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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    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Saturdays=Youth
    For all the awe kindled by the effectively perfect sound in a transcendent highlight like 'Kim & Jessie,' the real triumph is that M83 uses such a setting for more simple melody and emotion than ever before.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    You & Me
    In 'The Blue Route,' it hits home like a 30th birthday--and as the standout 'In The New Year' points out, realizing "It's all over anyhow" can be invigorating, a way of readying oneself for the next, far more interesting chapter.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    We're New Here
    The real triumph of We're New Here is that it doesn't feel like an album-length remix. Instead, it's a collaboration done the way Scott-Heron's best team-ups always are: after the fact, with time to consider the everlasting gravity of the man's words and wisdom.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Workbook 25 [Deluxe Edition]
    Although the mix sounds from another era, it also doesn’t sound compressed to within an inch of its life.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Persona
    Persona is uneasy listening, with heavier rhythms and more fragmented melodies than West deployed on previous works like Howl and Night Melody, yet it’s equally engrossing. It leaves a deep psychic impression--a truly “arthouse” album that begs repeated revisiting, to explore its many conflicting faces.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Z
    It's both rare and marvelous to hear a good band make its first really great album.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Wet Leg
    There are no dull moments on Wet Leg. With the winning pairing of two incredible guitarists and excellent songwriting, this is a near-flawless introduction. The record holds such a compelling collection of songs.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Kid
    The Kid is truly an album to experience beginning to end, one with a knack for making you feel--as Smith sings on “An Intention”--“everything at the same time.”
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blakroc
    Dash and the Keys score an undeniable win by keeping the samples homemade and the production pared down, and by hand-picking collaborators who know how to sink into a groove.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sleep Well Beast
    Those invested in the band’s slow-motion refinement of simmering melancholy will find that they’ve discovered yet more fresh nuance to that sound, as they seem to every time.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Some Girls [Deluxe Edition]
    Some Girls showed that the Stones could pull off the old magic using some flashy new tricks.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Little Oblivions
    With Little Oblivions, the singer-songwriter has made her most cohesive record yet. The resuscitation of a heavier sound works in Baker’s favor, while she still adds hints of the fragile gentleness that has captivated fans since her Sprained Ankle days.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    xx
    The result is sexy like early Portishead and thoughtful like Young Marble Giants--a perfectly formed debut with a genuinely new sound way beyond the sum of identifiable forebears.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What One Becomes
    What One Becomes shows Cook and Turner again occupying highly coveted space on the zenith of aggressive music--this time alongside Yacyshyn, the percussive mastermind. It’s hard to imagine a better metal record coming out this year.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Turtleneck & Chain
    The juxtaposition of white-boy geekiness with swaggering hip-hop posturing forms the core of The Lonely Island's smart-ass take on pop music, but the trio is also distinguished by obsessive cultural specificity on its sophomore effort, Turtleneck & Chain.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    District Line
    It plays much like a continuation of "Body Of Song," with the electronic elements even more streamlined and less obtrusive, save on the all-electronic 'Shelter Me.'
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Psychic Chasms
    Psychic Chasms is an excellent album of balmy psychedelia and breezy infectiousness.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The King Is Dead
    The King Is Dead spreads 10 songs across 40 minutes, and there isn't a bum track in the bunch.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Lines: 2012 Mix/Master
    Twenty-plus years later, it still sounds ahead of its time and remains an influential, genre-spanning work.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Warp Riders
    The Sword was long ago stamped with the epithet "hipster metal," and that isn't going to change with the release of Warp Riders.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Big Day
    The Big Day is a rare bouquet on full display; a stunningly realized array of color, sound, and sensation that swallows the room. Any structure at risk of pop cliché finds new life through Chance, whose mastery of composition creates spins on existing musical archetypes like new synaptic grooves being carved out for the very first time.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What a Time to Be Alive
    What A Time To Be Alive is the rawest Superchunk album since the band’s 1990 debut and undoubtedly its most ferocious.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Way Out
    The Way Out provides the best introduction yet to The Books' nerdy experiments, but also to the duo's grand, goofy emotional range.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    No More Stories Are Told Today I'm Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories the World Is Grey I'm Tired Let's Wash Away
    Mew really does inhabit a place where few contemporaries can be found.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Valentine
    Throughout Valentine, Jordan reaches a new height of expression that practically demands to be heard and felt. ... Over Valentine, Jordan takes turmoil and heartache and creates something beautiful from the mess.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Courage Of Others
    Coming after the hauntingly archaic The Trials Of Van Occupanther, the more personal The Courage Of Others is bracing—stunning, even.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Celebration Rock
    Celebration Rock starts strong and stays there over the course of its eight songs and 35 minutes.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ghosteen
    He sounds simultaneously alone at the edge of the world and surrounded by benevolent spirits, a fittingly biblical cloud of witnesses who haven’t seen the power of God so much as they’ve moved through the fallout of their own atomic blasts; theirs is a communion of radiation. So it’s a bit of a surprise that Ghosteen is also Cave’s most accessible album since The Boatman’s Call.
    • 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).
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Every Open Eye
    The record feels like the kind a band releases just before it takes off. If Every Open Eyes turns out to be Chvrches’ breakthrough album, no one should be surprised.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Soused
    Pairing the somber and overpowering baritone bravado of Walker—not to mention his mad-poet mystique—with the subterranean thunder and tumbling towers of holy-hell from the core duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson seemed like the perfect marriage. And it is.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bend Beyond
    Woods works well to find the right space for each instrument, maintaining the balance between accuracy and capriciousness that continues to define the band.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fortress
    The follow-up [to "Kezia"], Fortress, mines similar territory but cranks the ferocity even higher.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Yonder Is The Clock
    These are all-American songs of devastation and alienation; they’re also loads of fun and damn hilarious much of the time.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Undun
    With the tight, concise, ferociously focused Undun, however, the immensity of the project's ambition is matched by its seamless, masterful execution.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Hundred Million Suns
    A Hundred Million Suns might just be Snow Patrol's biggest, most genuine effort yet.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Achtung Baby [Super Deluxe]
    Achtung Baby sounds a like a typical U2 record--a terrific U2 record, arguably the best record U2 has ever made, but not exactly the decisive break from the band's past it is remembered as. What Achtung Baby instead represents is U2's last great creative gasp.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964
    He sounds like what he was beneath the myth he was already constructing for himself: a man with a gift for words and music, sitting in a small room and hoping someone outside would listen.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Crying Light
    A startlingly powerful album meted out with supreme control.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blood Mountain
    Blood Mountain is terrifying in scope as well as execution.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Hairshirt Of Purpose
    At a time when it’s once more trendy to declare that rock music is dying, there’s a band like Pile putting lie to that hyperbole and still pushing the form to its outermost limits.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
    What's lost is considerable: namely, the justly vaunted lyrical chemistry between Andre 3000 and Big Boi. But what's gained is even more remarkable: the powerful, singular, undiluted visions of two of rap's most fearless sonic explorers.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    I Am Easy to Find
    The National’s never been afraid to dial things down, but it’s rarely sounded as vulnerable as it does here--song after song, Dessner’s vibrant, moody arrangements serve to reflect Berninger’s precarious balance of hope and frustration.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Beast Epic
    Beast Epic perfectly distills a career into a nearly perfect collection.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Earthly Delights
    Lightning Bolt exists in a wholly different context than it did four years ago, but Earthly Delights ranks up there with the group’s best work.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bones of What You Believe
    She, Doherty, and multi-instrumentalist Iain Cook have crafted one of the year’s best albums, which means that buzz won’t be dying down any time soon.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Black Messiah
    Black Messiah confirms that music holds the power to challenge and comfort, to take us someplace spiritual, political, and existential. It’s beautifully, devastatingly human.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Channel Orange
    Channel Orange is so arrestingly smooth that all of its unusually shaped pieces fit together as a seamless whole.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Love & Hate
    Love & Hate is a massive leap in accomplishment for Kiwanuka.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    69 Love Songs
    Alternately recalling the best work of Blondie, Leonard Cohen, Depeche Mode, and dozens more, 69 Songs About Love is a sprawling masterpiece of White Album-like proportions.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Body, The Blood, The Machine
    It's 36 minutes of loose garage rock with massively catchy melodies sugarcoating the biting sarcasm.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sunbather
    What’s undeniable is that moments from Sunbather will resonate long after the pointless babble has died down, proving that sometimes the greatest beauty can only be found in the face of chaos.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What Now
    A record so good it answers its own title question and makes you eager to ask it again.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Seek Warmer Climes
    Seek Warmer Climes is itself predatory--but with a delicate, skeletal shudder, it turns that hunger into a lonely howl.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Celestial Lineage
    The latest of those hymns is Celestial Lineage--and as great as the group's two previous full-lengths were, Lineage is the first to truly, fully capture the Weavers' unholy vision of sylvan majesty and pagan mystique.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fucked Up Friends
    A rock-solid Aesop Rock cameo is icing atop this sorely overlooked platter, which easily one of 2008's best driving records.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bermuda Drain
    The power-electronics attack of Prurient's past remains at the core of the album, particularly in the serrated, disembodied title track. Even at its most blunt and abusive, though, there's a dynamic subtlety and blown-out ambience that lulls sanity to the brink, then dangles it there.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Civilian
    The added dynamism in Wye Oak's music makes the prettiest passages of Civilian that much more arresting, and the demons lurking beneath them all the more real.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Stranger in the Alps
    Stranger In The Alps alchemizes sorrow into redemptive beauty. It’s never about wallowing, but about slowly moving through it. That difference, played out over some incredible, wise-beyond-her-years songwriting, makes it one of the best albums of the year.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Living With The Living
    Another fiercely satisfying Leo record.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Neon Bible
    Through Neon Bible, the band is seemingly sending a beacon to other reasonable people forced underground by the world's insanity. It's almost like a musical version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Masseduction
    It’s the best encapsulation of her vision to date, here fully under her control.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast
    Graced by a new lightness of touch and simply better as programmers, the two friends behind Matmos sound loose and lively where they once sounded stiff.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Merriweather Post Pavilion
    Merriweather's sound plays like both a summation and an expansion of everything Animal Collective has done so far, with a sharper focus on melody and more emboldened vocals that drive the songs.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Return To Cookie Mountain
    TV On The Radio previously seemed content to roam the open horizon; here, it's intent on exploring the far side. The journey is, once again, enthralling.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Summertime '06
    It’s a major triumph disguised as a minor one--60 minutes of lean, inventive, important rap music that never pats itself on the back for being any of those things.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    We Are The Pipettes
    Three polka-dotted women with perfectly suited voices front The Pipettes, but it's the work of mastermind Monster Bobby and the rest of the backing band that elevates these 16 nuggets far beyond the disposable pop implied by the setup.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Kannon
    This is the soundtrack to the decline of our species, once again illustrating that Sunn O))) is one of the most interesting and progressive groups in heavy music.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Graceland [25th Anniversary Edition]
    The music of Graceland is as stirring as always.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Soft Bulletin
    An impossibly multi-tracked masterwork of excess, abrasion, and indefinable beauty.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Now We Can See
    An album that goes so far in proving that simplicity not only has its place, it’s also often the path to unmitigated greatness.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Stankonia
    Many rappers derive inspiration from Clinton, but OutKast has constructed its own far-reaching and experimental mythology, drenching its surrealistic, Southern-fried flows in brilliantly executed funk, blissful soul, rattling live drums, spacey synthesizers, and psychedelic guitars.... In its messy brilliance, OutKast has created a hip-hop Sign O' The Times, a messy, vital classic and a major step forward for both its members and hip-hop as a whole.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Since We Last Spoke
    Since We Last Spoke finds RJD2 sounding like some blessed creature who's able to tune in every radio station in the world, past and present, and mix them together into a cohesive whole.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Brighter Than Creation's Dark
    As a collection of songs, Brighter Than Creation's Dark ranks among Drive-By Truckers' best, even though there are a couple of skippable tracks.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Greatest Hits
    So few bands may be better suited to the greatest-hits treatment, and with the group going on hiatus (following 2007’s middling Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace), now is the time to do it. The standard edition collects 13 of the hits and features two songs, “Wheels” and “Word Forward,” recorded for this compilation, and a previously unreleased acoustic version of “Everlong.”
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Puberty 2
    Puberty 2 exposes new dimensions to Mitski’s voice, revealing its true richness and range. Mitski is an exceptionally keen observer of the human condition, and Puberty 2 marks a triumphant new step in her evolution.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bromst
    These are thick songs built around left-field ideas, positively fat with melodic contentâ??physically shake the record, and sheets of notes would probably spray out like a colorful rain of tonal Skittles.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ascension
    No longer struggling to wake from bad dreams, Broadrick has rubbed the sleep from his eyes, dug through the rubble, and planted Ascension on the summit of the ruins of the world.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Life Of Pablo
    It feels far different from any of the tightly constructed, singular works of West’s past, and from a sonic standpoint, it sounds almost like a greatest-hits collection of nearly every sound and musical idea that he’s cultivated up to this moment. If you have a favorite Kanye West record, you can find it in here somewhere.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hey Venus!
    It's unabashedly a pop album, and by restraining its inventiveness, the band maintains a warm of sense of Zappa-esque liveliness.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do
    The beauty of The Idler Wheel… is how it transmits each of those feelings in excruciating, frank, and lovely detail.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    He Gets Me High
    As holdover until the next album, He Gets Me High does exactly what it should: raise anticipation for what comes next.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dirty Computer
    There is a concept here, but it is Janelle Monáe; there is a story here, but it is Janelle Monáe’s. And she’s outdone herself in both the execution of this vision and its resonance.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Letter to You
    His new record Letter To You is an absolute triumph, one that can take its place alongside the best albums of Springsteen’s long career.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Singularity
    There’s no prescribed narrative, but Singularity still tells a grand story--a synesthetic evocation of how it feels to be alive.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Heavy Ghost
    Heavy Ghost, Stith’s debut, is nothing short of a masterpiece of mood and texture, an album that sounds as if it was devised in equal parts by a seasoned composer and an inspired amateur.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This Is Happening
    His third album as LCD Soundsystem moves even further beyond ironic distance toward introspection and unguarded affection.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Modern Times
    The slow-building atmospherics of Dylan's 1997 comeback album have given way to some of the most immediately accessible tunes in his catalog.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The SMiLE Sessions
    Wilson has always said he wanted to make a "teenage symphony to God." This Smile is so wonderfully close. Hallelujah.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Weekend In The City
    It's smart, strange, just different enough from its predecessor, and, eventually, absolutely stunning.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fetch the Bolt Cutters
    Fetch The Bolt Cutters is full of visceral, jittery, wonderfully imperfect performances that make the album feel like a dreamlike concert at Largo.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lisbon
    Lisbon is like a treatise on the untapped power of the have-nots, delivered by the kind of people who could turn a raw potato, a cup of water, and a pinch of salt into a five-star dish.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Wrath
    For the first time, Lamb Of God sounds as powerful composing songs as it does cranking out riffs--and the transformation is career-defining.
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