Rolling Stone's Scores

Select another publication »
For 5,909 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: 3,627 out of 5909
  2. Mixed: 2,242 out of 5909
  3. Negative: 40 out of 5909
5909 music reviews
view
per page
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Electric Arguments
    The set peaks with 'Travelling Light,' a magical mystery tour of reverbed chants, slide-guitar swoops, kalimbas and chimes. It's freak folk by a forefather.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sugar Mountain: Live At Canterbury House 1968
    Young charges forward here, playing half of the imminent Neil Young in pristine, tremulous-vocal form and reclaiming six of his Buffalo Springfield songs.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dark End Of The Street [EP]
    But like everything here, it documents the unlikely transformation of an emotive indie rocker into a bona fide soul singer.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Love Extreme
    When Hughes' drolleries and hopeless romanticism combine, the effect can be sublime.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Middle Cyclone
    Her high, hard voice invests her most elliptical lines with warmth, longing and other emotions that any human animal can feel.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    War Child Presents Heroes
    Beck bounces through Dylan's "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" with blazing distortion, while Peaches strips the Stooges' "Search and Destroy" down to sexy bass and krautrock beats.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Midnight At The Movies
    On his 2008 debut, Justin Townes Earle, son of rebel troubadour Steve Earle, seemed like he was getting up to speed with classic country and folk forms. But he sounds like a natural–born honky–tonker on his new album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's Blitz
    The big news, though, isn't YYY's groovier sound--it's the heat they radiate.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Easy Come, Easy Go
    Marianne Faithfull confirms her status as matriarch on this brilliantly programmed covers set.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Written In Chalk
    These alternative-country heroes steer clear of the complacency that afflicts their genre, electrocharging their music with the heat and heart of conjugal passion, and, at spots, with a rock & roll stomp that puts many a vaunted garage band to shame.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hazards Of Love
    From the glacial, droning opening track to the head–scratcher folk finale, The Hazards of Love takes its time, inviting you to grab a seat in front of the fire, stoke your Meerschaum pipe and take a trip.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crack The Skye
    There will be naysayers among the band's extreme, tatted legions. But Crack the Skye is an awesome display.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Living Thing
    The lyrics are by turns earnest and cheeky, but PB & J are most fun when they're feisty.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ten [Reissue]
    All that said, this is an exercise for die-hards and audiophiles: To PJ's credit, the original didn't leave much room for improvement.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jewellery
    The 13 songs here average just 2:30 in length, but they cram a lot in.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Willie And The Wheel
    It was worth the wait: Nelson's laid-back croon acts as a warm dishrag over the fiddle, pedal steel, cowboy harmonies and roadhouse jazz of Western-swing revivalists Asleep at the Wheel.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Together Through Life
    There is a grim magnetism coursing through these 10 new songs--and most of it is in Dylan's vividly battered singing.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Relapse
    By letting Dr. Dre take over the low-end-funk production, and rhyming about things he actually cares about, he comes up with a more painful, honest and vital record than anyone could have expected at this late date, up there with "The Eminem Show" or maybe even better.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Manners
    Passion Pit's full-length debut proves he isn't fronting: It's a shiny bouquet of synth-pop roses, with perfumed Eighties keyboard whooshes and modern stutter beats crooking a finger toward the dance floor.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Around The Well
    Iron and Wine's slow-motion magic shines here, and the material ranks with their best. It may be the most hypnotizing hour and a half you spend all month.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
    The 10 songs are sleek and clean, as if the Strokes had kept pushing a little longer and maybe bought some old disco records.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Secret, Profane & Sugarcane
    The music brings out the terser side of one of pop's most prolix lyricists, with some spectacular results.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big Whiskey And The GrooGrux King
    Big Whiskey, though, is a lot like a New Orleans funeral parade--mourning and zest balled into big, brawny music.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Eternal
    The irony is that The Eternal might be their most concise record ever. It's also a rock & roll ass-kicker.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rhett Miller
    Per usual for his solo work, he's made his strongest set yet.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Excitement Plan
    Todd Snider's compressed story-songs are so vivid and knowing that they seem completely plausible, even the one on his new album voiced by a piece of discarded junk mail that dreams of being a tree again.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wilco (The Album)
    Wilco's seventh studio album is a triumph of determined simplicity by a band that has been running from the obvious for most of this decade.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Far
    Far matches "Kitsch's" rococo flow with the follow-up's pop smarts.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Music For Men
    Punk purists may hate it. But dance-floor revelers will drown them out.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Electric Dirt
    Helm struts his slippery shell-game groove on 'Jed' and works it deftly throughout. But he digs deepest here with his voice, which veers between soulful stoicism and boozy yowl.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cradlesong
    There is plenty of unexpected texture to keep your ears engaged.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Saturday Night
    His new disc offers a typically appealing mix: prom ballads, gospel-tinged weepers, odes to fatherhood and plentiful yuks. But the heart of it is a double shot of widescreen optimism.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Horehound
    With Raconteurs bassist Jack Lawrence and guitarist-organist Dean Fertita helping out, the pair cut Horehound in three weeks, but these are all top-notch songs, rooted in Seventies dirtbag rock.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    La Roux
    Along with co-writer and fellow synth dude Ben Langmaid, she's ruling U.K. radio with splashy dance hits about sex and betrayal.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Humbug
    Their ace third album is full of Turner's snide observations on human behavior.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Joy
    If you can't enjoy Joy, you will probably never enjoy Phish. Yet, to paraphrase a vintage Phish song, what's most impressive here is how much they seem to be enjoying themselves--truly, deeply, gratefully. It's nice to have them back.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II
    This one will make heads from Shaolin to San Diego happy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Backspacer
    Backspacer, Pearl Jam's ninth album, backspaces to that boyish spirit, with the shortest, tightest, punkiest tunes they've ever banged out.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monsters Of Folk
    Everyone shines--although James, whose lead vocals open and close the set, beams brightest, the eclecticism of My Morning Jacket's 2008 opus, Evil Urges, brought into sharper focus by the company. Sometimes too many cooks are precisely enough.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Between My Head and the Sky
    At 76, her music remains truly vital: unsettling, touching, funny, undeniable.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revolution
    With her third record, Miranda Lambert remains country's most refreshing act, and not just because she makes firearms seem like a matter-of-fact female accessory.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Celebration
    It's a dizzying, nonchronological spin through the Madonna years, years it makes you feel lucky to be living through.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Incident
    The title suite on this two-CD set is the Tree's finest hour: a mounting drama of memoir and real-news trauma, animated with slicing guitars, ghost-song electronics, mile-high harmonies and smart pop bait.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghostdini: Wizard Of Poetry
    Can the silliest album of the year also be the smartest and the sexiest?
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She Wolf
    Shakira's trademark warble is gauche, but whether boasting about sex on 'Why Wait' or wailing on the guitar-propelled 'Mon Amour,' she's a charmer--a globe-straddling star you can cuddle up to.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cosmic Egg
    There isn't a boring moment--when's the last time you could say that about an album with Cosmic in the title?
    • Rolling Stone
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bleach: Deluxe Edition
    Beginning with a feedback overture and ending with full-on instrument destruction, the live set is a snapshot of a menacingly feral band about to become a beast.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alter The Ending
    The emo godfather's sixth album proves he's also gotten better in that span.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rated R
    Rihanna has transformed her sound and made one of the best pop records of the year.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Friend Of A Friend
    His tenor and understated acoustic-guitar work carry songs.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Chair In The Doorway
    Reid's playing is a thrill throughout; his solos sound like a mind blown wide but never to pieces.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Contra
    If Vampire Weekend was Rushmore, Contra is their Royal Tenenbaums: brainy, confident and generally awesome.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Odd Blood
    The result is simultaneously stranger and poppier, more celebratory and more serious.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Best Of The Black President [Reissue]
    While the song selection (including classics like the brass-balled superfunker "Zombie") is killer, recording info would help. The music speaks for itself, but presidential history deserves better.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blood Of Man
    On his best album yet, Jennings goes much darker, with chilling tales of addiction, madness and loss, all wrapped up in fuzzy electric guitars, feedback and raw, distorted vocals.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heligoland
    But the haunting horns under Horace Andy's vocal on "Girl I Love You" and mind-tickling thump of closer "Atlas Air" are pure genius from the minds of Grantley Marshall and Robert Del Naja: creepy and danceable.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Broken Bells
    It turns out the two pop-science geeks are a perfect match. Danger Mouse pushes Mercer's gorgeous, existential tunecraft outward with Day-Glo dynamics.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Midnight Souvenirs
    This delightful new album makes one thing clear: Nothing can kill Wolf's charm, musicality and youthfulness.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Am What I Am
    It's the hard-boiled stuff that really brings a lump to the throat--when it's not cracking you up.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heaven Is Whenever
    It's their most polished record, nearly majestic at points, without scrimping on bloodshot angst or exuberance.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Is Happening
    Murphy mixes the organic and the synthetic, rock and electro, loud guitars and louder beats. Like any good dance producer, he excels at the art of tension and release.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brothers
    But Brothers, recorded largely in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with little outside help, has a higher ratio of compelling songs and distress [than 2008's Attack & Release].
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mojo
    The performances are natural knockouts – cocksure grooves, pithy knife-play guitars and little overdub fuss – worked up, then nailed, some on the first full take, at the band's suburban Los Angeles rehearsal space. Petty can't help stressing the authenticity here.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Recovery
    Recovery is his most casual-sounding album in years, with odes to a "white-trash party" ("W.T.P.") and songs that hearken back to his freewheeling early records--rhymes as goofy and imaginative as they are violent and profane.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    MAYA
    From the sound of Maya, she's capable of anything - except being dull.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Suburbs
    How can any young band evolve toward that full-grown third album after starting out with a meditation on death and grief? It's no problem for Arcade Fire--these Montreal indie rockers are not shy about gunning for a solemn, grandiose, three-hankie anthem every time out.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Croweology
    The album is much better than a greatest-hits affair – it's a reason to go on.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Majesty Shredding
    No youngsters this side of Arcade Fire (who record for the Chunk's Merge Records) articulate ambivalence with such skill or heart. Few even try.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wake Up!
    Legend and the Roots capture the old feeling of protest and uplift while updating the sound. They're not imitators - they're heirs.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Le Noise
    Le Noise is also the most intimate and natural-sounding album Young has made in a long time: just a songwriter making his way through a vividly rendered chaos of memoir, affection and fear.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clapton
    Clapton is both impulses in one record, for the first time: a serenely masterful engagement with roots--the guitarist co-wrote just one original--that is all over the place in repertoire yet devoutly grounded in its roaming.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being
    You won't hear a funnier record all year. Jailbird or civilian, human or moon man, Lil Wayne is pop's most reliable deliverer of unadulterated fun.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Come Around Sundown
    The gigantic-sounding Come Around Sundown suggests that, Caleb's humble grumblings aside, they are thriving on it.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Speak Now
    She's in a class by herself when it comes to turning all that romantic turmoil into great songs. At this point, she's like the new Morrissey, except with even more eyeliner.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lady Killer
    How can you not love Cee Lo? He's a virtuoso rapper who has one of pop's most unique singing voices.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Secret Sisters
    Pouring out harmonies on originals ("Tennessee Me"), spunky covers (the kitsch classic "Something Stupid") and sublime traditional ballads ("Do You Love an Apple"), they make you believe, for three minutes or so, the lie that music was purer and better way back when.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Silent Movies
    The record is most striking for its gentleness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Libra Scale
    The real "concept" here is: Michael Jackson tribute album. And a damn good one.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Body Talk
    This disc cherry-picks from two previous Body Talk EPs while tossing in five new tracks.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Northern Aggression
    Northern Aggression, made with his long-running Miracle 3, is a new peak in that hard-boiled moral aggression.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The King Is Dead
    For a band able to push the limits of songwriting, it's a revelation, and a chance to see how deep simplicity goes. Very deep, it turns out.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Live on Ten Legs
    The sequel to 1998's Live on Two Legs, this 18-track compilation is perfect for anyone unwilling to wade into the sea of official Pearl Jam bootlegs.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Faith: Special Edition
    The album holds up as one of the Eighties' smartest megapop statements, full of passion and surefire hooks.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yuck
    Yuck channel their college-rock jones with skill and charm, balancing in-the-red guitar fuzz with melodic sweetness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The King of Limbs
    For these guys, disappearing completely and disappearing into the groove are pretty much the same thing.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smart Flesh
    There are few happy endings here, but the wounded have plenty of room to roam and waltz.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wounded Rhymes
    Lykke Li is a different kind of Swedish wunderkind: an ingenious oddball.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Collapse into Now
    On Collapse Into Now, they sound like they'd rather be a band than a legend, which must be why they keep pushing on.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smoke Ring for My Halo
    On Vile's fourth LP, the stoner haze lifts a bit, and he settles on a mood: chilled-out but guarded, and wrapped in gorgeous folk-blues guitar-picking.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Angles
    With its sudden-U-turn songwriting and curt execution, Angles is the best album that Casablancas, guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr., bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti have made since 2001's Is This It, the cannonball that inaugurated the modern-garage era.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Femme Fatale
    Femme Fatale may be Britney's best album; certainly it's her strangest. Conceptually it's straightforward: a party record packed with sex and sadness.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last of the Country Gentlemen
    This solo debut is as commanding: emotional trial ("Woman, When I've Raised Hell") and despair ("Country Dumb") stripped to Pearson's fraught vocals and hypnotic, irregular fingerpicking.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blood Pressures
    The chemistry between Mosshart and Hince must be more intense than ever, because their fourth album is also their finest.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    How to Become Clairvoyant
    How to Become Clairvoyant is Robertson's first record in more than a decade and a return to the ambitious aural cinema and textural explorations of 1987's Robbie Robertson and 1991's Storyville.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wasting Light
    The album reunites Grohl with producer Butch Vig, who worked on Nirvana's 1991 monster, Nevermind, and brings the same nuanced approach to weight and release here.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So Beautiful or So What
    It's his best album since 1990's The Rhythm of the Saints, and it also sums up much of what makes Simon great.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nine Types of Light
    Well, the end of all things must've been pretty bitchin', because the follow-up is pure heaven.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    House of Balloons
    The wormy hooks and earnest falsettos suggest the possibility of ginormous hits if Weeknd were to clean things up a bit, both lyrically and sonically. But let's hope that doesn't happen too soon.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Queens of the Stone Age [Reissue]
    When Homme hums that "words are weightless here on Earth because they're free" over dense space swirl, you hope gravity never takes hold.
Page: