Rolling Stone's Scores

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For 5,903 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: 3,621 out of 5903
  2. Mixed: 2,242 out of 5903
  3. Negative: 40 out of 5903
5903 music reviews
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2
    We get the sound of master musicians in their comfort zone, doing everything their own way. Nobody would want to hear the Beasties try anything else.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Helplessness Blues
    Too young to have experienced the era he holds so dear, Pecknold has found refuge and inspiration in the echoes.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Circuital
    Recorded in a Louisville church gymnasium, Circuital is just as adventurous, yet more organic and focused.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Born This Way
    What makes Born This Way so disarmingly great is how warm and humane Gaga sounds. There isn't a subtle moment on the album, but even at its nuttiest, the music is full of wide-awake emotional details.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bang Years: 1966-1968
    The Bang Years is the anthology his fans have always craved--the first definitive collection of his Sixties nuggets, when he was just another Brooklyn punk hustling his way into the business with a guitar, groovy sideburns and a solitary-man glare.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Dreaming Fields
    The melodies and hooks remain as irresistible as ever.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    D
    There are countless touchstones, but the sublime attack often recalls late-Sixties Grateful Dead, when their songs still had garage-rock drive but were exploding every which way.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revelator
    This meaty masterpiece is the debut of an 11-piece troupe co-led by guitarist Derek Trucks and his wife, singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi. Revelator is also a turning point in Trucks' odyssey, since adolescence, toward a deep soul laced with Indo-slide ecstasy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Treasure
    "Amber Jean" is a lovely tribute to his newborn daughter, while "Grey Riders" is a lost epic that suggests Crazy Horse with a twang infusion. The oldies shine too: "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong" sounds as if it originated with the Flying Burrito Brothers instead of Buffalo Springfield.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An American Trilogy: Looks Like Rain/'Frisco Mabel Joy/Heaven Help The Child
    This Texas native (1940-2002) was a one-man song factory in the late Sixties, writing hits for Nashville royalty. But Newbury's hurt and searching, draped in chamber-country silk, bloomed best on the solo LPs in this box.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bakesale [Deluxe Edition]
    Barlow's new approach made for one of the best indie-rock albums in a year full of stellar ones--and Sebadoh's greatest work.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Where Country Grows
    She can be as rugged as Miranda Lambert and Jamey Johnson, and sings better than each.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ritual Union
    Their third set hits a sweet spot between the futuristic soul of their debut and the synth pop of 2009's Machine Dreams.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Life's Rich Pageant
    R.E.M. were already college-radio heroes by the time they made Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986. They could've kept making mumbly, jangly tunes for their core audience, but they went bigger and bolder, stepping toward radio-friendliness while retaining their iconoclastic spirit.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From Africa With Fury: Rise
    Addressing Nigeria's history ("Slave Masters") and militarism ("African Soldier"), Seun's proper coming-out closes with some positive thoughts on cannabis ("The Good Leaf"). Fela lives, indeed.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Red Hot + Rio 2
    Other tracks, like the kinetic breakbeat jam "A Cidade," by DJ Dolores with Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hutz, take the Tropicália spirit into the 21st century, where it sounds perfectly at home.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Obscurities
    Yeah, he's a romantic; a cynic, too. But above all, a songwriter: brilliant, perverse, funny as human nature. Which is pretty damn funny.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wild Flag
    It's a moment that feels like an emotional explosion – and it sums up everything great about Wild Flag.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Outside Society: Looking Back 1975-2007
    It flows better than 2002's double-disc anthology, Land. It also does a better job contextualizing her later stuff as personal and pop-culture history
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hell On Heels
    It's heartbreaking and hilarious, in equal measure.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    SuperHeavy
    If the songs sometimes feel a bit undercooked, the spirit is dazzling.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Whole Love
    The Whole Love seems like a celebration of that freedom, with songs that roam happily all over the place.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hunter
    Mainly, though, The Hunter demonstrates how contemporary radio rock can still be made with imagination, precision and a majestic sense of force.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Biophilia
    When Bjork's supernatural voice soars in "Thunderbolt"--"Craving miracles"--soul easily trumps software.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bad as Me
    It might also be his most broadly emotional set ever; certainly it's his most sharply focused record since the game-changing tag team Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs decades ago.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    25 Years
    What shines throughout these 45 tracks is the unerring songcraft, and a voice that's lost none of its power over a quarter-century.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ceremonials
    Florence and the Machine's second album is as dark, robust and romantic as ever, but a revving 18-wheeler is no longer the apt metaphor for Welch's voice.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take Care
    It's what Drake does best, collapsing many moods--arrogance, sadness, tenderness and self-pity--into one vast, squish-souled emotion.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Siamese Dream [Deluxe Edition]
    Corgan built a monument to art rock and OCD.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    El Camino
    El Camino is the Keys' grandest pop gesture yet, augmenting dark-hearted fuzz blasts with sleekly sexy choruses and Seventies-glam flair.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strawberry
    Their most compellingly dire-sounding [album], not as grabby as their 2005 debut, Funeral Dress, but rocking out in a frayed, mordant way that makes every stick-in-your-head chorus they share seem like a small triumph.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bitch Magnet
    Their half-formed debut EP is redeemed by a previously unreleased follow-up session. The LPs Ben Hur and Umber still stun.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hospitality
    The melodies are stickier than hot tar, but it's those vivid little scenes that lodge in your head the longest.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tramp
    Here, she and her double-tracked voice sound bigger, thanks partly to help from dudes in Beirut and the National.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Russian Wilds
    The inspirations and pot-dream idealism may be retro; the zeal and momentum are not.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reign of Terror
    Heavy-breathing sex chants with a heart of darkness.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Leaving Eden
    Leaving Eden is a lesson in 21st-century American folk--a tradition that's as miscegenated as ever, and stronger for it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prisoner
    A fresh blast of vintage turmoil: a robust spin on the echo-laden romanticism of early-Eighties New Wave rock.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Locked Down
    Full of muscled, vintage R&B grooves, fevered soloing, psychedelic arrangements and oracular mumbo jumbo, it's the wildest record Rebennack has made in many years.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded
    If you believe that art and commerce and provocation and fun – and hip- hop and disco and teen pop – can all be one and the same, here's a record for you.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Slipstream
    It's mood music with a razor edge, pain fronting as bliss, delivered by a vet who understands that the blues are often about just that.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Europe
    What sets them apart are Morris' understated wit... and the clear enthusiasm of her bandmates, who hurtle through every jangly chord change like they're falling into a new romance.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions
    1998's Mermaid Avenue let the artists rewrite themselves, too: Billy Bragg, the British folkie agitator, turned goofier ("My Flying Saucer"), while Wilco turned rootsier ("California Stars).
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Only Place
    A string of minicrises about judgy friends, bad habits and turbulent relationships – relatable quarter-life bummers, spun into hooks as indelible as Taylor Swift's.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trespassing
    Trespassing delivers, with a mix of tinsel disco-club sleaze and leather-boy love ballads.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Born and Raised
    As usual, his playing is restrained and elegant; he's a singer-songwriter with a session man's soul, so every breezy solo or sun-dappled acoustic spindle is comfy and luxe like a spun-silk blanket.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ...Ya Know?
    Unlikely but undeniable dynamite.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Celebration Rock
    Japandroids sing about lost youth and sex and drinking atop hammer-of-the-geeks distortion swirls and holler-along refrains a gorilla could pump some paw to.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Early Takes, Vol. 1
    Even with just 10 tracks and no session details, this companion to Martin Scorsese's 2011 documentary deserves a brass–band welcome.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Copper Blue [Deluxe Edition]
    An album that cut through the grunge-y haze of 1992 with crisp Sixties melodies and... daring emotional clarity.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Channel Orange
    When Ocean reins himself in, tucking his words and melodies into tighter verse-chorus structures, the songs have startling force.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Best of Kylie Minogue
    This 21-track set plays like a crash course in the history of international club style.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Country Funk: 1969-1975
    A high-steppin', side-steppin' life outside you ain't never seen.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    God Forgives, I Don't
    There are times when God Forgives is as engrossing and surprising as rap can be.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Election Special
    Election Special is protest music delivered with a patriot's gifts – the American-roots beauty and expert fire in Ry Cooder's playing – and long memory.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sun
    Marshall has always been one of the most emotionally intense songwriters around, but with Sun she has made her riskiest, most vital album, not to mention one of her greatest.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rebirth
    Most of the originals are strong enough to pass as covers of classic jams. The actual covers, meanwhile, are spot on.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shields
    With Shields, they still sound like Radiohead at a Buddhist retreat, but the songs are more muscular, increasingly driven by drummer Christopher Bear's innate swing.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uno!
    They deliver it like late-breaking news, with mid-Sixties-guitar clamor, '77 velocity and no breathing room.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Privateering
    Knopfler's sueded voice has changed little since his 1980s heyday, and his elegant electric-guitar work sounds better than ever.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jake Bugg
    For a teenager's debut, Jake Bugg shows an artist who is crazy fully formed, stepping into a journey that should be worth following.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran
    [This collection is] loving genuflection; it's also proof that Johnson, 21st-century country's outlaw ne plus ultra, is also one of its most sensitive balladeers – beneath the scary beard, he's an old softie.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Good Kid, M.A.A.D City
    The plush production of tracks like the Neptunes-produced centerpiece "good kid" hearkens back to Seventies blaxploitation soundtracks and Nineties gangsta-rap blaxploitation revivals, and good kid warrants a place in that storied lineage.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Local Business
    Their third disc is a hilarious gut-wrenching mess that relocates the Replacements and Thin Lizzy at their most bracing and bighearted to the suburban skate-park diaspora – all centered around Patrick Stickles' glass-half-smashed existentialism.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Psychedelic Pill
    Young may feel like the last hippie standing, but he still sounds like a guy who believes the dreaming is not done.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Omen EP
    This debut EP is a small masterpiece of downtempo sound sculpture, finely detailed and often as gorgeous as it is discomforting.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
    Godspeed's music remains as deep, angry, tender, ecstatic and uncompromising as ever.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Girl on Fire
    The result is both her catchiest and subtlest album yet--and one of the best R&B records of 2012.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness [Deluxe Edition]
    The extras on the deluxe box set show how Corgan's mid-Nineties creative peak couldn't even be contained by two CDs.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tre!
    ¡Tré! picks up where its predecessor, ¡Dos!, left off.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unorthodox Jukebox
    The result is a record that makes the competition sound sad and idea-starved by comparison.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors
    Bringing these new jacks together in harmony is impressive enough; the ease with which Big Boi insinuates his smack-talking, game-kicking self into their midst, even more so.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Born to Sing: No Plan B
    The greater, constant lift is in the album's earthy-R&B roll--the slow-drag groove in "Born to Sing" suggests Ray Charles leading the band at New Orleans' Preservation Hall – and the disarming, one-of-a-kind warmth of Morrison's gift.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Light Up Gold
    Parquet Courts are especially versed in the clipped, repetitive buzz of Wire's '77 classic Pink Flag, but, like Pavement, they soften post-punk's cranky edge with the glazed, lonely wonderment of fresh, wide-eyed New York transplants.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Django Unchained [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    The soundtrack for Django Unchained is typically all-over-the-place: spaghetti-Western themes, Seventies folk rock, raucous acoustic blues, James Brown, Rick Ross.... There are well-chosen originals here, too.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    M B V
    Despite the skull-crushing power, MBV is music that rewards close listening, music that takes its time to give up its secrets.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amok
    [Amok is] the warmest, grooviest album Yorke has ever made--nine songs where next-level laptop science collides with wild, funky improvisation.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    D.A.I.S.Y. Rage [EP]
    Her flow is fleet and inventive, and the woozy budget-price production is as engrossing as any you're likely to hear this year. Wow.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Next Day
    A triumphant album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    People, Hell and Angels
    Hendrix left us so much but in precious little time. Every shred counts.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love from London
    This British singer-songwriter and psychedelic cult hero keeps issuing delightful, incisive rec ords, and this is one of his recent best.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like a Rose
    Nine songs, 32 minutes, no false moves.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The 20/20 Experience
    The 20/20 Experience is both a return to form and a departure, deftly combining his trademark shape-shifting digital funk with a warmer, more organic sound.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Same Trailer Different Park
    The album showcases a songwriting voice you won't hear anywhere else in pop: young, female, downwardly mobile, fiercely witty.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Afraid of Heights
    Frequent Nirvana echoes flirt with overkill. But no one has ever channeled that band's bubblegum nihilism better.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Terror
    The beauty is fleeting but piquant.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nomad
    A perfect match of sound and soul, the set introduces a new guitar hero, and confirms Auerbach's arrival as a roots-music producer to be reckoned with.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stories Don't End
    [A] quietly gripping, deceptively gleaming record.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Inspiration Information/Wings of Love
    This reissue pairs his metaphysically funky 1974 masterpiece, Inspiration Information, with a similarly spacey unreleased LP cut between 1975 and 2000 that positions this multi-instrumentalist as a missing link between Sly, Jimi, Stevie, Prince and Frank Ocean.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Random Access Memories
    At times, the album is a victim of its own ambition. But it wouldn't be half as awesome a ride if it had aimed any lower.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trouble Will Find Me
    The National are letting light and air into their shadows.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LSXX [Last Splash: 20th Anniversary Edition]
    A record as good as anything by her old band that was also a pop success.... This three-disc reissue adds a raft of cool demos, a 1994 concert and four EPs.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ...Like Clockwork
    Yet for all his demon-steed drive, Homme's a versatile guy--he coos as persuasively as he howls, and few can rain down metal decay with as much nuance and craft.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Acid Rap
    It’s the density of wit, ideas, and verbal invention that makes this one of the year’s defining hip-hop releases, whether Chance is rapping about God’s cell phone battery, racial politics, or merely unleashing thick clusters of rhymes.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nothing Can Hurt Me [OST]
    If the alternate versions aren't all that different from the originals, they're no less dazzling, dense with harmonies and hooks whose perfectly turned imperfections make their aches leap out of the speakers.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The RCA Albums Collection
    It is not overkill. It is the necessary account of a brilliant, wayward pop life still best known for tawdry and misleading reasons.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hesitation Marks
    Reznor's first NIN album in five years, it is one of his best, combining the textural exploration on the 1999 double CD The Fragile, and the tighter fury of his 1994 master blast, The Downward Spiral.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
    Her perfectly turned sixth LP deals with identity and autonomy; it's got feminist musculature and the dirt of a working musician under its fingernails.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Elvis at Stax
    The remarkable results, originally scattered across middling LPs, get bundled with illuminating outtakes on this three-CD set.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Still Within the Sound of My Voice
    Producer Fred Mollin provides atmospheric, country-tinged settings throughout Still Within the Sound of My Own Voice, lending consistency to the wide range of performers and material.
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