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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Title TK
    Title TK comes off as unglued in an almost perversely restrained, even uneventful way.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mad Season
    "Last Beautiful Girl"... would be good enough to inspire a wholesale reassessment of Matchbox Twenty if the material surrounding it weren't so average.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Day Without Rain
    Self-seriousness and artistic water-treading aside, there's nothing wrong with A Day Without Rain. It's just that few households need more than an hour or so of Enya music, and Shepherd Moons and Watermark serve that purpose far more effectively.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Devil's Workshop
    Devil's Workshop is the shorter of the two discs, and the better by virtue of brevity and energy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Process Of Belief
    Plunges right back into oppressively rigid formula.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    New Danger
    A sprawling mess.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    C'mon C'mon
    Though she's a master of the explosive chorus, too much of C'Mon C'Mon sounds calculated around that talent, dropping hooks into otherwise unremarkable songs.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Fire Theft
    Oddly formless and forgettable, The Fire Theft finds Sunny Day Real Estate diminished in more ways than one.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Destiny Fulfilled
    Destiny Fulfilled sounds distant and detached, and its pronounced ballad-fancy only occasionally raises a flag for the group dynamic it serves to restore.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Street Dreams
    While a delight on guest appearances, he has yet to prove that he can construct memorable songs, let alone a solid album.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Snare
    With the murmured, strictly cadenced vocals, The Snare resembles an especially wan, uninspired rap record.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    England, Half English
    While his rhetoric remains fiery, the material is weak.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    You're the One
    Though not exactly a bad album, when contrasted to the remarkable Graceland and Rhythm Of The Saints, it sounds as arbitrary as a collection of B-sides.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Production
    What could have been a huge breakthrough instead sounds staid, as if he were so used to rocking the house that he didn't want to risk rocking the boat.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Purple Haze
    Purple Haze lumbers drearily through a sea of gangsta-rap clichés.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Beekeeper
    Floats by without stirring much interest.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rebirth
    Though Lopez often comes off as little more than a featherweight studio concoction, Rebirth contains a few moments with the sugary snap of fresh Bubble Yum.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bleed Like Me
    Garbage's latest approaches a kind of shimmering technical perfection, but remains strangely, stubbornly uninvolving.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In Space
    Pleasant in parts, embarrassing in others, In Space sounds more like an okay album from any of a dozen Big Star-inspired bands than like Big Star itself.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Black Holes & Revelations
    Give Muse credit for remaking itself over the years into a full-blown theatrical experience, and not just another echoing rock band. But that experience is, frankly, kind of shitty.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Bring on the Comets
    VHS's tardy follow-up, Bring On The Comets, might as well have stayed in bed.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Gods Of The Earth
    For all intents and purposes, The Sword's Gods Of The Earth is the exact same album as its predecessor, "Age Of Winters." That isn't a good thing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Re-Arrange Us
    The Mates recapture a bit of brio of 'The Re-Arranger' and 'Help Help,' but the rest of Re-Arrange Us is only useful for putting the kids to sleep.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    End Times
    Unfortunately, End Times comes off as impersonal and flat.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Rebirth
    Rebirth sounds like a strange dispatch from a lost ’80s in which Wayne trafficked in cheesy power chords, cornball hard-rock atmospherics, lame guitar solos for beginners, rock clichés, and Reagan-era synthesizers.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    United Nations of Sound
    Ashcroft himself is disappointingly meager. For a man with a true gift for epic pomposity, he's mostly dull here.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Funstyle
    Possibly the saddest thing about Funstyle is that the seven straighter songs those experiments surround have just as little to recommend them.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Soulsville
    There's a lot to be said for Lewis' work ethic and nose-to-the-grindstone grit. What these songs need, though, isn't grunting, grueling workmanship--it's soul. And Soulsville just doesn't have it.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Mine Is Yours
    For the most part, Mine Is Yours is the bland sound of a band trading identity for ambition.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    See My Friends
    Sadly, See My Friends is mostly embarrassing, pairing Davies with ill-matched partners like Billy Corgan, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora, and Metallica, who reduce "You Really Got Me" to third-rate bar-band fodder.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    In Your Dreams
    For all the juvenilia of the songwriting, the production on In Your Dreams is an oldster's abomination, lacquering dated MOR bombast over intermittently inspired melodies that wilt on impact.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Hot Cakes
    With Hot Cakes-the group's third album, and first since reforming last year-the laughter has died. In its place is the sad wheeze of the last surviving party balloon slowly, listlessly deflating.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Murder of the Universe
    Overall this record requires a huge narrative commitment, with the payoff of a vomit coffin. Not worth it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Times Infinity, Vol. 2
    Throughout, the album is marred by dated, slathered-on digital effects or chintzy, ’70s romantic drama synth-strings, or laden with clunky refrains.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Songs of Experience
    Songs Of Experience, U2’s 14th studio album, revs up the ambition, to embarrassing results. It finds the group desperately searching for a radio hit while pontificating on American exceptionalism, shoehorning the Syrian refugee crisis into not one but two love songs--and on consecutive tracks, no less.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 33 Critic Score
    Revival
    Revival isn’t even interesting enough to warrant all of the critical beatdowns it’s taken in its short time in the world. Instead, it’s boring and predictable, which are greater threats to the Eminem legacy than anything else.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Gameface
    A mercifully brief running time (less than 50 minutes) and a few scattered moments of autobiographical storytelling help make Gameface marginally less disposable than its most recent predecessors.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Pole
    A stylistic side-step that trips and falls without making much of the tumble.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Low Kick And Hard Bop
    She mixes sloppy beat work with awkward singing that makes her songs feel like tossed-off indie pop.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Fear Yourself
    Johnston's voice rarely melds with Linkous' production, and it loses its gritty charm amid such dignified surroundings.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Rock Action
    Even [producer Dave] Fridmann's ever-clever studio work can't make Rock Action interesting.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Slicker Than Your Average
    An album that features all of his worst tendencies and almost none of his good ones.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Weird Revolution
    Weird Revolution sounds dated and quaint, both in its "Pepper" rehashes ("Dracula From Houston," "The Shame Of Life") and in its halfhearted attempts at caustic shock ("Shit Like That") and misfit mission statements ("The Weird Revolution").
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Love, Shelby
    The disc's 10 tracks blur into a dispiriting, middle-of-the-road mishmash of lite pop, lite country, lite rock, and lite adult-contemporary.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Evolve
    The singer spends most of Evolve dithering on elastic, airy, funk-jazz excursions that convey few opinions or emotions, not to mention hooks.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Group Therapy
    The group's familiar sound returns intact, but the songs just aren't there; most of them fade into a distressing mid-tempo mush while plodding through the paces at half speed.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Comfort Woman
    The last adjective that could ever describe NdegeOcello's music is "dull," but that's just the damnation to apply to the new Comfort Woman, along with "inexplicable," "meandering," and "inexplicably meandering."
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Raven
    Maybe it worked on the stage, but taken out of context the result is a two-hour "Huh?" of an album.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    10,000 Hz Legend
    By trying to offer something for everyone, the mostly dull 10,000 Hz Legend has little to offer anyone.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Wonderland
    The few moments on Wonderland that make sense in the context of the band's history are overshadowed by a musical reach that exceeds its grasp.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Revolutions
    All too often finds X-Ecutioners playing second fiddle to an outsized roster of uninspired guests.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Twisted Tenderness
    The occasional brush with former glory, such as "Vivid" and the title track, isn't enough to make up for the eager-to-please inadequacies of the other material.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Invincible
    Jackson has lived a bizarre train-wreck life of mystery and tragedy, but following such a lengthy absence, Invincible just reeks of desperation and aimlessness.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Invincible Summer
    Instantly forgettable... consistently tepid, devoid of personality, and characteristic of a considerable talent on auto-pilot.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Alive & Amplified
    Alive & Amplified sounds so slick that it slips right by.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Suitcase: Failed Experiments and Trashed Aircraft
    A must only for the hardest of the hardcore Pollard fans, its subtitle--Failed Experiments And Trashed Aircraft--should not be ignored. It takes 17 tracks to hit a song ("Spring Tigers," from the aborted 1992 album Back To Saturn X) that sounds like a regrettable exclusion, and the consistency doesn't pick up from there.... if nothing else, it's a fine warehouse of great song titles...
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    One Plus One Is One
    At times, the album sounds like a lost collaboration between Nick Drake and Jethro Tull, and one that might have best stayed lost.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    10
    Cool J has backed off from proclaiming himself the greatest rapper of all time at every possible opportunity, which is fortunate: His claim on that title has never been shakier.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Conspiracy of One
    Setting aside the abhorrent "Original Prankster," which plumbs new depths of Yankovic appropriation--and throws in a stupid Rob Schneider sample to boot--the bulk of the album indulges The Offspring's preferable loud-fast-shrill side... Conspiracy Of One's crowd-pleasing novelty idiocy doesn't run much deeper than its single, and while that may disappoint those who enjoyed Americana, it makes it The Offspring's most tolerable record in years.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ten New Songs
    This is the first time he's sounded less than vital.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    America's Sweetheart
    Love has nothing new to say and no better way to say it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Black Letter Days
    The tossed-off quality of his recent work may be liberating to Black, but it's not likely to be so satisfying to his audience.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Auf Der Maur
    She never finds a way to distinguish one track from the next, or from the output of just about any '90s alt-rock also-ran.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Discovery
    While Discovery embraces the cheesiness of the lamest of lame music, the strategy frequently comes across as gimmickry. The album isn't so much fun as it is silly, and while Daft Punk's members may just be musical smart-alecks, funk hasn't sounded this resoundingly stupid since Bootsy Collins' squiggly solo work.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Iowa
    Those who've moved beyond efforts to scare mom and dad will do well to steer clear, though they've probably made that choice already.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Open
    While the continued drive to mix up its sound remains admirable, the weak spots are downright deadly, making Open feel sort of like a between-albums goof, an experiment strictly for the fan club.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Splinter
    The problem is that most of it is deadly dull.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Rainbow Children
    The Rainbow Children contains one good song, a ballad called "She Loves Me 4 Me," buried beneath layers of spiritual horseshittery.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Hotel
    An album that finds Moby half-remembering ideas for songs that are hard not to forget.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Forgotten Arm
    Mann's signature wordplay sounds clichéd and exhausted, and her melodies lack the energy and pop sparkle that distinguished her pre-Lost In Space work.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Make Believe
    It's a sweet, open, daringly earnest album in which the sad old Cuomo does battle with the wise old soul Cuomo wants to become. By conventional wisdom, it should never work as a rock album, and most of the time, that conventional wisdom is dead on.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Hannicap Circus
    The problem with shock, of course, is that it quickly loses its novelty, and anyone who doesn't find the topics of pedophilia, drug abuse, or incest innately hilarious will find Hannicap Circus rough going.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Howl
    Howl indulges the band's heretofore-dormant interest in country, gospel, and Delta blues, in an exercise that sounds about as exercise-y as music gets.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Weirdness
    Even at 40 minutes, this album is interminable.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Untitled
    Untitled should make no sense to any sentient being older than 18, but that isn't ageism, it's practical marketing
    • 66 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Mentor Tormentor
    These days, the group creates reasonable facsimiles of utter tedium.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Lust Lust Lust
    It's a narrow frame of reference that The Raveonettes seem likely to stick with; hopefully, on future albums, the songs will get more memorable than this batch.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Simple Plan
    Think Lavigne's "Girlfriend" without the hooks, but with a discernable degree of emo introspection.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Reality Check
    Regardless of whether Reality Check is "bad" or simply bad, The Teenagers belong on the scrap heap.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Weezer (Red Album)
    The blame for Weezer can't all be laid on Cuomo—his bandmates' songwriting contributions (particularly Brian Bell's Uncle Kracker stab 'Thought I Knew') are just as unforgivably soulless.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    T.O.S. (Terminate On Sight)
    The once-fascinating, now-tedious gangsta-rap superstar's creative losing streak continues with G-Unit's dreary new posse album Terminate On Sight.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Big Bad World
    This time around, it's all saccharine pop and desperate ballads.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Face Control
    This is easily the most flavorless fruit yet to fall from the Wolf Parade family tree.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cardiology
    Although the new album opens promisingly with Beach Boys-esque a cappella before kicking into a handful of bland yet workable pop-punk tunes, the middle backslides into watered-down dance-rock.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Gold Cobra
    Time hasn't been kind to the once-popular amalgam of metal and hip-hop known as nü-metal, and it's been absolutely brutal to former scene king Limp Bizkit
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    I'm Back! Family & Friends
    Contrary to its emphatic title, I'm Back! Family And Friends isn't so much a full-fledged comeback album as a mildly inspiring three-song EP surrounded by truly horrible re-recordings and remixes of Stone's biggest hits of the late '60s and early '70s.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    World Wide Rebel Songs
    As a folksinger, he undeniably blows: There's simply nothing appealing or compelling about his forced, tuneless, featureless vocals, and without a strong frontman like Zack De La Rocha or Chris Cornell, flaccid attempts at rocking out like "It Begins Tonight" render Rebel Songs even weaker than if he'd stuck strictly to folk.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    SuperHeavy
    Most of SuperHeavy is frankly unlistenable, lacking even the professionalism and solid chops of late-period Stones records.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Evanescence
    Maniacally narcissistic, Evanescence is corny in the way only music so grim and humorless--and yet irredeemably stupid--can be
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Lulu
    An utter wreck that curiously, miraculously, might have been great.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Born to Die
    Shallow and overwrought, with periodic echoes of Ke$ha's Valley Girl aloofness, the album lives down to the harshest preconceptions against pop music.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Scars & Stories
    Ultimately, these mid-tempo, mid-volume tunes flounder in mediocrity.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    This Machine
    An undistinguished slog of an album that counts an atrocious cover of "16 Tons" as one of its many grating moments.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Fortune
    Not all of Fortune is so unctuous, but none of it is inspired.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Mr. Blue Sky: The Very Best
    Mr. Blue Sky is the musical equivalent of George Lucas changing a few of the special effects in the Star Wars films and then re-issuing them (again).
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Somethin' 'Bout Kreay
    There's only so much blood to be squeezed from that stone, so instead, Somethin 'Bout Kreay contents itself with using that stone to bash listeners over the head.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Excuse My French
    [A] vacant record-by-the-numbers.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    MGMT
    This is a bag of potato chips that’s 80 percent air, unconvincingly trying to pass itself off as a full meal.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Blacc Hollywood
    Khalifa’s 2011 breakthrough, Rolling Papers, compensated for his bland rapping with sticky pop hooks, and even his 2012 snoozer, O.N.I.F.C., offered some varied production to offset the tedium, but there are no such respites on Blacc Hollywood, an album every bit as vacant and unappealing as the artist who made it.
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