The A.V. Club's Scores

For 3,336 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 1.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
3,336 music reviews
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 100
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 91
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 100
    It's more of a "real" record than McCartney, but it just as firmly rejects rock-star self-importance.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 100
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 91
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 80
    A punchy and exciting debut.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 83
    It's a work of hushed intimacy and unabashed romanticism that uses synthesizers to create incongruously organic, natural-sounding grown-folks R&B.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 83
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 80
    Extending his winning streak to five albums, he's become a paragon of quality and musical honesty.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 80
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 100
    The follow-up [to "Kezia"], Fortress, mines similar territory but cranks the ferocity even higher.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 83
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 91
    Empros doesn't just defy gravity, it defines it.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 100
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 80
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 91
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 90
    Song for song, this could be its best album.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 80
    Sounds cranky, cynical, sentimental, and mordantly funny--in other words, like a good Warren Zevon record.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 80
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 90
    A major album from a major artist, Soul Machine works with a sonic, lyrical, and emotional palette that encompasses everything from joy to rage.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 100
    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.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 91
    As Dylan's official bootlegs go, this is one of the series' best.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 91
    When artists soften with time, their music often loses some of its appeal; rarely does a songwriter nail his voice as successfully as Cronin has here.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 91
    Gojira suffuses L'Enfant Sauvage with a refined, at times contemplative take on its signature catharsis and assault.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 90
    Lowe keeps turning out albums that sound like the best of his career.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 91
    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.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 80
    He collides substances that shouldn't mix to create a sound that not only survives the impact, but thrives in the aftermath.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 91
    Meiburg's voice focuses each track on quietly bold melodies, strung through with excitement, wonder, and joy.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 80
    The Coup's warmest and most organic effort to date, both lyrically and musically.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 100
    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.