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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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Happy Songs For Happy People
    Happy Songs finds middle ground between brevity and meandering.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Source Tags & Codes
    The group plays imaginative alt-rock with intense passion, and Source Tags & Codes lets the pressure build exquisitely.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Streetcore
    In a way, the tinny sound and half-finished feel makes it seem more touching and direct than the final result might otherwise have been.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Budos Band III
    Whoever has the spotlight at any given point, III is The Budos Band's most confident-sounding album, like a soundtrack to a Shaft In Africa if it were actually made in Africa.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Semper Femina
    Her steady output has produced some of her generation’s finest records, and her sixth, Semper Femina, is among her most affecting to date.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Have One On Me
    It’s a long album, and it plays that way. The second reason is more complicated, and it gets to both the strengths and weaknesses of an album that will take time to process in full.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    De Vermis Mysteriis
    De Vermis offers nothing but variations on Pike's well-established fixations. But what stunning variations they are.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Veckatimest
    Veckatimest offers more than just an inventive exercise in collage: It’s like hearing the past few centuries of music playing in symphony, which sounds--thrillingly and reassuringly--like the future.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Skinty Fia
    More than anything, however, Skinty Fia’s plodding progression and miserabilist overtones come across like cut-rate versions of Bauhaus’ chilly gothic vibes and the aforementioned Joy Division’s claustrophobic dirge, only without the benefit of the latter group’s inimitable basslines.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bitte Orca
    Over nine indispensable tracks, Bitte Orca forges a more perfect union between eccentricity and accessibility.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Devotion
    There's a youthful, warm energy emanating from Ware's vocals that enervates Devotion, making it more than a mere exercise in restrained, sophisticated sexiness.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Kicking Television: Live In Chicago
    While it's no surprise that the YHF songs sound better live, it's surprising how much better Ghost songs like "Company In My Back" and "The Late Greats" sound with the addition of some synthesizer accents and thicker guitars.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tenacious D
    Managing an odd simultaneous fusion of stupid and clever, acoustic-guitar-wielding rockers Jack Black and Kyle Gass mingle songs and skits on their slick, gleefully profane, Dust Brothers-produced debut.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Real New Fall L.P. (Formerly Country On The Click)
    As with just about every Fall release ever, the compressed sound and abandonment of melody makes it hard to distinguish one song from the next. As a result, the tauter material is the best.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bubblegum
    While the guests push and pull Lanegan in different directions, Bubblegum's songs never lose him in the translation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Soft Bulletin
    An impossibly multi-tracked masterwork of excess, abrasion, and indefinable beauty.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    King Push - Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude
    If Darkest Before Dawn really is a prelude to the record King Push to come, you have to wonder where Pusha T will choose to take his music next. Making it deeper, angrier, darker, and more foreboding doesn’t seem possible.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Weather Station
    There’s plenty to unpack lyrically, too, which makes it ideal for a headphones listen. You know, not unlike Blue or Court And Spark.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Muchacho
    Muchacho is also Houck’s most accomplished release to date--his most heartrending and life-affirming, equal parts lost-love devastation and hip-swaying, horn-led exultation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
    This is Yo La Tengo in full 32-flavors mode, but somehow, as with similarly diverse past efforts like I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, they make it all sound cohesive.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Chemistry Of Common Life
    While it's offset on a few songs by "clean" female vocals, Damian Abraham's glass-gargling roar remains the primary source of Fucked Up's visceral energy. From this point on, it'll be more exciting to see how much farther beyond gut-level the band is willing to go.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Goodness
    It’s a record that, by its end, is a profound statement. It just requires a little patience for it to be heard.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Airing Of Grievances
    With its brash and boiling-over debut, Titus Andronicus has done its small part to draw indie-rock out of the genre's recent navel-obsessed slump.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blinking Lights And Other Revelations
    Blinking Lights is a junk heap dotted with pretty flowers.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dongs of Sevotion
    Recording with a small band that includes John McEntire (Tortoise, The Sea And Cake) on drums, Jeff Parker (Tortoise, Isotope 217) on guitar, and Matt Lux (Isotope 217) on bass, Callahan has created a surprisingly accessible and enjoyable pastiche of what makes him tick.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Old Ideas
    Fittingly, the album is all warmth, putting Cohen's improbably expressive smoker's purr in the middle of simple yet sumptuous instrumentation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Boys And Girls In America
    The triumph of Boys And Girls is that it's full of the kind of songs that Finn's protagonists would crank up, relishing every power chord.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hell-On
    Case’s restless exploratory impulses are contained within relatively conventional song structures, with much more compelling results.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Pure Comedy
    Pure Comedy excels when Tillman trains his observant side-eye on smaller targets as well.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Ys
    For those willing to let go a little and drift, Ys can be an amazing journey, especially when Parks' strings and Newsom's harp lock into a seductive dance, or when her voice catches one of the fleeting snatches of melody and rides it until it escapes.
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