The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 4,544 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 64% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 34% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 74
Highest review score: 100 The Life Of Pablo
Lowest review score: 0 Graffiti
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,663 out of 4544
  2. Mixed: 771 out of 4544
  3. Negative: 110 out of 4544
4544 music reviews
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lisbon
    Lisbon is like a treatise on the untapped power of the have-nots, delivered by the kind of people who could turn a raw potato, a cup of water, and a pinch of salt into a five-star dish.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Majesty Shredding
    Majesty Shredding lives up to its name and doesn't waste much time catching its breath, and along the way Superchunk delivers something that used to be expected of the band: an album on which every song sounds as inspired as the next one.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky
    Where it leads, and who dares to climb it, is irrelevant; the fact that it so dizzyingly hangs between spirituality and perversion, austerity and decadence, is enough.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964
    He sounds like what he was beneath the myth he was already constructing for himself: a man with a gift for words and music, sitting in a small room and hoping someone outside would listen.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Body Talk
    Over the course of Body Talk, Robyn has proved that there's real emotion to be found among the ones and zeros of electronic music, and Pt 3. is the culmination of that outlook: euphoric, personal, and inspirational to the last beat.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The King Is Dead
    The King Is Dead spreads 10 songs across 40 minutes, and there isn't a bum track in the bunch.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    James Blake
    James Blake is dubstep's crossover moment, rolling back the hostile skronk and centering on a croon that rivals Antony Hegarty for lovelorn beauty.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Greatest Story Never Told
    Told is worth the wait; raising Saigon's profile is probably Entourage's greatest/only gift to the world, at least where hip-hop is concerned.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    We're New Here
    The real triumph of We're New Here is that it doesn't feel like an album-length remix. Instead, it's a collaboration done the way Scott-Heron's best team-ups always are: after the fact, with time to consider the everlasting gravity of the man's words and wisdom.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Civilian
    The added dynamism in Wye Oak's music makes the prettiest passages of Civilian that much more arresting, and the demons lurking beneath them all the more real.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    He Gets Me High
    As holdover until the next album, He Gets Me High does exactly what it should: raise anticipation for what comes next.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Reptilians
    Reptilians is equal parts important, fun, and urgent, and it's hard to think of a better combination of attributes for a pop record.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nine Types of Light
    Finding the beauty and the beat in unpredictable chaos-keeping the heart when the world falls apart-has always been TV On The Radio's specialty, and here, it sounds completely effortless.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Helplessness Blues
    Wide-eyed self-searching is this record's predominant mode, which Fleet Foxes do both lyrically and sonically, reveling in the process of discovery.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Turtleneck & Chain
    The juxtaposition of white-boy geekiness with swaggering hip-hop posturing forms the core of The Lonely Island's smart-ass take on pop music, but the trio is also distinguished by obsessive cultural specificity on its sophomore effort, Turtleneck & Chain.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Demolished Thoughts
    The album seems beamed in from the early '70s, and probably should've happened in the '90s, but as modern psychedelia increasingly becomes the domain of electronic music, Demolished Thoughts feels right on time--an organic reminder of what can happen when a couple of analog geniuses sit down in a room together and hit "record."
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    David Comes To Life
    They're also bracingly potent and screamingly vital; David Comes To Life is the work of a band openly aspiring to be great, and pulling it off.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Black Up
    A killer second act.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ascension
    No longer struggling to wake from bad dreams, Broadrick has rubbed the sleep from his eyes, dug through the rubble, and planted Ascension on the summit of the ruins of the world.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bermuda Drain
    The power-electronics attack of Prurient's past remains at the core of the album, particularly in the serrated, disembodied title track. Even at its most blunt and abusive, though, there's a dynamic subtlety and blown-out ambience that lulls sanity to the brink, then dangles it there.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Celestial Lineage
    The latest of those hymns is Celestial Lineage--and as great as the group's two previous full-lengths were, Lineage is the first to truly, fully capture the Weavers' unholy vision of sylvan majesty and pagan mystique.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Days
    Real Estate set itself up to falter by comparison, but Days pulls off the impressive feat of earning that company [of Beach Boys' Today, the Byrds' Notorious Byrd Brothers, and The Shins' Oh, Inverted World].
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The SMiLE Sessions
    Wilson has always said he wanted to make a "teenage symphony to God." This Smile is so wonderfully close. Hallelujah.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Achtung Baby [Super Deluxe]
    Achtung Baby sounds a like a typical U2 record--a terrific U2 record, arguably the best record U2 has ever made, but not exactly the decisive break from the band's past it is remembered as. What Achtung Baby instead represents is U2's last great creative gasp.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Some Girls [Deluxe Edition]
    Some Girls showed that the Stones could pull off the old magic using some flashy new tricks.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Siamese Dream [Deluxe Edition]
    The meticulously constructed cathedrals of guitar sounds on Siamese Dream--so clean and melodic, yet also heavy-make the album more comparable to A Night At The Opera or Boston than Nevermind or Vs.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Undun
    With the tight, concise, ferociously focused Undun, however, the immensity of the project's ambition is matched by its seamless, masterful execution.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Open Your Heart
    With Open Your Heart, The Men have taken that breath. And it's only made their hearts beat faster.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Silent Hour/Golden Mile [EP]
    Rossen proves he can stand on his own.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sunkissed
    Bad Weather California has done an excellent job here; each track is filled with energy and positivity that just makes for a fun album.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dopesmoker [Reissue]
    It's an album of endless pleasures, and its arcane, foggy-headed mysteries never stop revealing themselves.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Cancer4Cure
    Cancer For Cure is a triumph of imagination and intelligence in service of a pervasive sense of personal and political unease.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ram [Deluxe Edition]
    It's more of a "real" record than McCartney, but it just as firmly rejects rock-star self-importance.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Celebration Rock
    Celebration Rock starts strong and stays there over the course of its eight songs and 35 minutes.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Graceland [25th Anniversary Edition]
    The music of Graceland is as stirring as always.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do
    The beauty of The Idler Wheel… is how it transmits each of those feelings in excruciating, frank, and lovely detail.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Channel Orange
    Channel Orange is so arrestingly smooth that all of its unusually shaped pieces fit together as a seamless whole.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Seer
    Swans has never traveled a straightforward, clean, or uninterrupted path. But with The Seer, one thing is certain: Even during its quietest lulls, Gira has never sounded louder.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bend Beyond
    Woods works well to find the right space for each instrument, maintaining the balance between accuracy and capriciousness that continues to define the band.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    METZ
    For all its abrasion and denatured noise, Metz isn't a statement of nihilism or finality; it's a bright, exploratory scalpel making the first of hopefully many incisions.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Lines: 2012 Mix/Master
    Twenty-plus years later, it still sounds ahead of its time and remains an influential, genre-spanning work.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pedestrian Verse
    Hutchison falls in with another proud Scottish tradition: the ability to make the gloomy anthemic.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Modern Vampires of the City
    The band itself probably doesn’t know quite what that is yet, but as a capstone to what it’s done so far, Modern Vampires Of The City feels pretty perfect.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sunbather
    What’s undeniable is that moments from Sunbather will resonate long after the pointless babble has died down, proving that sometimes the greatest beauty can only be found in the face of chaos.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bones of What You Believe
    She, Doherty, and multi-instrumentalist Iain Cook have crafted one of the year’s best albums, which means that buzz won’t be dying down any time soon.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Workbook 25 [Deluxe Edition]
    Although the mix sounds from another era, it also doesn’t sound compressed to within an inch of its life.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Spiderland [Box Set]
    It’s a thoughtful look at a legendary act, and one that’s both long overdue and well deserved. Just as Spiderland rewards the patient listener, the box set rewards the patient fan.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Seek Warmer Climes
    Seek Warmer Climes is itself predatory--but with a delicate, skeletal shudder, it turns that hunger into a lonely howl.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Heal
    Showalter does Coldplay better than Coldplay has in a long time, delivering an invitation into his world through this profoundly affecting work of artistic necessity.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Foundations of Burden
    That the band took it upon themselves to subtly yet profoundly revamp--aand exquisitely humanize--doom is just part of the reason why Foundations Of Burden is such a brave record. The other is the fact that it’s quite simply moving, the sounds of dislocated souls finding a voice at last.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Soused
    Pairing the somber and overpowering baritone bravado of Walker—not to mention his mad-poet mystique—with the subterranean thunder and tumbling towers of holy-hell from the core duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson seemed like the perfect marriage. And it is.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Black Messiah
    Black Messiah confirms that music holds the power to challenge and comfort, to take us someplace spiritual, political, and existential. It’s beautifully, devastatingly human.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Carrie & Lowell
    Meet Carrie & Lowell on its terms and it’s revelatory.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Summertime '06
    It’s a major triumph disguised as a minor one--60 minutes of lean, inventive, important rap music that never pats itself on the back for being any of those things.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Every Open Eye
    The record feels like the kind a band releases just before it takes off. If Every Open Eyes turns out to be Chvrches’ breakthrough album, no one should be surprised.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Return to the Moon
    It’s the flip side of the same gorgeous, engaging coin, and it’s more than just a placeholder while the next National album marinates--it stands shoulder to miserable, brilliant shoulder.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Kannon
    This is the soundtrack to the decline of our species, once again illustrating that Sunn O))) is one of the most interesting and progressive groups in heavy music.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Life Of Pablo
    It feels far different from any of the tightly constructed, singular works of West’s past, and from a sonic standpoint, it sounds almost like a greatest-hits collection of nearly every sound and musical idea that he’s cultivated up to this moment. If you have a favorite Kanye West record, you can find it in here somewhere.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Teens of Denial
    That exercise in tension and release, repeated throughout the record, is essential to Teens Of Denial’s blistering greatness. The distortion-laden songs on Teens Of Denial build and soar, often repeatedly within a few minutes.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Goodness
    It’s a record that, by its end, is a profound statement. It just requires a little patience for it to be heard.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What One Becomes
    What One Becomes shows Cook and Turner again occupying highly coveted space on the zenith of aggressive music--this time alongside Yacyshyn, the percussive mastermind. It’s hard to imagine a better metal record coming out this year.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Puberty 2
    Puberty 2 exposes new dimensions to Mitski’s voice, revealing its true richness and range. Mitski is an exceptionally keen observer of the human condition, and Puberty 2 marks a triumphant new step in her evolution.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Love & Hate
    Love & Hate is a massive leap in accomplishment for Kiwanuka.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Freetown Sound
    What keeps Hynes grounded is his sense of emotion, demonstrated in the seductively smooth funk undercurrents of “E.V.P.” (featuring Debbie Harry), evoking George McCrae’s stunted yet whisper-like vocals.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    World Eater
    World Eater represents a true stylistic leap. It’s a mammoth collection of songs that carve out a unique niche between apocalyptic anxiety and brief, cathartic bursts of ecstasy--a feeling that should resonate with just about everybody these days.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Semper Femina
    Her steady output has produced some of her generation’s finest records, and her sixth, Semper Femina, is among her most affecting to date.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Infinite Worlds
    In the eight songs that compose the record, there’s not a second that feels extraneous, making for 28 minutes of uncompromising and effortless genre-bending. It’s a stunning record, apparently for all parties involved.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Hairshirt Of Purpose
    At a time when it’s once more trendy to declare that rock music is dying, there’s a band like Pile putting lie to that hyperbole and still pushing the form to its outermost limits.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    AZD
    AZD marks a triumphant return for Actress.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    Lamar trusts every idea to stand on its own. When you’re making art this substantial, vital, and virtuosic, there’s no need to wrap a tidy bow around it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What Now
    A record so good it answers its own title question and makes you eager to ask it again.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Guppy
    Charly Bliss has made a record as alive and irrepressible as anything I’ve heard in years.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Melodrama
    What Melodrama confirms most of all is Lorde’s uncanny ability to drill down so precisely on grand emotional themes that would fell lesser songwriters. Tackling a bad breakup certainly isn’t new in pop music, but it’s delivered here with an honesty an energy that is uniquely her own.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Underside of Power
    Underside feels like a quantum leap from [its 2015 self-titled debut] both musically and thematically, newly charged with the righteous anger of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and explosively unleashed by artists and activists who sense that this is their moment to seize. The result is a collection of songs that articulates that fury and despair with such authority, it deserves to become the soundtrack for whatever future documentary montage captures the mess of 2017.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Out in the Storm
    Each Waxahatchee album has felt like a big step forward, and Out In The Storm feels like the biggest one yet.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Beast Epic
    Beast Epic perfectly distills a career into a nearly perfect collection.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sleep Well Beast
    Those invested in the band’s slow-motion refinement of simmering melancholy will find that they’ve discovered yet more fresh nuance to that sound, as they seem to every time.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    V
    Overall, V maintains a distinctively elegant gloom, The Horrors continuing to find intoxicating new shades within their gray moods. It’s an album that confirms them as one of the most consistently surprising, most artistically sophisticated, simply greatest rock bands working today.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Stranger in the Alps
    Stranger In The Alps alchemizes sorrow into redemptive beauty. It’s never about wallowing, but about slowly moving through it. That difference, played out over some incredible, wise-beyond-her-years songwriting, makes it one of the best albums of the year.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Kid
    The Kid is truly an album to experience beginning to end, one with a knack for making you feel--as Smith sings on “An Intention”--“everything at the same time.”
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Masseduction
    It’s the best encapsulation of her vision to date, here fully under her control.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Turn Out the Lights
    Turn Out The Lights is beautifully crafted throughout, full of the kinds of songs that linger long after they’ve ended. Baker doesn’t make it easy, but fans wouldn’t have it any other way.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Utopia
    It is musically heady and rawly autobiographical, translating the most intimate moments into towering, skywritten love notes. It’s ruled by a divine feminine energy that interrogates toxic masculinity and, more subliminally, environmental issues. ... In other words, it’s a journey that’s easy to want to take with her.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Twin Fantasy
    With the new Twin Fantasy, Toledo has done the unimaginable: created a reboot that matches its original in tone, passion, and excitement.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What a Time to Be Alive
    What A Time To Be Alive is the rawest Superchunk album since the band’s 1990 debut and undoubtedly its most ferocious.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    You're Not Alone
    In addition to a pack of his best songs since I Get Wet, he brings with him a trio of spoken-word interludes that further expand on his philosophy, and as stupid as that might sound on paper--and even on first listen--it makes sense in the world of Andrew W.K. ... His confidence is unassailable and contagious.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Persona
    Persona is uneasy listening, with heavier rhythms and more fragmented melodies than West deployed on previous works like Howl and Night Melody, yet it’s equally engrossing. It leaves a deep psychic impression--a truly “arthouse” album that begs repeated revisiting, to explore its many conflicting faces.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dirty Computer
    There is a concept here, but it is Janelle Monáe; there is a story here, but it is Janelle Monáe’s. And she’s outdone herself in both the execution of this vision and its resonance.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Singularity
    There’s no prescribed narrative, but Singularity still tells a grand story--a synesthetic evocation of how it feels to be alive.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hell-On
    Case’s restless exploratory impulses are contained within relatively conventional song structures, with much more compelling results.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Negro Swan
    He’s given us not just a great album, but a piece of himself that stands as a whole truth that need not be escaped, but rather, treasured.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Room 25
    From beginning to end, Room 25 is a testimony to the power of telling your story and the hope that can be found in doing so without apology. Like hearing the chorus of an old spiritual or having a long conversation with a close friend, each song is intimate in a restorative way. An unquestionable balm for uncertain times like these, this album announces Noname’s lyrical coming-of-age.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Some Rap Songs
    Well, it can be [dour]. But it’s also ecstatic. Make no mistake: This is an album by one of the best rappers alive, elbowing slant rhymes and assonance into his disses (“Please do abort, I could feel when you’re forcin’ it / Still in a bore riddim”) and exhaling those singularly oblong sentences of his (“Galaxy’s the distance between us by Christmas,” he describes one foundering relationship).
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    I Am Easy to Find
    The National’s never been afraid to dial things down, but it’s rarely sounded as vulnerable as it does here--song after song, Dessner’s vibrant, moody arrangements serve to reflect Berninger’s precarious balance of hope and frustration.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Big Day
    The Big Day is a rare bouquet on full display; a stunningly realized array of color, sound, and sensation that swallows the room. Any structure at risk of pop cliché finds new life through Chance, whose mastery of composition creates spins on existing musical archetypes like new synaptic grooves being carved out for the very first time.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Center Won't Hold
    This may also be Sleater-Kinney’s lustiest album yet. Several of the album’s 11 songs are peppered with breathy sighs and ecstatic yelps, and it’s almost as if Brownstein is staring you directly in the eyes as she sings, “Let me defang you and defile you on the floor,” in “Bad Dance.” But this, too, has its political aspect. ... A stunning finale is another Sleater-Kinney specialty, and The Center Won’t Hold delivers with the devastating, disarming “Broken.”
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ghosteen
    He sounds simultaneously alone at the edge of the world and surrounded by benevolent spirits, a fittingly biblical cloud of witnesses who haven’t seen the power of God so much as they’ve moved through the fallout of their own atomic blasts; theirs is a communion of radiation. So it’s a bit of a surprise that Ghosteen is also Cave’s most accessible album since The Boatman’s Call.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fetch the Bolt Cutters
    Fetch The Bolt Cutters is full of visceral, jittery, wonderfully imperfect performances that make the album feel like a dreamlike concert at Largo.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Letter to You
    His new record Letter To You is an absolute triumph, one that can take its place alongside the best albums of Springsteen’s long career.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Little Oblivions
    With Little Oblivions, the singer-songwriter has made her most cohesive record yet. The resuscitation of a heavier sound works in Baker’s favor, while she still adds hints of the fragile gentleness that has captivated fans since her Sprained Ankle days.
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