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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    • 87 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    House of Balloons
    House Of Balloons' hook is its canny incorporation of indie-rock attitude into R&B songs. But Tesfaye's lurid, unrepentant depiction of hard drugs and empty sex is what lingers long after the novelty of a couple of Beach House samples wears off.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seven Swans
    Like Nick Drake or, more recently, Damien Jurado, Stevens serves his songs best with near-whispers, delicately breathing them into existence. [31 Mar 2004]
    • The A.V. Club
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Kala
    Kala is such a resolutely strange, sweltering album that it's thrilling to be alive in an era when such a thing can lay claim to the mantle of "pop."
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    V
    Overall, V maintains a distinctively elegant gloom, The Horrors continuing to find intoxicating new shades within their gray moods. It’s an album that confirms them as one of the most consistently surprising, most artistically sophisticated, simply greatest rock bands working today.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Isolation
    As she breaks down the triumphs and heartbreaks of real life, she deftly invokes her every musical whim--from 1970s soul to hip-hop beats that wouldn’t be out of place on a ’90s dance floor--to stunning effect.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    LIFE ON EARTH
    Overall, Life On Earth has plenty of strong music that shows how much Segarra’s artistry has evolved.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    22, A Million
    22, A Million can stand confidently as the only album to bridge Hornsby’s The Way It Is with Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mass Romantic
    More than the sum of its influences--even if it occasionally feels like a stack of Cars, Cheap Trick, and early XTC albums melted together--Mass Romantic throttles from strength to strength.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    DFA Remixes: Chapter 1
    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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Let England Shake
    The muted atmosphere shouldn't fool anyone, though; Shake is an album so roiling with poetic indignation, all it can reasonably do is steam.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Sound Of Silver
    Sure, lots of other people have done this lately, but few do it with Murphy's flair.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Body Talk
    Over the course of Body Talk, Robyn has proved that there's real emotion to be found among the ones and zeros of electronic music, and Pt 3. is the culmination of that outlook: euphoric, personal, and inspirational to the last beat.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Time (The Revelator)
    A winsome, beautiful collection of songs... Welch has never seemed more assured, building a creatively expansive work out of modest ingredients.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Who Kill
    Whokill's sonic imagination outlasts the novelty of Tune-Yards' debut, and even better, a lyrical persona as playfully warped as the rhythms punching away behind it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Comicopera
    Really, all of Comicopera rolls deliriously over pillowy layers of sound
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    thank u, next
    A leap forward in the way it reshapes her R&B-inflected pop into something sleeker and more adventurous. ... Thank U, Next skillfully toys with the tension between universal sentiments and deeply personal confessions.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Welcome To Mali
    Welcome To Mali sounds heavily produced but not overproduced, and even with the pings and whizzing, Amadou’s playing and the pair’s singing insure it never sounds less than organic.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Natalie Prass
    What makes it good is her sophisticated ear for pop arrangements. What sets it apart is her gracefully authoritative, hyper-emotive, and at times semi-animal personality brought out through a masterfully controlled and gloriously weird set of pipes.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Mirrored
    It works best when the songs sound in thrall to themselves, reacting in different ways while retracing steps, but it also fishtails into missteps ("Rainbow") that sound oddly like Mannheim Steamroller.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Are We There
    Are We There offers an artist in full command of her voice and her instrument, a woman who knows exactly what she wants to offer listeners and who isn’t afraid to accompany the barest streaks of sunlight with thousands of clouds.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bon Iver
    But for all its introspection, Bon Iver feels a lot more open than Vernon's previous work, the sound of a lonely guy taking his first steps into a larger world.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    How I Got Over
    How I Got Over hearkens back to the neo-soul mellowness of The Roots' mid-'90s output, while songs like the infectious title track retain Tipping Point's pop savvy.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Love & Hate
    Love & Hate is a massive leap in accomplishment for Kiwanuka.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fixed::Context [EP]
    Because no other act really sounds like Labradford, which matches its Ennio Morricone-style melodies and analog synths with a sense of menace missing from most ambient music, it's forgivable that only subtle distinctions differentiate one recording from the next.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
    As monumental as Dead Cities sounds in parts, its uniformity proves oppressively stirring after just a few tracks.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hercules And Love Affair
    He knows when to kick disco into action and when to just kick back and listen.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Syro
    Even if Syro isn’t a radical departure, it’s still a swaggering return, a reminder of just how many varieties of warped sound remain at James’ command--and just how few of his acolytes can touch that versatility.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Jericho Sirens
    It all works. Whenever Hot Snakes decide to get together, they will always be welcome.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Teens of Denial
    That exercise in tension and release, repeated throughout the record, is essential to Teens Of Denial’s blistering greatness. The distortion-laden songs on Teens Of Denial build and soar, often repeatedly within a few minutes.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Robyn
    The overall mood is light even when the lyrics get pointed--which is plenty of the time.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Separation Sunday
    The Hold Steady is the ideal iPod band. Finn's abrasive voice sounds legitimately exciting in four-minute bursts, and his best put-down lines are more corrosive.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Process
    It’s the best R&B debut since FKA Twigs’ LP1.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blues Dream
    Blues Dream, Frisell's best collection since 1995's breakthrough Nashville, frequently incorporates blues as the base for a strong batch of evocative arrangements...
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You Forgot It In People
    The commitment to iconoclastic expressiveness, which includes belting out some fairly raunchy lyrics, leads to dead ends, but Broken Social Scene never blows it altogether, because it holds onto its hooks to get out of tough corners.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Minimum-Maximum [Live]
    Kraftwerk still sounds great.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Kaleidoscope Dream
    Kaleidoscope Dream will almost surely attract comparisons to another recent R&B album with its own amiable internal logic, Frank Ocean's Channel Orange, and not unfairly, given that both are uniformly excellent.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Once I Was an Eagle
    Eagle is a master class in creation.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Thunder, Lightning, Strike
    A challenge to even the most hardened depressive, Thunder, Lightning, Strike finds one way after another to shake new pleasures out of old material.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Remain In Light
    Kidjo’s Remain In Light, now arriving in studio form, is a stunning transformation that sheds the nervous, alien nature of these well-worn songs, turning them into something more human, danceable, and, in some cases, more meaningful.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    50 Song Memoir
    Though it lacks its predecessor’s immediate accessibility, it benefits from an aesthetic texture that’s grander, darker, and more satisfying, if only for the sense that memoirs don’t have to be confessional; they can tell a life’s story through tone and structure in addition to words. A good gimmick, it goes to show, has the power to transcend itself.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Heaven & Earth
    Earth is loaded with mentally and emotionally draining songs. ... Heaven, [is] a set of smoother, more cosmic songs that showcase Washington’s ability to pen compositions of awe-inspiring majesty. Even more impressive is the way those two modes occasionally bleed into each other from across the album’s border.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Halcyon Digest
    Halcyon Digest isn't always a cohesive listen, but the record gels where it counts--it's all great.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Welcome Interstate Managers
    Even at their most piercingly observant, Collingwood and Schlesinger never lose their warmth for their subjects, and their lack of condescension comes through in the music, as well.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    45:33
    LCD mastermind James Murphy took a lot of flack from indie didacts for aligning with Nike last year, but it's worth asking, no less now than then: Who else would make this good on a payday premise that just as easily could have been phoned in?
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Midlife: A Beginner's Guide To Blur
    Whatever the future holds, few bands fit as well into their time as the Blur captured here.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LCD Soundsystem
    Marries raw rock attitudes to the sonic spread and kinetic energy central to dance music.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bakesale [Deluxe Edition]
    It's a chance to marvel at the record's sturdiness in spite of its sonic adherence to an extremely specific time in music history.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Blade
    The majority of Monroe’s superb third album hunkers down with heartache and struggle.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Cosmogramma
    Flying Lotus reaches into the past in order to create something clearly of the future – a hybridized work that challenges others to follow its dazzling blueprint.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Shields
    On an album that touches repeatedly on the barriers people build between each other, the members of Grizzly Bear have forged further ahead into sweet synchronicity.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ram [Deluxe Edition]
    It's more of a "real" record than McCartney, but it just as firmly rejects rock-star self-importance.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    LP1
    Few debuts possess such control and ambition all in one; LP1 is the rare album that manages to sound both lived in and completely futuristic.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective
    The Steinski myth has grown in the darkness of bootlegs, but this long-overdue release proves that the reality more than lives up to the legend.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Stone Rollin'
    The end result is a warm, sometimes reckless, but always deeply moving and wildly creative effort that is absolutely dizzying in the best, most indelible sense.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Futureheads
    A punchy and exciting debut.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Authenticity
    It's a work of hushed intimacy and unabashed romanticism that uses synthesizers to create incongruously organic, natural-sounding grown-folks R&B.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Locked Down
    The album is at once classic and modern, and while it's short on timeless songs like "Glowin'," "Loop Garoo" and "Mos' Scocious," on the whole it's a more engaged, eclectic, and ornery set than these types of revivalist projects usually are.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Soul of a Woman
    After the James Brown frenzy of its opening tracks and the less memorable Motown-inspired middle ground, the album changes course. This reprise of Jones’ established work ends and listeners get a peek at what would have come next: an odyssey of densely symphonic funk and soul.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Transcendental Blues
    Extending his winning streak to five albums, he's become a paragon of quality and musical honesty.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chavez Ravine
    Chávez Ravine never romanticizes its subject. It simply makes it seem unnatural that any place where people lived, dreamed, died, and formed a neighborhood could be made to disappear.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fortress
    The follow-up [to "Kezia"], Fortress, mines similar territory but cranks the ferocity even higher.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Harps And Angels
    Some of the more on-the-nose satire falls flat....Still, heart-on-the-sleeve tracks like 'Losing You' and 'Feels Like Home' feature Newman at his most affecting.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Empros
    Empros doesn't just defy gravity, it defines it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    DAYTONA
    For the first time since going solo, it all feels of a piece. ... The sonic setting he [Kanye West] places this performance from Pusha in is an absolute masterpiece of minimalism.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Boxer
    To those with time for only a passing glance, it could conceivably come across as dull, but a close look at monumental songs like "Start A War" and the scathingly sad, funny "Slow Show" will reveal bleak, black diamonds—precious, glimmering, and lasting.
    • 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).
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Blood Cells
    The White Stripes can create an ungodly amount of noise, and it opens White Blood Cells by doing just that. But it makes some of the most memorably melodic ungodly noise on the market.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Popular Problems
    As usual, the freshest-sounding songs are those that tread the farthest from Cohen’s gypsy-folk roots, but here that’s most of them, save the plodding thud of “Samson In New Orleans” and the lilting, acoustic “You Got Me Singing.”
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Ravedeath, 1972
    Complex and rewarding in a way that the telescoping salvia trip of An Imaginary Country never was, and tougher and more fibrous than the excellent Haunt Me Haunt Me, Do It Again, Ravedeath, 1972 somehow manages to soothe even as it disorients.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    American Dream
    It’s a beautifully produced, masterfully realized album, but it’s also a bit of a downer and an unusually slow burn.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All Hands On The Bad One
    Song for song, this could be its best album.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Wind
    Sounds cranky, cynical, sentimental, and mordantly funny--in other words, like a good Warren Zevon record.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lemon Of Pink
    Some of the exposed-seam splicing sounds sloppy and/or twee, but the guys in The Books wield a solid musical hand over melodic figures that hint at swooning grandeur without falling prey to florid temptation.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cee-Lo Green Is The Soul Machine
    A major album from a major artist, Soul Machine works with a sonic, lyrical, and emotional palette that encompasses everything from joy to rage.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Acid Rap
    What he’s accomplished with Acid Rap is nothing short of remarkable: Just two years removed from high school, and with no label support, he’s crafted the most assured breakthrough Chicago rap release since The College Dropout.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    David Comes To Life
    They're also bracingly potent and screamingly vital; David Comes To Life is the work of a band openly aspiring to be great, and pulling it off.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Surf
    Surf is so vibrant, so alive with triumphant vibes and unadulterated joy, that it never leaves any room for cynicism.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
    As Dylan's official bootlegs go, this is one of the series' best.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Lost In the Dream
    The War On Drugs aims for listeners’ feelings about them, and for our collective radio unconscious. On Lost In The Dream, they nail us good.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    L'Enfant Sauvage
    Gojira suffuses L'Enfant Sauvage with a refined, at times contemplative take on its signature catharsis and assault.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Underside of Power
    Underside feels like a quantum leap from [its 2015 self-titled debut] both musically and thematically, newly charged with the righteous anger of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and explosively unleashed by artists and activists who sense that this is their moment to seize. The result is a collection of songs that articulates that fury and despair with such authority, it deserves to become the soundtrack for whatever future documentary montage captures the mess of 2017.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Happier than Ever
    Billie Eilish’s second album expands upon everything that worked the last time and pushes it in new directions, a creative muse restless and bold in its ambition. It may not always land, but this is a terrific release that proves Eilish’s staying power, demonstrating she’s more than up to the task of delivering on the promise of her debut.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    All at Once
    Although not every song is essential in its own right, as a whole, All At Once congeals beautifully; in the era of the single, this is a real album, touching on themes of autonomy and control both in a personal and a wider political context.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Convincer
    Lowe keeps turning out albums that sound like the best of his career.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    untitled unmastered.
    It may be a while before Lamar releases a project with such low stakes again, so take Untitled for the casual gift that it is: a bonus disc that improbably holds up as an essential album in its own right.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Poison Season
    Poison Season is the sound of an artist in complete control of the strange chaos around him.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Mysterious Production Of Eggs
    He collides substances that shouldn't mix to create a sound that not only survives the impact, but thrives in the aftermath.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Shaking the Habitual
    Shaking The Habitual has minor drawbacks—it wastes too much time on shambling instrumentals, and a wall-to-wall rager would have been great—but this brother-sister team is still heroically alienating and giddily perverse.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Hitchhiker
    For fans of Neil Young in the ’70s--his pretty undeniable peak--this one is fantastic. Beyond that, it could easily serve as an introduction to a generation that hasn’t heard his music.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Lucifer on the Sofa
    Lucifer On The Sofa is one of the band’s most focused songwriting efforts yet: Every note feels deliberately placed and well-constructed, with crisp arrangements (the piano-sprinkled ballad “My Babe”), piercing hooks (the elastic “The Devil & Mr. Jones”) and sweeping dynamics (the melodramatic, glammy art-rock waltz “Satellite”).
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Agent Intellect
    The Agent Intellect is an impressive addition to the band’s small discography, and it hints that bigger, bolder work may lay ahead.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Knock Knock
    There hasn’t been a more purely enjoyable record released in 2018.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Rook
    Meiburg's voice focuses each track on quietly bold melodies, strung through with excitement, wonder, and joy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Party Music
    The Coup's warmest and most organic effort to date, both lyrically and musically.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Life...The Best Game In Town
    Life… isn't easy listening (the anvil-heavy ballad 'Roses' alone could drive the clinically depressed to suicide), but the improved contrast between upbeat and harrowing makes Harvey Milk's extremes that much easier to appreciate.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    50 Words for Snow
    Her first full-length of new material since 2005, 50 Words is by far the subtlest and least immediately accessible she's ever made.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
    There's a confidence here that carried over from Case's remarkable 2004 live album The Tigers Have Spoken.
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