triple F Life: Friends, Fans and Family
    Triple F is another set of barked strip-club salvos.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Driving Towards the Daylight
    He excels on longer pieces.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anthem
    A precision-produced guided missile seeking the hearts of socially awkward skate punks everywhere.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gettin' In Over My Head
    Perhaps it's best to think of Gettin' In Over My Head as Wilson's celebrity children's record.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    See You Tonight
    The baritone has cranked out brighter tunes about a topic more befitting a 19-year-old star: getting some.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ludaversal
    On his first album since 2010, he's still the same elastically flowing shout-rap dirty bird.... At 37, Luda also indulges in some dad-rap introspect.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Work
    The sonic references keep on coming throughout Work, but great songs do too.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Redemption's Son
    A gust of spiritual pop, a record that openly worships without sinking into heavy-handedness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Single Mothers
    His phrasing, always nuanced, is more emotive than ever. It suggests a life where songs are the only painkillers that still work.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Used to Think I Could Fly
    McRae’s debut doesn’t exactly make her stand out from the sea of algorithmic pop girls, but it definitely shows promise.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Only By The Night
    Only by the Night is long on astral, arena-ready largeness, with blippy keyboards, droney guitars and whoa-oh-oh backing vocals.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    You Should Be So Lucky
    Naturally, his solo debut is about impeccable piano and organ.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Velocity of Sound
    Compresses eleven impeccable examples of retro-cool songcraft into twenty-eight minutes that don't give a damn what year it is.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Make Up The Breakdown
    Hot Hot Heat prize the backbeat as much as the melody, sometimes more.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Master of My Make-Believe
    Her songs sound great but feel off, merely gesturing in the direction of emotions. In the end, she's so cool she'll frost up your earbuds.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Riot Act
    The familiarity of this straightforward tumble sounds tired -- the musicians struggle to put their backs and hearts into the Mudhoney-ish rocker "Save You." But like Neil Young at his most deliberately despondent, Pearl Jam sound purposefully tired.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I'm Back! Family & Friends
    The results are spunky, if unnecessary: Why bother with Sly and Jeff Beck's remake of "(I Want to Take You) Higher" when you can listen to the torrid original?
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Surgery
    Occasionally snoozy but always intoxicating.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Civil War
    Matmos amble and shuffle toward a new interpretation of history. [11 Dec 2003, p.204]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mother
    Too often, the music feels a bit limp, and the buttery harmony backups of her fellow Dixie Chicks are sorely missed. But there are some surprises.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cosmogramma
    There's some info overload, but Ellison is an ace with pacing, and a distracted soulfulness guides the frantic laptop science.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cruel Runnings
    Sure, Cruel Runnings is a bit of a one-trick pony--but, you have to admit, it's a pretty great trick.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Timez Are Weird These Days
    The 23-year-old Trinidad- born Brooklyn MC's neo-retro hip-hop mashes up TV on the Radio's vocal cadences, old-school break-dance beats and the forlorn melodic tug of a Smiths fan (he dropped This Charming Mixtape in 2009).
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ella Mai
    If the arrangements sometimes sound automated, Mai is adept enough as a singer to enliven them.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trap Lord
    Slow, silky and menacing, with twists of eccentricity, his debut is a finely constructed mood piece.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Down to My Last Bad Habit
    "Sad One Comin' On (Song for George Jones)"--a note-perfect honky-tonk weeper about the king of honky-tonk weepers. That’s the odd-card highlight of a set that focuses on smooth Eighties-style country-pop and ballad schmaltz.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Faith
    Faith consists of audio files recombined by producers and record executives into something coherent, listenable, and at times even enjoyable, but not quite dazzling. Maybe it’s not an Anthony Bourdain doc constructed with artificial intelligence, but it still feels a bit weird.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Satan's Graffiti or God's Art?
    They bounce between genres with screwball zeal, but the anti-concept loopiness can be weird fun.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Circle
    It does rock--if your idea of rock is Aerosmith doing Diane Warren songs.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Animal
    It's repulsive, obnoxious and ridiculously catchy--thanks to songwriter-producers Dr. Luke and Max Martin, who envelop Ke$ha's bratty raps in percolating beats and buzzing bass lines.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    23 Live Sex Acts [Live]
    It's a loose affair, but Grace's sheer exuberance keeps it exciting.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Haven't Got the Blues (Yet)
    Loudon Wainwright III's latest album is a long joke, full of wry commentary on weighty topics like mortality and lonesomeness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In Limbo
    [In Limbo] grooves on the easy symmetry of unfussy harmonies and dead-simple, no-hurry guitar, drum, and keyboard parts well buttered with reverb.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Exit Wounds
    Can evoke an Americana-tinged Warren Zevon, gruff but tender, with the best songs featuring Shelby Lynne's empathetic vocals. [Jul/Aug 2021, p.133]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Jul 20, 2021
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    About A Boy [Soundtrack]
    The movie-cue instrumentals, underdeveloped sketches and an incongruous fake cop-show theme prevent About a Boy from fully holding together as an album, but at the core of this soundtrack are some elegant, fully realized songs.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silver Landings
    Settles on muscular, tasteful adult pop that's often autobiographical. [Mar 2020, p.91]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Mar 6, 2020
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Comedown Machine
    Comedown Machine is basically a solo trip for singer Julian Casablancas, showing yet again how much he respects Eighties New Wave.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    trampin'
    It's the modest, more melodic songs that triumph.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    More Than Just a Dream
    The pleasures of the songcraft don't quite compensate for dopey lyrics, the bland vocals of Fitz and co-lead singer Noelle Scaggs, and the relentless spazzing-out.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Geogaddi
    Geogaddi is marvelously vague, as unconcerned with the real world as gangsta rap is obsessed with it. It's also a lovely, strangely comforting collection of electronic introspection, mood and shadow.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    More Than You Think You Are
    Matchbox Twenty now seem almost dignified, a fact that is as much a tribute to their advancing abilities as it is to how shamelessly their sellout successors suck.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Altar
    Banks' list of grievances can get wearying, but the music's dour detail is alluring too.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Life Pursuit
    When the experiments work... it's clear that band leader Stuart Murdoch still has plenty of major-league tunes left in the tank. [9 Feb 2006, p.64]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being II
    This is exactly the record you'd expect to hear from Weezy in 2013: a solid album by a brilliant MC who's half-interested.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bitte Orca
    It's at once attention-deficient and micromanaged, exhilarating and aggravating.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black Hours
    If his songwriting can be a bit flabby, the deep palette and intimate musicianship sustain a mood of late-night melodrama stretching toward 5 a.m. epiphany.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Plans
    Plans flounders in the second half, where Death Cab run out of ideas and try to fill the holes with busy keyboard bits.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fanatic
    The Wilson sisters ride a late-game hot streak through Fanatic, still living up to their band name.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tomorrow's World
    The nine-song set shows that keyboardist-mastermind Vince Clarke's genius for weaving grand melodies with ecstatic beats is still intact, but tinny vocal compression muddles throbbers like "Whole Lotta Love Run Riot."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Release Therapy
    Luda's heart doesn't seem to be in the party songs.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Mercy
    No Mercy is the sound of a rapper addressing his idiocy without sacrificing his swagger. Sometimes, the gravitas feels perfunctory, like T.I. is just fulfilling a public-service requirement; other times, it totally backfires.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Ballad of Dood & Juanita
    As much as you have to admire Simpson for making such an oddball and ambitious record, the album rarely transcends its tale.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nellyville
    Outside of "Pimp Juice," the album sounds weighed down by the commercial pressures of going multiplatinum the last time out. After five tracks, one cannot help but wonder what might have been had Nelly not gotten so pop so quickly.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chase This Light
    On their drony 2004 album, "Futures," Jimmy Eat World seemed deflated, as if frontman Jim Adkins was in need of one of his own “it just takes some time” musical pep talks. That’s not the case with the uneven Chase This Light, which is instead afflicted with the musical gigantism all too common in mainstream rock.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rather You Than Me
    Musically, he's drifting through a mid-career malaise. The beats he uses are the same worn poles of yacht-rap luxury and trap bangers that he's relied on since his 2010 watermark Teflon Don. Lyrically, he's still capable of speaking truth to power with remarkable clarity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Showroom of Compassion
    Cake graduated from the same Nineties class of alt-rock oddballs that produced Beck and Weezer.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Glass Boys
    Their fourth LP feels like their most serious yet--but that doesn't mean they've matured.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Is All Over... The Map
    An uneven album... but it's a nice soundtrack for a lonesome drunken night. [14 Oct 2004, p.98]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It's a Holiday Soul Party
    This is a playful and funky 11-track set, filled with both originals and unique takes on traditional Yuletide standards, with rich melodies and arrangements courtesy of the Dap-Kings.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It Is Time For A Love Revolution
    As a blast back to the past, this is the best album Lenny Kravitz has ever made--a visceral, expertly tailored blend of late-Sixties and early-Seventies classic-rock paraphrases with just enough modernizing to justify the record's copyright date.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Face Control
    Happily, their latest album, Face Control--recorded after the duo stormed the clubs of Eastern Europe for inspiration--is a huge improvement.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Collection
    A single CD of short edits is an odd thing for a prog-techno act who specialize in spacious songs that often run for more than 10 minutes.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pop Trash
    The well-named Pop Trash shows off their jaded hooks and nasty wit; it's for fans only, but those of us who still crumple at the opening hiccups of "Hungry Like the Wolf" will be glad for another fix.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Raise Vibration
    What makes Raise Vibration more than just Professor Kravitz orating about the world’s ills is how he never forsakes catchy melodies for seriousness. His language is cutting (“It’s enough, and we all are just getting fucked” he sings on the latter track) but he presents it in a sweet, catchy way that’s easy to digest.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chicken & Beer
    A great style doesn't always equal a great album, and the world's illest flows can't rescue some of these dud beats.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Absolution
    It's too bad that vocalist Matt Bellamy doesn't bring as much ingenuity to his singing.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Meteorites
    Producer Youth helps balloon the intensity skyhigh, making McCulloch the Bono of spider-web bangs and black regret.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Many Moons
    The Brooklyn-based singer is an expert arranger and song craftsman, if only an adequate lyricist.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lost Highway
    Lost Highway moves in on Nashville as shrewdly as "It's My Life" skimmed Stockholm seven years ago. [28 Jun 2007, p.71]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jay Stay Paid
    This collection of unreleased material is uneven, tossing in undercooked instrumentals alongside tracks with MCs like Black Thought.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    American Classic
    For all his genius, Nelson can be kind of lazy, and this disc--a sequel of sorts to his beloved 1978 standards collection, "Stardust"--he only occasionally sounds like he's trying.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes
    On their sharpest disc since their commercial peak in the early Nineties, Mike Ness confronts a trail of devastation, over a melodic tumult steeped in rootsy allusions ­"Gimme Shelter" gospel singers, gritty balladry.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Music Is A Hungry Ghost
    The group relaxes its rigid Krautrock stance and lets seductive dub rhythms and elastic hip-hop beats infiltrate the main.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wild World
    The band can feel hampered by its populist ambition, though, which means the best stuff here moves toward the intimate.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Suit Yourself
    More of a mood piece than a collection of commercial hooks.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sugaring Season
    There is something elemental about Orton's folk soul; at its best, it sounds like the world's prettiest campfire music, all hickory smoke swirling into a starlit sky.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Down the Road Wherever
    On an album with 14 songs, there’s certainly some filler (see the sleepy “When You Leave”), but for the most part, Knopfler’s blues-roots blend, infused here with a fresh dose of jazz and funk) remains sturdy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Documentary 2
    This sprawling album [is] his most solid release since the original Documentary. It's nothing more or less than the complex story of a lifelong hip-hop fan who's happiest when he can see himself as part of the history he embraces so vocally.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sorry To Bother You
    It's an admirably ambitious mix, often a bit too unruly.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Super Extra Gravity
    Nina Persson sings like a warmer Aimee Mann, and the songs manage to deliver their payloads without clobbering you over the head, or schmaltzing out.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wallflower
    This collection of favorites by the likes of Randy Newman, the Carpenters, Jim Croce, Bob Dylan and Elton John, among others, fits easily into her tastefully eclectic comfort zone.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lamb of God
    Much of Lamb of God contains the sort of piledriving guitar riffs and Olympic-medal-worthy drumming the band has perfected over the last 20 years, making it easy for their less political fans to get in on the fun. That said, the group sounds best when they take musical risks.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Now You Know
    A disc of bare-bones folk blues that recalls O Brother, Where Art Thou? more than anything by Martsch's band.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kill The Moonlight
    With Kill the moonlight, Spoon complete their transformation from ragtag rockers into beat-driven post-punks.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gorillaz
    Inspired by the punky reggae parties of Sandinista!-era Clash, tracks like the dub-rap-rock mutation "Clint Eastwood" and its catchier two-step Rasta remix bring back the exuberance missing from Blur's last album, 13, while running with its anything-goes avant-aesthetic.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    New Roman Times
    The songs are hit-and-miss.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Forgotten Arm
    This time around her songs are more pleasurable for seeming less deeply felt. [5 May 2005, p.72]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Corinne Bailey Rae
    Corinne Bailey Rae is as pop-wise as it is overly gentle and one to grow on.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Roses
    There are lyrical uh-oh moments ("Schizophrenic Playboy"), but Roses reminds us that note-hammering Brits from Adele to Florence owe Dolly a small debt.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Remember Me
    Sonically, the record is up-to-the-minute; in spirit it's a throwback to the adult-oriented R&B of Anita Baker, Toni Braxton and Whitney Houston. Hudson's a one-woman revival, with a voice so forceful it can roll back time.
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