The A.V. Club's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 49 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    44/876
    Mostly, 44/876 is just unremarkable, limply competent reggae lite, designed for Sandals resort lobbies and Sting’s office.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Prophets of Rage
    It is an album of obvious statements set to equally thudding music, liable to move and inspire no one.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    in•ter a•li•a
    Inter Alia sounds unmistakably bored with itself.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Search for Everything
    He’s delivered a batch of songs that feel relentlessly focus-tested in an attempt to win back his female fan base, but that have, in the process, sanded away the edges that gave him personality in the first place.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Dystopia
    The music is ferocious, catchy, and arguably the band’s best since the early ’90s; but many of Dystopia’s lyrics have nauseating connotations.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    A Better Tomorrow
    A Better Tomorrow has very little to do with the music of 20 years ago, but it has even less to do with the music of today; it’s completely out of joint, an island of irrelevance forced into being by the labor- and drama-intensive nature of the group.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Storytone
    If A Letter Home worked to privilege and highlight songwriting tools like melody and lyricism, Storytone does the opposite, overwhelming any inherent heart or soul in Young’s original compositions.
    • 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.
    • 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
    Excuse My French
    [A] vacant record-by-the-numbers.
    • 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.
    • 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).
    • 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.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Fortune
    Not all of Fortune is so unctuous, but none of it is inspired.
    • 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Scars & Stories
    Ultimately, these mid-tempo, mid-volume tunes flounder in mediocrity.
    • 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Path of Totality
    To Korn's credit, The Path Of Totality is its most radical reinvention to date. It's also the worst slab of sludge it ever shat.
    • 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Great Escape Artist
    Great Escape is a bold, erratic, pathetic attempt to recontextualize Jane's for the 21st century.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    SuperHeavy
    Most of SuperHeavy is frankly unlistenable, lacking even the professionalism and solid chops of late-period Stones records.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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.
prev
Page: