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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Pussycat
    14 tight and tidy grunge-pop tunes, playing everything herself.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Snow
    It’s unmistakably a New Year album, and a decent one at that, but it doesn’t do much to distinguish itself.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    async
    Async gives the sensation of being inside an art installation, where everything you’re supposed to be thinking is spelled out for you on little white gallery cards. Async works far better when Sakamoto lets the music mirror that existential ambiguity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    All This I Do for Glory
    By zeroing in on a more human theme, he has found a way to open up, creating an album that’s easier to listen to than its predecessors while still being dazzlingly difficult to perform.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Rock N Roll Consciousness
    By the time “Aphrodite” grinds to a close, his group slowing intuitively in lockstep while he unleashes lightning bursts of noise, Moore has made a convincing case that this marks a new beginning.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Pleasure
    Pleasure isn’t all novelty. It’s a demanding record expressing demanding emotions.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Humanz
    All of this isn’t to say that the album is bad--Albarn’s dialed in, and the guests are meticulously curated--but rather that it seems dwarfed by its role as part of a larger concept, the music mostly valuable for its possible real-world applications in videos, on tours, as action figures and video games, and all of the other manufactured, disposable pop culture ephemera for which Gorillaz was designed.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Guppy
    Charly Bliss has made a record as alive and irrepressible as anything I’ve heard in years.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Electric Lines
    Despite a little sagging in the middle third, Electric Lines is a fine club-friendly album to spend the summer with.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Robyn Hitchcock
    He’s been doing that for years now, but on his 21st record, he again accomplishes that goal in his own inimitable style, still mining the uncommon depths and winning melodies within his own bizarre parameters.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Death Song
    Death Song confirms there’s no end to the kinds of hurt and frustration that can be channeled into its cathartic music.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Narkopop
    Voigt certainly hasn’t lost touch with electronic music, though Narkopop reclaims the sound of it that is most unmistakably his, while also giving it more variance in tone.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    8
    Too many songs get halfway there, starting promisingly, then petering out quickly.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    AZD
    AZD marks a triumphant return for Actress.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Season High
    Like every Little Dragon album, Season High contains several new entries into the band’s essential catalog, but as a whole, it fails to fulfill its potential.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The World's Best American Band
    It’s the whole package that matters here, and taken together, The World’s Best American Band has the elements of one of the year’s best rock albums.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Death Peak
    It is as purely individual a statement as the English producer has released yet. Happily, it’s also his most approachable, with the producer sounding more euphoric than he has in a long time.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Swear I'm Good at This
    In just under a half hour, the band displays a musical confidence rare for a joyfully ragged garage-pop debut.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    August by Cake
    The music barely hangs together at times, but the potential for the roller-coaster to go flying off the tracks is, as always, part of the fun.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Arca
    If the skittering fluctuation of Ghersi’s past releases gained him a cult following, then the open-hearted ballads sprinkled throughout Arca should earn him his well-deserved breakthrough.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Whiteout Conditions
    In the immediate, Whiteout Conditions might leave you a little cold.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Far Field
    The raw passion of Future Island’s past work still dominates, but with more complexity in the arrangements, and more push and pull in the ongoing dialogue between the voice and the instruments behind it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Pure Comedy
    Pure Comedy excels when Tillman trains his observant side-eye on smaller targets as well.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    All-Amerikkkan Bada$$
    He’s still reaching to the golden age for inspiration, but updating it so thoroughly that we’re reminded why we considered it golden in the first place.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    You Only Live 2wice
    It sounds instead much more like an artist stepping back into his old pocket with great relief and delivering the verses he feared he’d never be allowed to. He’s packing even more words in and rapping harder than ever, like his life depended on it.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Bloodlust
    For every track that maintains an admirable speed-thrash spirit (“Walk With Me,” “Raining Blood”) there’s another that sounds more silly than rocking, like the cheesy posturing of “Here I Go Again,” a dark metal song as imagined by Roger Corman.
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