The A.V. Club's Scores

For 3,333 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 1.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
3,333 music reviews
    • Metascore: 95
    • Critic Score 100
    Many rappers derive inspiration from Clinton, but OutKast has constructed its own far-reaching and experimental mythology, drenching its surrealistic, Southern-fried flows in brilliantly executed funk, blissful soul, rattling live drums, spacey synthesizers, and psychedelic guitars.... In its messy brilliance, OutKast has created a hip-hop Sign O' The Times, a messy, vital classic and a major step forward for both its members and hip-hop as a whole.
    • Metascore: 92
    • Critic Score 100
    All the elements of previous White Stripes records surface again, but in weirder, more intense strains that don't break with Jack and Meg White's past, yet don't slavishly adhere to it, either.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 100
    An album that sets the bar for density and imagination almost unreasonably high.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Critic Score 100
    Alternately recalling the best work of Blondie, Leonard Cohen, Depeche Mode, and dozens more, 69 Songs About Love is a sprawling masterpiece of White Album-like proportions.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 100
    Since We Last Spoke finds RJD2 sounding like some blessed creature who's able to tune in every radio station in the world, past and present, and mix them together into a cohesive whole.
    • Metascore: 89
    • Critic Score 100
    Quite possibly the best sample record ever made.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 100
    An impossibly multi-tracked masterwork of excess, abrasion, and indefinable beauty.
    • Metascore: 91
    • Critic Score 100
    What's lost is considerable: namely, the justly vaunted lyrical chemistry between Andre 3000 and Big Boi. But what's gained is even more remarkable: the powerful, singular, undiluted visions of two of rap's most fearless sonic explorers.
    • Metascore: 93
    • Critic Score 100
    Like both artists' most transcendent work, Madvillainy retains its mystery and wonder after dozens of listens.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 100
    A lush, impeccably produced, musically adventurous, emotionally resonant examination of the way relationships are both strengthened and damaged by distance, the album surpasses Gibbard's other career highpoints, which is really saying something.
    • Metascore: 90
    • Critic Score 100
    Z
    It's both rare and marvelous to hear a good band make its first really great album.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Critic Score 100
    It's an easy Destroyer album to love, approachable as both a collection of strong rock songs and a literary exercise in just how far songs can stretch to make sense of the words within them.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Critic Score 100
    Sure, Fishscale has its share of pointless skits. But that's what the fast-forward button is for, just as the play button seems to have been designed specifically to let people listen to Fishscale over and over again.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 100
    What's best is the sense that no DFA remix will sound quite the same way twice. That applies to the sounds within as well as the complete tracks, which beg to be approached from different directions--as contemplative rock, frazzled dance, wonky prog, and so on--so they can show off entry points lurking almost everywhere.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 100
    Graced by a new lightness of touch and simply better as programmers, the two friends behind Matmos sound loose and lively where they once sounded stiff.
    • Metascore: 72
    • Critic Score 100
    It's Never Been Like That has the necessary edge of real art, but it's approachable right down to the final song, "Second To None," with its deep echo and thin lines.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Critic Score 100
    TV On The Radio previously seemed content to roam the open horizon; here, it's intent on exploring the far side. The journey is, once again, enthralling.
    • Metascore: 73
    • Critic Score 100
    Three polka-dotted women with perfectly suited voices front The Pipettes, but it's the work of mastermind Monster Bobby and the rest of the backing band that elevates these 16 nuggets far beyond the disposable pop implied by the setup.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 100
    It's 36 minutes of loose garage rock with massively catchy melodies sugarcoating the biting sarcasm.
    • Metascore: 89
    • Critic Score 100
    The slow-building atmospherics of Dylan's 1997 comeback album have given way to some of the most immediately accessible tunes in his catalog.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 100
    The pull of European cool against Oldham's usual rustic, heartfelt love poetry creates moments of sweet tension.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 100
    For the first time, the cantankerous Lightburn matches his lyrics--from rapture to self-exploration to joy both lived and missed--perfectly with the music, which nods to Britpop but never succumbs to any genre trappings.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 100
    The songs brim with melodic ideas, but the album never overwhelms, because Meloy doesn't try to pack every minute with words and hooks.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 100
    Blood Mountain is terrifying in scope as well as execution.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Critic Score 100
    By boldly expanding the parameters of mainstream hip-hop, Fiasco's threatening to make rap a welcoming place for geeks and iconoclasts as well as pimps and thugs.
    • Metascore: 65
    • Critic Score 100
    It's smart, strange, just different enough from its predecessor, and, eventually, absolutely stunning.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 100
    Through Neon Bible, the band is seemingly sending a beacon to other reasonable people forced underground by the world's insanity. It's almost like a musical version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 100
    Another fiercely satisfying Leo record.
    • Metascore: 68
    • Critic Score 100
    Traffic And Weather offers vivid little snapshots of characters and places, but in Schlesinger and Collingswood's hands, a snapshot can tell the whole story.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 100
    New Moon is thankfully, wonderfully full.