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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    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Assume Form
    Assume Form casts Blake’s prior albums in a new light, as does the once-secretive young maestro’s new openness about his life and his struggles. What sounded like someone trying to dive down into the inkiest depths of his soul turns out to have been someone trying to swim up out of them.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Remind Me Tomorrow
    Its 10 songs are much more focused on how their protagonists are dealing right now, in the present, with triumphs, traumas, and new beginnings. This approach leads to rich songs with lyrics probing the liminal space where resolution isn’t clear—but emotional reactions crackle on the surface like tingling electricity.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
    Thoughtful, strange, spiritual, immersive, rewarding upon repeated and thoughtful engagement.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Mandy [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    It marks a turning point in his musical style, an embrace of the lush and layered as well as the heavy and metallic. Realizing that, and thinking about what could have come next, makes his death all the more tragic.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Some Rap Songs
    Well, it can be [dour]. But it’s also ecstatic. Make no mistake: This is an album by one of the best rappers alive, elbowing slant rhymes and assonance into his disses (“Please do abort, I could feel when you’re forcin’ it / Still in a bore riddim”) and exhaling those singularly oblong sentences of his (“Galaxy’s the distance between us by Christmas,” he describes one foundering relationship).
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    E=MC2
    It's skillful and winsome enough that the other hits it spins off will stay pleasant, if not revelatory.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Black Velvet
    Even as Black Velvet occasionally fails to gel as a cohesive album--it is, after all, essentially a B-sides collection--it succeeds as a tribute to an authentic talent.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Suspiria [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    Its ballet scenes are climactic, cathartic centerpieces, dramatically illustrating the power of sound to move, to manipulate, to conjure. Yorke’s score is a shrine to that dark power.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Darkness Rains
    Musically, the group’s sound is looser and more ferocious than some of its contemporaries, embracing atonal saxophone à la X-Ray Spex and swaggering scuzz-rock riffs along with the psychedelic guitar, sinister organ, and heavy, pounding drums you’d expect from a garage-rock revival band.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tha Carter V
    Like any fifth installment in a series, you’re going to need to care about those early entries to care about this one, and, at 90 minutes, it’s way more than anyone needs. But the highlights are so many--Mannie Fresh reunion “Start This Shit Off Right,” gonzo Kendrick collab “Mona Lisa,” the mixtape-style freakout of “Let It Fly,” heartbreaking coda “Let It All Work Out”--that you sort of give him a pass on the duds.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Electric Messiah
    The band’s eighth studio album towers alongside its best work, offering both peerless, full-speed-ahead blitzkriegs (like the title track, dedicated to late Motörhead frontman Lemmy, a kindred spirit in grizzled delivery and powerhouse shredding) and slower, heavier epics like the 10-plus-minute “Sanctioned Annihilation.”
    • 79 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Wanderer
    There’s nothing inherently wrong about Wanderer being mannered--but, unfortunately, the album’s subtlety is also often its undoing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Lamb
    In many ways, The Lamb is a step forward for West, but here’s hoping its cleaned-up approach doesn’t end up reining her in too much.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    AAARTH
    Aaarth is the band’s most off-kilter collection of anthems yet, working in tribal drumming, stuttering and overlapping vocal tracks, and some of the Middle Eastern influences Led Zeppelin famously tried on for size when feeling adventurous. Admirable though the experimentation can be, The Joy Formidable still hits its sweetest spot aiming for the nosebleeds.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Iridescence
    The group’s music is all over the place, often gloriously so. The temptation has always been to pick out best tracks from these records, and Iridescence has some clear standouts.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Dancing Queen
    Dancing Queen pulls off a perfect balance of frothy effervescence and resonant emotional depth.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    MITH
    The musical spaciness only enhances his already-considerable dignity and the gravitas of his songwriting, making Mith a powerful, prophetic collection.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Art of Doubt
    While album standout “Risk” delivers a slick and insistent groove with lyrics about trying to cut through layers of emotional distance--too many tracks find themselves lacking the enticing hooks that fuel so much of Metric’s appeal.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Cry Pretty
    Here the bluesy “Drinking Alone” transports you to a smoky bar where two lonely strangers find each other above their beer bottles, while “The Bullet” is a strong and surprising anti-gun-violence message from a country star. But it’s Underwood’s considerable resilience that shines through here.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Piano & A Microphone 1983
    Piano & A Microphone 1983 verges on postmortem voyeurism, but it’s also a unique insight into the way a notoriously private artist’s creative impulses fired.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Chris
    Chris more than anything revels in fluid identities--whether gender, personality, mood, or otherwise--and the way they free people from expectations and limits. By extension, this frees up Christine And The Queens from musical conventions, and propels the group to the precipice of greatness.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Room 25
    From beginning to end, Room 25 is a testimony to the power of telling your story and the hope that can be found in doing so without apology. Like hearing the chorus of an old spiritual or having a long conversation with a close friend, each song is intimate in a restorative way. An unquestionable balm for uncertain times like these, this album announces Noname’s lyrical coming-of-age.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Moon 2
    Moon 2 plays more like a collection of standout tracks than the kind of album that needs to be taken in from beginning to end, but it’s effective all the same. Nearly every song could be slotted into a playlist at a club without screwing up the flow, and that’s an achievement in itself.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    True Meanings
    Forty-plus years into his career, the Modfather has once again ripped up his own playbook--and released a singular album.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Double Negative
    The result is fearless and impressive, but often lacking in the kind of inviting musicality that encourages repeat listening. It’s a headphones record that holds its audience at a distance: admirably fascinating, but rarely addictive.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Render Another Ugly Method
    All told, Render Another Ugly Method is a transitory step for Mothers, one that’s equally messy and compelling, showing that Leschper’s voice as a songwriter and singer remains her own, no matter how many effects she puts on top of it.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    And Nothing Hurt
    Nothing Hurt is the band distilled into its most affecting essence.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Solo Piano III
    While those showier pieces grab attention on first listen, the more meditative ones slowly sink their hooks in, too.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    In the Blue Light
    It would be easy to get bogged down in treating Blue Light as a compare/contrast exercise, but what’s most impressive about is the way that it sounds more or less of a piece as its own record.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    New Hymn to Freedom
    New Hymn To Freedom, the English trio’s second album, is a remarkably lucid 45 minutes of spontaneous composition, a civilization of sound and emotion conjured from nothing more than the in-the-moment interplay between keyboardist Luke Abbott, saxophonist Jack Wylie, and drummer Lawrence Pike.
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