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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    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Street Songs of Love
    The rush of Escovedo's ecstasy and agony proves frustratingly one-sided on the stale, hard-to-embrace Street Songs Of Love, which reduces all the unruly feelings that go with rough-and-tumble romantic relationships down to a series of blustery, MOR power ballads.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everyday Robots
    It’s a pretty enough record, but not one that makes any sort of impression, breaks any ground, or leaves listeners wanting more.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Haunted Cities
    Transplants make a splattery mess of modern music as often as they stumble over something new and exciting.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    White Knight
    Mostly, White Knight sounds like an album that was probably a lot more fun to make than it is to listen to.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Winning Days
    The album's midsection--in other words, just about everything between the first song and the last song--sags under the weight of midtempo, middle-of-the-road throwaways. [31 Mar 2004]
    • The A.V. Club
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Geometrid
    When The Geometrid is good, it's extremely good... Too much of the album's remainder, however, is forgettable and lukewarm, the work of a band that's still trying to define itself.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Black Mile to the Surface
    There’s some beautiful songwriting here, but it’s buried beneath the smudges of its producers.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    We Can Do Anything
    Too often, solid tracks like “Foothills”--never mind its ridiculous and hilarious rhymes like “I’ll take lunch with my coworkers / But after work I just go berzerkers”--are lost among the album’s wackier, ambitious forays.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Plain Rap
    Sonically, Plain Rap picks up where Labcabin left off, and at its best ("Rush," "Guestlist," "Frontline"), it recaptures that album's sophisticated sonic slinkiness, if not its lyrical brilliance. Too often, however, Plain Rap sounds like what Labcabin's detractors unfairly accused it of being: mature and adult to the point of sounding hopelessly dull.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz
    Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz ends up a collection of fleeting engaging moments sandwiched between a slew of half-formed musical ideas.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Blessing And A Curse
    The bulk of the album is made of slight, rote country-rockers, as sturdy and flat as a table.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Musik, Die Schwer Zu Twerk
    Ultimately, Musik, Die Schwer Zu Twerk is satisfied with halfheartedly rehashing a handful of psych and prog rock signifiers with little renewed enthusiasm or inventiveness.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Over There That Way
    Over There That Way’s pandering play for indie-pop acceptance makes it a more leisurely listen. But, with no need to periodically clean a little heavy-metal grit out of the ears, the album just doesn’t demand much attention.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Working in Tennessee
    Working In Tennessee is often sleepy to the point of being narcoleptic. Still, even when he strains to hit notes, which he does often, Haggard sounds like he's enjoying himself.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Here
    He sounds absolutely defeated on this short, non-starter of a record.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Radiosurgery
    While steeped in New Found Glory's same old mix of hormonal angst and simple syrup, the album shows a marked drop in metabolism.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Junto
    For the most part, Basement Jaxx are coloring within the lines on Junto, which leads to disappointing results.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ellipse
    The result is a muddled collection of gently electronic pop that vacillates between mildly engaging and outright boring, a prime candidate for scoring teen TV dramas and stocking Starbucks shelves.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    We Are Young Money
    Money is pure bubblegum, the kind of instantly disposable pop ephemera listeners forget about while it’s still playing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shape the Future
    With so much New Age nattering, here more than ever your enjoyment will depend on your own zeal for enlightenment and/or bong rips.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Head Carrier
    Unlike Indie Cindy, Head Carrier knows exactly what it is. Whether that’s something we’ll remember is another discussion entirely.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Out Of Exile
    As Out Of Exile carries on, the songs sound repetitious and a little formulaic; each guitar solo seems to arrive at a preordained moment, and both the album and the individual songs drag on too long.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Under The Boards
    As usual, his nasal voice gets grating, but at least his band has returned to what it does best.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Artwork
    Peeling off much of the outfit’s Utah-bred oddness and emotive chaos, the album is a clear ploy at breaking through to a more pop-inclined audience.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Range of Light
    These two tracks ["Alpenglow" and "The Dome"] are outliers, though, emotionally and sonically devastating songs on an otherwise languid and forgettable record.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Preacher's Son
    Jean's ambition and eclecticism are admirable as ever, but the further he strays from his hip-hop roots, the less vital he seems.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cranekiss
    Cranekiss is going for hypnotic, but too often ends up narcotizing.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chickenfoot III
    As the title suggests, Chickenfoot III is stupid like a fox, filling a VH-shaped void created by the inaction and endless drama of Hagar's former bandmates.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Let's Be Still
    Let’s Be Still falters in its lethargy.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    (III)
    Instead of anarchist dance jams full of crunchy 8-bit noise, (III) is more like a static-filled radio station fading in and out of range.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anywhere I Lay My Head
    She isn't a traditionally talented vocalist, which in itself can be fine. But she isn't much of an interpreter, either; she brings the flat, throaty tones of the heavily drugged to songs that beg for passion.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Solar Power
    Solar Power’s a little messy and rough around the edges, and features a Lorde now moving on from her youth and wanting to keep some things to herself. In short: It’s just like being 24.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Walk With Love and Death
    Overall Love isn’t arresting enough to draw listeners in without a visual component. Along with a handful of other Melvins albums, A Walk With Love & Death seems destined to be overshadowed by the band’s stronger output.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The "W"
    Although roughly half as long as Wu-Tang Forever, The W is every bit as erratic and overreaching. If Forever was a great single album hidden in a messy two-disc set, The W feels like a good six-song EP nestled inside an uneven album that seems to take its cues from the half-assed weirdness of ODB's N**** Please.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Live on I-5
    While the album features respectable performances of many of the band's biggest hits-even a diminished Soundgarden can't muffle the power of the almighty "Outshined"-Live On I-5 should have stayed in the dark hole it's been buried in for 15 years.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everybody
    “Amiable” is sort of the operant word for Everybody, which, like Joey Badass’ All-Amerikkan Bada$$, strives to create a trenchant pop-rap polemic for the Trump era, but unlike that record—or any other record ever, for that matter—frequently gets lost in minutes-long spoken-word segues in which Neil DeGrasse Tyson speaks as a benevolent god about the nature of self-worth.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    TM:103 Hustlerz Ambition
    There's nothing about TM 103 that suggests Jeezy has any interest in moving on.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Now You Know
    Duds and semi-duds aside, Now You Know holds together okay, with plenty of high points, mostly huddled together in the first half.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Family Jewels
    Needless to say, that overbearing need to prove herself just ends up being exhausting. But the lady doth protest too much: There are hints of the darker, weirder dance-floor diva she wants to be hiding beneath the avant-garde pretensions of tracks such as “Shampain,” “I Am Not A Robot,” “Guilty,” and “Oh No!”
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Witness
    Despite the presence of bulletproof hit-makers (Max Martin, Sia, Jeff Bhasker) and inventive electro artists (Purity Ring, Hot Chip, Duke Dumont), the record is curiously flat, a shapeless slog that feels remarkably sluggish.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Radioactive
    For an uncomfortable seven-song stretch, the rapper seems so alienated from his own album.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Six Cups of Rebel
    Six Cups seems determined to resurrect the bad decisions of pop's past.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Virtue
    For every adequate Strokes throwback or Radiohead soundalike, Virtue antagonizes you with two formless freak-outs cobbled together from influences as wide-ranging as ’90s R&B, Arabic chants, “Monster Mash,” and a shocking amount of nü-metal.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Death to False Metal
    In execution, though, Death To False Metal is frustratingly hit-or-miss.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Michael
    Michael mostly reflects the paranoid, musically out of touch, deeply unhappy person he became -- and who many fans would just as soon forget.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Sacred Hearts Club
    Overall, Sacred Hearts Club also signals a return to Foster The People’s more electronic origins, but not in the inventive way that was used on Torches. Rather, it comes off as hackneyed copy, full of the predictable EDM/trap beats that every other chart-topper has shoved in somewhere.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Earth To The Dandy Warhols
    They were better as clever corporate whores.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Suck It and See
    Only five years ago, Turner was a fresh-faced quipster hopefully eyeing a crush on the dance floor, but now he's playing into the tiredest archetype: the jaded, sunglasses-shaded rock traditionalist on the hunt for an easy lay.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    World Peace Is None of Your Business
    The future is here; love has not brought us together, nor has the bomb. Morrissey, having left himself no other options, makes do with a shrug.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Sea of Memories
    The Sea Of Memories plays like an endless replay of Rossdale's past musical miscues.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Nightmare
    Avenged Sevenfold continues to sound like five different bands on every album, none of them particularly good.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Alter The Ending
    Alter The Ending nose-dives into the studio of Butch Walker, the man behind Pink’s "Funhouse" and Weezer’s "Raditude," and he comically overproduces the damn thing.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Kiss Me Once
    Kiss Me Once is a disappointing record that tries too hard to mold Minogue into something she’s not.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Drastic Fantastic
    Tunstall tries hard to stand out with moments of guitar fuzz and lyrics that occasionally border on clever, but Drastic is ultimately little more than pleasant background noise.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Light
    Like the former Fugees mastermind, Matisyahu carries the curse of burying his true brilliance in too much pop schlock.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Threes
    Where Amputechture is directionless but at least clever about masking its influences, Threes is directionless and completely predictable.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Asleep In The Bread Aisle
    This isn’t a horrible album, just a really boring one. What a disappointment.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    New Glow
    On New Glow, they’ve either finally dumbed things down too much, or simply reached the end of where this rudimentary songwriting can take them.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Ultraviolence
    Ultraviolence moves away from more pop-friendly territory and instead languishes in a sleepy, sad aesthetic.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    rEvolver
    Despite the title's promise of evolution, the record mines the same club-banging, shawty-romancing formula of the singer's boom years, to ever-diminishing returns.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    ARTPOP
    For as flamboyant as she is, Gaga’s never lacked sincerity; ARTPOP’s lack of substantial personal connection and its tenuous grasp on reality makes it a tough record to like.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Everyday I Said A Prayer For Kathy And Made A One Inch Square
    If the idea was to shore up the band's indie roots, Wheat has succeeded in the worst possible way.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Yours Truly
    Yours Truly is based on the same assumption as Sublime With Rome, which is that fans will appreciate the superficial similarities to a band they once loved, and won't look close enough to notice the gaping holes.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Again and Again
    Again And Again feels like it's skimming the dreaminess of that era without retaining any of its prickly quirk-or worse, any of its personality.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Reintegration Time
    Reintegration Time, the second album by Canada’s Shout Out Out Out Out, is ambitiously laid out, with lengthy, mostly instrumental tracks and a leisurely sense of pace. Too bad the electro grooves don’t offer much, nor does the ornamentation.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Exister
    A handful of tracks manage to convey some sense of energy and urgency. Few of them, though, rustle up the dark hooks that used to be HWM's greatest strength.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Crash Love
    The limited palette this time around doesn’t do the band any favors.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Secret, Profane & Sugarcane
    Like Momofuku, the new record was knocked out quickly, drawing heavily on material left over from other Costello projects, but while the looseness worked for the driving rock ’n’ roll songs on Momofuku, the freeform ballads and back-to-basics roots workouts of Secret mostly fade into Burnett’s tasteful woodwork.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Freedom
    Freedom never seems to settle on a single direction, but it’s hard to say whether that’s good or bad.... But it’s when Refused attempts to sound modern--through ultra-slick production tricks and modern sonic collage--that the album truly falters.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Unbreakable
    An album that lacks both a mission statement and a sense of purpose.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The 2nd Law
    For a band so seemingly full of big ideas, Muse sounds on its sixth album like a hard-rocking collection of other bands, some that they've previously been compared to, and others new.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Donda
    More than half of this album is complete filler. No one’s missing “Okok,” “24,” or “Remote Control.” A soulful choir is not enough to save “Never Again.” On this record, there is none of the production genius we’ve come to expect from West. ... And that’s the thing that’s missing most from this record, with all its myriad problems: No one edits West anymore, not even himself. And that’s a damn shame.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Shwayze
    Shwayze is remarkable only in how unremarkable it is.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Love?
    In general, though, Love? is as vague and unfocused as its titular inquiry suggests, a musical shrug that seems to mean even less to Lopez than it will to listeners.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    I Can Spin a Rainbow
    “The Sun Still Shines,” suggests that Palmer and Ka-Spel should have really focused their energies on composing interstitial music for a stage production.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Head and the Heart
    Though the songwriting is sturdy, the choruses hearty, the melodies time-tested, and the recording vibrant, The Head And The Heart falters most on account of Jonathan Russell and Josiah Johnson's pre-packaged, Cracker Barrel lyrical conceits.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Louder Now
    That's not to say that Louder Now lacks charm--"Spin" and "Miami" excellently blend the band's acumen for punk punchiness and melody alike--but the album's numbing repetitiveness negates it.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Songs from the Sparkle Lounge
    A few bright spots don't make up for the album's general lack of immediacy or memorable hooks.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Nothing But the Beat
    Nothing But The Beat is obsessed with the sex, swagger, and sensation of club culture, and taken individually, its songs are well-made, euphoric paeans to the dance-floor gods; but a deficiency of texture and emotional build causes them to blend into a predictable, exhausting murk of smoke and lasers.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    We Don't Need To Whisper
    We Don't Need To Whisper feels like 50 long minutes of DeLonge proving himself as an artist.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    If Only You Were Lonely
    Unsurprisingly, repetition sinks If Only You Were Lonely.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Stadium Arcadium
    The trouble with virtuosity is that it doesn't always translate into songcraft, and the absence of even one hum-it-on-the-way-home track here raises the old questions again: Does this band even make sense? Are punk energy and funk grooves music's peanut-butter-and-chocolate or its oatmeal-and-sardines? And what's Anthony Kiedis talking about, anyway?
    • 59 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Relapse
    It’s less a relapse than a rehash, less a comeback album than the kind of album artists need to come back from.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Visitor
    Young and the youngsters he’s playing with here sound like they wrote and jammed these songs out in a few days, relying on the strength of his sentiment to carry them through. But a jam session with some cranky speak-singing on it doesn’t make for a great album, and it’s not going to make any new converts, unfortunately--either to Neil Young’s politics or his music.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Black Cocaine [EP]
    Judging by this underwhelming return, Prodigy's stint in the correctional facilities merely constituted time lost.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Drift
    Where other records by The Men showed they could pull from someone else’s playbook and make something their own, Drift’s hodgepodge of styles ultimately makes The Men sound like they couldn’t settle on what they wanted to do.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele
    May claims to be a devotee of Lee Hazlewood, and admittedly, that genre lends itself to cheese, but there’s a big difference between Velveeta and a good, fatty brie.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Magic Hour
    Nostalgia-driven fan-funding is a useful way to see which short-lived phenoms have anything left in the tank, but Magic Hour suggests Luscious Jackson is a little too far removed from what drove the group to make music in the first place.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Turn Blue
    Feelings are always “heavy” or a “burden,” and love is consistently “dark” or “light”; it’s thematic territory that feels stale for the band, and the result is an album that aspires to talk about the complex nature of relationships, yet has nothing meaningful to say.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Bionic
    Outside of her exceptional vocal abilities, Aguileraâ??s main talent thus far has been absorbing and regurgitating trends with such commitment that she essentially disappears behind a calculated varnish.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    HitNRun: Phase One
    [Co-producer and engineer Joshua] Welton tinkers too much with too many EDM toys, and often the result is a cacophonous collision of EDM’s lamest trends. When this album does succeed—which it does on its back half—it’s because Prince and Welton have achieved a balance between dance and funk in which each genre brings out the best in the other.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Beta Love
    It tries so hard to please that it becomes perversely repellant.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Hell in a Handbasket
    Too much of Hell In A Handbasket is just generic songwriter-mill fodder, over-cranked and over-sung.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    What The...
    Demons used to be what drove Black Flag toward hitherto extremes of punk-rock brinksmanship, and there are glimpses of that savagery on What The.... Mostly, though, it’s a footnote to a legacy that never needed one.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
    Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark seems uniquely constructed to frustrate the expectations of U2 fans, musical-theater lovers, and even train-wreck enthusiasts, who will be disappointed to find that the show isn't as bad as some have suggested--at least when experienced solely as an album.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Sorry for Party Rocking
    Sorry For Party Rocking is a dumb party record that knows it's a dumb party record.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    VII: Sturm und Drang
    A generic album.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Bedlam In Goliath
    The band's frenzied rate of output seems to have trampled any inner editor, and the result is a splat of concepts and virtuosity that never coheres.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Pacific Daydream
    The Weezer frontman continues to tap that increasingly dry well, his dusty lovelorn longings for perfect summer nights now sounding completely formulaic.
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