The A.V. Club's Scores

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:
4544 music reviews
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Go Away White is more than a swansong. It's a minor masterpiece that proves Bauhaus has been nicely preserved.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    King's vocals (on four of the 11 tracks) are more of a distraction than they were on "Red," though they add just the right amount of spice to make Revenge enjoyable from beginning to end.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Urata's slurred warble leaps into soaring vibrato, and the group's eerie throb of violin, accordion, and sousaphone has never felt so cinematic.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The overall effect is an endearing, successful addition to Ward's never-ending quest to assimilate every single populist song form of the 20th century.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Brain Thrust Mastery wouldn't exist without the '80s, but We Are Scientists offer up more than just retro-rock, even when they get as danceable as The Killers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    April, his third full-length under the Sun Kil Moon moniker, and the first made up of new songs since 2003, easily bears the weight of expectations, proving once again that he really does transcend any slowcore or singer-songwriter tags that have been tossed his way.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    This is the late-night, beat-driven, torpid-languid music of a zillion coffee shops, sure, but with the blood drained out of it, a creepy-crawly, black-and-white-sounding thing that gets under the skin and stays there from the first play
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    It's Hutchison's utterly believable desperation and frank lyrics that push the whole thing from good to great.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Far from an easygoing slice of complacent contentedness, Kensington Heights finds the band pinpointing its angry energy with expert precision, rather than flailing with the wild abandon of old.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Jim
    On Jim, Lidell course-corrects by choosing a warmer, more organic palette. It's a retro-soul record minus the bleeps and whistles, and it exposes Lidell as the charming, confident vocalist he is.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Though at times it threatens to become overbearing in its eclecticism, Santogold's solid lyricism and pop sensibility keep the album from disappearing up its own ass.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The four-track EP hints back at last year's Strawberry Jam, but the songs are more melodic and spacious--more patient in making way for whatever drifts in.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    It sounds timeless, yet tossed-off. Best of all, it's a real blast, just like messing around with your drinking buddies (rock legends or not) should be.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Today's politically charged songwriters can drop coy manifestos and clever metaphors all they want--Silver Mt Zion's 13 Blues actually flushes out the psychic, karmic residue of a suicidal civilization just to stomp around in all that apocalyptic plasma.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Tindersticks remains a champion at feel-bad soul strings, but those who've found the group's previous work oppressive might want to try again: Staples' vocals haven't changed, but with the music as pared-down as one of their impressionistic soundtracks, it's a new sound.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The songs are full, lush, even sparkling, and their teeming arrangements--woodwinds, electric piano, summer-afternoon copulations of banjo and violin--are the best of his career.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Meiburg's voice focuses each track on quietly bold melodies, strung through with excitement, wonder, and joy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The new Pacific Ocean Blue: Legacy Edition corrects that [being out of print] while confirming the rumors of the album's greatness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Two Men With The Blues is Willie at his most limber--and the surprise is that his co-star, the oft-formal Wynton Marsalis, sounds just as loose.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Drawing from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sass, Coppola wraps her laid-back vocals around narratives that are innovative yet accessible, resulting in one of the most promising pop debuts 2008 is likely to see.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    On Preteen Weaponry, it patiently carves its own landscape and brews up the weather to go with it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The album only has two full-fledged ballads, and while they don’t burst with the same life as the rest of the record, they showcase the songwriting and performance chops that should earn Maria a notable career beyond this impressive debut.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    While certain details are kept shrouded, the acts and emotions are hyper-real, and the story's arc is plenty navigable.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    On Dear Science, TVOTR finds a more traditional consistency, transmuting that dirty experimentalism into a lush cleanliness that eases--rather than hurls--its songs into the art-making ether.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Ultimately, though, Dead Confederate's alt-country/grunge hybrid doesn't just feel like a compelling debut, it feels like a compelling new genre.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Resurgam is brimming with glacial, lucent, keys-driven beauty.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    More importantly, the songwriting is better this time around, with sharp hooks that draw blood once they grab on.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Neil Young and Beatles influences are laid bare, the quirkiness is now more tuneful than cerebral, and the band has surrendered to the basic human craving for candied country melodies.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The result is even more appealing than Konono, drawing on likembes, the buzzing and drum-like tam tam, electric guitars, and half a dozen vocalists to create hypnotic, rich, complex polyrhythmic wonders.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Nearly all the songs on Offend Maggie find different ways to achieve a surprisingly full, evocative union of Deerhoof's pop sense and experimental whims.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    As Dylan's official bootlegs go, this is one of the series' best.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    By the time the track 'Where Do You Run To'--and its echoing impersonation of Joy Division's 'A Means To An End'--shambles by, Vivian Girls morphs from a work of nosebleed pop into something icy and numbing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Williams spent much of this decade proving she can branch out, but here she's staged something even more impressive: a pleasing homecoming.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Black Ice will trigger nostalgia in the devout, but inasmuch as the album reaffirms AC/DC's power, there's nothing backward-looking about it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The bolder sound signals that Deerhunter is now less concerned with the scarring effects of loss, conflict, and the passage of time, and more concerned with the ways to escape those things--even if that escape is fleeting.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Receivers finds the band slowing down the tempo and more fully exploring the textures and nuances of its dense, multi-layered soundscapes.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Here are the simple things about Chinese Democracy: Three of the songs are astonishing. Four or five others are very good. The vocals are brilliantly recorded, and the guitar playing is (generally) more interesting than the guitar playing on the "Use Your Illusion" albums.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Welcome To Mali sounds heavily produced but not overproduced, and even with the pings and whizzing, Amadou’s playing and the pair’s singing insure it never sounds less than organic.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    It's the rare supergroup that's actually super.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    With its brash and boiling-over debut, Titus Andronicus has done its small part to draw indie-rock out of the genre's recent navel-obsessed slump.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Get Guilty is a stirring set of memorable power-pop, given a personal spin via Newman's habit of delivering hard-to-parse pronouncements, like some kind of mad-eyed, curiously convincing soothsayer.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Vocalist Inara George and programmer Greg Kurstin have an affinity for all things pretty and vaguely retro, as her exceedingly pleasant vocals and his lush production attest. It's a formula, yes, but one that works over and over.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Not since 1992’s "Your Arsenal" has he combined barbed wit and fast-moving, backward-glancing guitar rock so piercingly.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sometimes the rigid pattern of power-murk-power gets a little too predictable, but the pleasure of having a Trail Of Dead album that contains mostly good parts and no blind alleys more than makes up for any reduction in ambition.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Earlier Vetiver records cultivated an air of backwoods mysticism, heavy on acoustic picking and tribal percussion, but Tight Knit is a leap ahead, stepping out of the mists and shadows and into a warm, bright clearing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    200 Million Thousand showcases some of their most satisfying [tunes] yet.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Fully digested, Hungry Bird succeeds as a grand epitaph and a birth announcement.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    All of Middle Cyclone is reliably Case-like, in that it seems unpredictable, unless you’ve listened to Case long enough to understand what she understands: that following fleeting impulses can be as rewarding as it is dangerous.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    They’re sensitive and sublime.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Her eponymous debut as Fever Ray is countless times more claustrophobic and creepy than "Silent Shout."
    • 65 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The rest of the remarkably memorable Kicks is similarly raw, tight, and funky.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    What makes Eagle so strong is that the music stayed light, and those bucolic splashes of washed-out color contrast so well against Bill Callahan’s blues.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Three years away has done wonders for the masked supervillain. The rapper who now goes by DOOM (“all big letters but it ain’t no acronym”) comes roaring back to life on the largely self-produced Born Like This.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    With Universe and 2005’s "Playing The Angel," Depeche Mode has created back-to-back albums compelling enough to stand up to its past best.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    While it’s misleading to call an album “mature” when it plunders rock history for riffs and features an ode to comic books, Argos has done some growing up.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    For all the pain and peril of the lyrics, there’s a lot of sly humor, too, underlined by the album’s loose, joyful sound.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Black Cascade makes it a little harder to just sink into the gloom, but the payoff is hearing Wolves become a more thoroughly powerful metal act.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Mostly, as Actor demonstrates, St. Vincent has found her own voice--and it’s one you wouldn’t want reading your kids any bedtime stories.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    A bit more raucous and a hell of a lot more cohesive than 2006’s "Axis of Evol," Outside Love finds frontman Stephen McBean (who also leads Black Mountain) continuing to rewrite the 1960s, with much improved results.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The original sound of "The Way" has been greatly cleaned up here, and a few songs’ endings have been elongated slightly.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    At 10 songs and 35 minutes, there’s no filler, not even on the obligatory final comedown 'Leave It At The Door,' which is all fluttery woodwinds and exhaustion.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Though it’s on par with its predecessor in terms of repetition, Yesterday And Today is also on that level in terms of quality--which should mean no disappointments.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    When the dust settles around the closing notes of The Bachelor’s outro, 'The Messenger,' it’s clear that Wolf has achieved that rare artistic feat: total catharsis. And a beautiful batch of it, at that.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    If Archives is ultimately less of a career-redefiner than Decade, that’s only because Young’s become such an entrenched part of rock history that his career has been exhaustively picked-over. Aside from the heretofore under-explored surf influence, there are really only a few new connections made or questions raised with Archives.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Posthumous projects are often ethically iffy, but the presence of Dilla’s hero Pete Rock as musical supervisor should reassure fans that Paid is about celebration rather than exploitation of Dilla’s life and legacy.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Beneath the disheveled exterior is an ace storyteller with a Raymond Carver-esque gift for mapping out the troubled contours of a character’s life with a few well-chosen details.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Farm sounds like the best alt-rock album that 1993 forgot.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    A huge evolutionary leap forward from the group’s charming 2006 debut "Moonlighting," Brooklynati brings together the whole package: gorgeous beats, thoughtful rhymes, strong song concepts, and a laid-back, cohesive vibe.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    It’s merely an excellent companion to Hood’s recent work with his regular band, with several songs--including the Springsteen-like 'Pollyanna' and the smoldering guitar workout 'Walking Around Sense'--ranking with his very best.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    These Four Walls is like a 50-minute, 11-song tour through the Scottish scene’s past, present, and future, emphasizing how much of the country’s best pop music has been concerned with transporting listeners to specific places, so we can all linger there together.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The sympathetic accompaniment of his expansive band--which abandons its on-stage Crazy Horse roar to operate in a spare, desolate gray area between funeral-paced country and bloodshot soul on the quietly breathtaking Josephine--does nothing to make Molina seem any less alone.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Florence Welch has a penchant for dramatics. But what would be a dubious distinction for most twentysomethings becomes an advantage when paired with Welch's otherworldly vocals and a trio of top-tier British producers who elevate her Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Lungs, to something that manages to be grandiose, relatable, and incessantly catchy all at the same time.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Wye Oak isn’t breaking any new ground in the exciting field of drone-exploration, but the band’s tone is striking--like a tuning fork with the blues.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Horse’s Ha’s debut album, Of The Cathmawr Yards, blends Elkington and Bean’s voices and sensibilities together seamlessly on a set of songs that relies heavily on intricate acoustic guitar plucking, dreamy violin, and a gently melancholy air.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    There’s a straightforward appeal to the album’s dynamism and fatalism, but that appeal swells with each close listen.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    In the past two years, Pissed Jeans has stewed in its own formidable digestive juices, and the result is a bold leap forward into hip-deep sludge.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Simian Mobile Disco’s astounding track record as a remix powerhouse is due in no small part to the group’s mastery of mood, and Temporary Pleasure benefits greatly from this.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Using different sounds to create the same tune over and over, Bejar and Destroyer create the feeling of a tale told again and again by different people. It’s a haunting effect, well worth its unusual frame.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Love And Curses still generates plenty of highs. Cartwright’s songwriting draws on Stax, Sun, and the Brill Building, combining a classic pop structure--simple and memorable--with a fair amount of only-got-this-studio-booked-for-an-hour immediacy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Fine Print runs just under an hour and is drawn from the outtakes of four different albums, yet it’s as cohesive and entertaining an album as Drive-By Truckers have ever released.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    As usual, they sound less like imitation than a band remaking its record collection in its own image.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Raekwon pays further homage to his late friend’s memory by releasing a tour de force that honors both the legacies of Wu-Tang Clan and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Mika has slapped together a pop-music patchwork capable of appealing to anyone who’s ever liked a song on the radio.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Monsters Of Folk is a real pleasure, full of songs that are loose, catchy and likeable.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Each maintains a newfound cool, which must be the result of Islands’ principal dudes realizing that they could live without one another, but that they’re far deadlier songwriters together.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Us
    On Us, his deeply humane new album, that mad-prophet intensity can be exhausting, exhilarating, and downright transcendent.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    New Leaves--Kinsella’s fifth full-length as Owen--was influenced by marriage and fatherhood, and even if he overindulges now and again (if his bones feel old in his early 30s, imagine how they’ll feel at 50), it proves that emo can grow up and still sound wonderfully relevant.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bonfires On The Heath continues one of the most remarkable winning streaks in alt-pop, in which each Clientele album has sounded like a welcome refinement of what came before.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Embryonic presents a band discovering that the far edge of an idea is often more compelling than its core.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    For most of the songs amassed here, it still takes around 10 minutes to get the job done--threading those thick synthesizer blasts and all that skittering digital manna through a brick wall of guitar fuzz--but Fuck Buttons succeeds at turning its unpredictable epics into masterpieces of pacing and strange beauty.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Though Radioclit seems to draw production ideas from the already existent ether--largely the African-Western pop alliances of the ’80s--that does nothing to take away from this fascinating and happy moment captured on record.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    On this, his major-label bow, the (now beardless!) prince of freak-folk has harnessed his many left-field tics and energies to craft his most elegantly driven work yet.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    On this album, Wolfmother becomes a band worth paying attention to.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    It’s another inside-out move for Tegan & Sara; they’ve pulled apart self-doubt and found the self-regard that lines it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Though it isn’t a concept album, Live At The Olympia does tell a story about the remarkable staying power of one of the best rock bands of the past 30 years.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Greg Fidelman does a better production job here than he did on Metallica’s "Death Magnetic," perhaps due to oversight by Rick Rubin, who produced Slayer’s best work.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sure, it’s valuable as a blueprint for music that would change everything (for a while, anyway), but also as a repository for the perfect synthesis of grunge’s anger and Kurt Cobain’s pop sensibility.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    With young contenders like The Gaslight Anthem hot on their heels, the members of Lucero have shown that they can still stretch, grow, and move forward--even while keeping a reverent eye on the rearview mirror.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    As usual, it’s worth any amount of trouble to hear Waits live.