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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    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    PersonA
    Skeptics who have already written the band off may dismiss the new methods as artificial, which isn’t that hard to do, given how much of the group’s history feels contrived. But, to an impartial ear, the record doesn’t sound like a collective of falsely enthusiastic neo-hippies; rather, it sounds like a collective of talented, unhampered musicians, and it deserves recognition as such.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Near to the Wild Heart of Life
    Japandroids have always sought love and adventure in equal measure, and they get both on Near To The Wild Heart Of Life.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Nearer My God
    It’s as impressive as it is expansive, a perfect showcase for modern emo’s elasticity.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sour
    Her debut record, SOUR, will be a contender for best pop album of the year. There are no filler tracks on SOUR. Each song represents a different side to Rodrigo’s artistry, embracing every influence that’s shaped her music, while still creating something fresh.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Wrecking Ball
    Ultimately, though, Dead Confederate's alt-country/grunge hybrid doesn't just feel like a compelling debut, it feels like a compelling new genre.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    evermore
    evermore is even better than folklore, thanks to greater sonic cohesion (Antonoff only has one production credit, on the superlative “Gold Rush,” leaving the bulk of the music produced or co-produced by Aaron Dessner) and stronger songwriting.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Before the Dawn [Live]
    Because the main suites were written with a blind listen in mind and because it is so well-executed, the audio makes for an epic, vivid two-and-a-half-hour event that will enchant anyone new to Bush’s music.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Terror
    The Terror is the sound of The Flaming Lips going from a group experience to an internal monologue, the perfect record for any fan who has ever felt like the band could use two “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate”s for every “Race For The Prize.”
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Invisible Girl
    Sensitivity never felt so filthy—and garage rock has rarely felt so fun.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Death Magic
    A monstrous album on which its electronic and industrial mystique has matured to represent an absorption of the band’s discography, injected with a serum of growth hormones.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Covers
    Stellar. ... The album boasts Marshall’s usual selection of interesting and unexpected covers. This time around, she’s curated an intriguing and moody mix of modern pop, vintage country, and classic rock, highlighted by recognizable songs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Ring
    It's an ambitious, perhaps even hypercompositional debut, one whose strange beauty demands attention.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Now Or Heaven
    More importantly, the songwriting is better this time around, with sharp hooks that draw blood once they grab on.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions
    Mermaid Avenue remains a lovable chapter in the story of an American icon, and two of his worthy musical offspring.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Post-War
    Post-War is easily M. Ward's most accessible album to date, charged with a bouncy spirit.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Hey Hey My My Yo Yo
    Multi-instrumentalist/producer Junior masters JS's many loves without having to scale them down, and expands Don't Stop's compact party into a show of force.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Cage Tropical
    Cage Tropical possesses darker dimensions and inspirations, driven by twinges of velocity and an unsettled vibe. This combination suits Rose well: Her music may have emerged from a period of great turmoil, but, in the process, she’s found a new path forward.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    A Crow Looked at Me
    Pain is the crux of Elverum’s career, and without resorting to any of his brutally stark instrumentation, he offers his most sobering full-length to date, and likely of all time.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Welcome 2 America
    This record is evidence that Prince’s one-of-a-kind genius never really dimmed, even if he sometimes lost sight of how to focus it, 0r—perhaps more importantly to the quick-take internet area that Prince detested so much—how to package it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Twelve Reasons to Die
    In an era where it increasingly seems like rap albums are being rendered obsolete by mixtapes, this tightly focused, wildly entertaining collaboration between two master craftsmen is a testament to how powerful the form can still be.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Catastrophe Keeps Us Together
    [Rainer Maria] drapes songs in atmospheric echo while maintaining a steady, urgent beat--all of which provides a stage for Caithlin De Marrais' earnest, fully engaged voice.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    200 Million Thousand
    200 Million Thousand showcases some of their most satisfying [tunes] yet.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Monsters Of Folk
    Monsters Of Folk is a real pleasure, full of songs that are loose, catchy and likeable.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    American Slang
    The band's third LP, American Slang, represents a welcome, organic progression. It's more varied in style than the excellent (but samey) The '59 Sound, and the songs feel more original-the product of Brian Fallon's notebooks, not his record collection.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Grace/Confusion
    By throwing out the genre rulebook, Hawk is pushing electronic music into weirder, more exciting territory, chillwave purists be damned.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Century Of Self
    Sometimes the rigid pattern of power-murk-power gets a little too predictable, but the pleasure of having a Trail Of Dead album that contains mostly good parts and no blind alleys more than makes up for any reduction in ambition.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Shadows
    Shadows is a touch too twee at times, but more often, it impresses with its understated elegance and classically constructed melodies.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    World Painted Blood
    Greg Fidelman does a better production job here than he did on Metallica’s "Death Magnetic," perhaps due to oversight by Rick Rubin, who produced Slayer’s best work.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Young For Eternity
    Broudie... supplies the record with more thrust and polish than some of these half-written songs deserve.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sports
    The result should be unbearably bleak and self-absorbed, but Sports catches Weekend gazing not at its shoes, but into its soul.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky
    There are a ton of catchy songs here: Almost every track on the album has something that grabs the attention.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Awoo
    The band's fourth album Awoo keeps the lyrical restraint, but restores some of the energy of The Hidden Cameras' early work, in more of a rock 'n' roll vein.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Songs For Christmas
    Both hauntingly beautiful and a helpful summary of Stevens' career to date.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Black Cascade
    Black Cascade makes it a little harder to just sink into the gloom, but the payoff is hearing Wolves become a more thoroughly powerful metal act.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Everything Under the Sun
    If a piano-pop song has ever put a smile on your face, Everything Under The Sun belongs in your collection. If that's never happened to you, well, why not?
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Popular Songs
    As usual, they sound less like imitation than a band remaking its record collection in its own image.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Temporary Pleasure
    Simian Mobile Disco’s astounding track record as a remix powerhouse is due in no small part to the group’s mastery of mood, and Temporary Pleasure benefits greatly from this.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    So Beautiful or So What
    It'd be inapt to say that Simon's latest, So Beautiful Or So What, finds the 69-year-old in a more creatively fruitful place than he's been in 20 years.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Devil's Halo
    The album as a whole is bracingly unpredictable and persistently enjoyable; it’s an art-soul record for those who like to be challenged while they’re tapping their toes. Or vice versa.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Southeastern
    For the most part Southeastern is pretty serious business. Then again, so is life and the one that Isbell has lived thus far is certainly worth documenting, especially when the songs supporting it are this stunning.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Can Cladders
    It's not a grand departure, just the best album yet by one of the modern-rock era's most loveable bands.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Microcastle
    The bolder sound signals that Deerhunter is now less concerned with the scarring effects of loss, conflict, and the passage of time, and more concerned with the ways to escape those things--even if that escape is fleeting.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Never Hungover Again
    Never Hungover Again isn’t a complete overhaul of the band’s sound, but with all the gentle twists on those charms, it ends up serving as a re-introduction.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Light of a Vaster Dark
    It might've been enough for Faun Fables to bear up McCarthy's commanding theatricality on this album. Instead, it has a surplus of ideas that only make Light feel more purposeful.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Trouble Will Find Me
    Like the rest of the National catalog, Trouble Will Find Me is subtly insinuating; at first it seems almost free of hooks, then six listens later it’s difficult to get it unstuck.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Looping State of Mind
    The Field knows how to tease until it's practically torturous, while somehow never qualifying for off-putting tags like "difficult" or "experimental."
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Next Day
    The Next Day is not just a strong comeback, but a stunning, resonant piece of expression--an intimate communiqué that whispers at the soul without denying the labyrinth of identity that once made Bowie a self-contained echo chamber.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    To Pimp A Butterfly
    On Lamar’s longer, denser, and even richer follow-up To Pimp A Butterfly, he stops holding the listener’s hand.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    He's the kind of libertine who needs to live on the knife's edge just to feel alive, and Fantasy is gloriously alive.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Game Theory
    Especially in its superior second half, the album resonates with casual ambition as it reconciles ?uestlove's effortless bohemian cool and sonic perfectionism with Black Thought's dark swagger, street-level sociology, and silver-tongued virtuosity.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Expo 86
    It might be difficult to expect such restlessly creative musicmakers to sit still for long, but Expo 86 shows that Wolf Parade could be a place worth settling in for a while.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Death Dreams
    By album-ender "First Contact" the pair have accumulated enough momentum that they sound ready to bust out of Saulnier's self-conscious mind and take the rest of the world on, one graceful guitar burst at a time.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Play It Strange
    Pastiche without a trace of pretension, Play It Strange isn't just The Fresh & Onlys' most vigorous album to date, it's a perfect example of how trying--or even thinking--too hard can be antithetical to crafting punchy, catchy rock.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Treats
    Krauss and Miller immediately reach for the jugular on nearly every track of Treats. The trick could wear thin quickly, but the tracks that previously made the Internet rounds as demos sound just as vital here as they did on first download.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Lonerism
    The band's latest, Lonerism, digs even deeper into those themes and sounds [early-'70s psychedelia, proto-metal, and British pop], and pulls out a masterful collage.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Third
    This is the late-night, beat-driven, torpid-languid music of a zillion coffee shops, sure, but with the blood drained out of it, a creepy-crawly, black-and-white-sounding thing that gets under the skin and stays there from the first play
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    No Devolucion
    As raw yet coldly deliberate as self-surgery, No Devolucion isn't a return to form for Thursday; it's a searing, scarring reinvention.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II
    Raekwon pays further homage to his late friend’s memory by releasing a tour de force that honors both the legacies of Wu-Tang Clan and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bleach: Deluxe Edition
    Sure, it’s valuable as a blueprint for music that would change everything (for a while, anyway), but also as a repository for the perfect synthesis of grunge’s anger and Kurt Cobain’s pop sensibility.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    New Brigade
    While Refused deconstructed post-hardcore, Iceage's stunning debut, New Brigade, slaps vibrant new life into the worked-over corpse of post-punk, radiating a breathless, desperate, ramshackle charm that runs counter to the frigid gloom of the music.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Golden Age
    Eitzel's trademark gloom still dominates, but his ability to bend glacial chords around pure poetry remains vital. In fact, it's stronger than ever.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Teen Dream
    Teen Dream is deeper in hue than its predecessors. Its blues are bluer, even while warmer tones abound, and Scally’s guitar emotes as lithely as the voice it dances with.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Reminder
    The Reminder sounds best on headphones, since its rich room tone and casual instrumental interplay is essential to the experience.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    M B V
    Regardless of whether it’s an echo of the past or a bridge to the future, MBV stands as something potentially timeless--and immediately breathtaking.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Pacific Ocean Blue [Reissue]
    The new Pacific Ocean Blue: Legacy Edition corrects that [being out of print] while confirming the rumors of the album's greatness.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    What Were You Hoping For?
    Twice as raw and thrice as hungry as anything the neo-soul mastermind has previously released, Hoping-from the title on down-is a full-throated, full-throttle challenge.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Receivers
    Receivers finds the band slowing down the tempo and more fully exploring the textures and nuances of its dense, multi-layered soundscapes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    New Hymn to Freedom
    New Hymn To Freedom, the English trio’s second album, is a remarkably lucid 45 minutes of spontaneous composition, a civilization of sound and emotion conjured from nothing more than the in-the-moment interplay between keyboardist Luke Abbott, saxophonist Jack Wylie, and drummer Lawrence Pike.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Take Care
    His follow-up album is plenty downbeat, but it's also gorgeous, an immersive headphone masterwork that's tender and intimate like little else in contemporary rap and R&B.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sirens of the Ditch
    Sirens is the sound of a freshly liberated songwriter scouring his soul - and coming up full-handed.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Compassion
    Compassion may feel especially timely, but music this passionately realized will always be worth revisiting.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Any Shape You Take
    The record has achieved a rare quality: It sounds as though it was made just for you.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Parallax
    It's a brilliant feat: to make a record about distance, Cox has written the most effortlessly approachable music of his career.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Candylion
    Fantastic.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Milk Famous
    Milk Famous is consistent in the one way White Rabbits needs to be: At all times, it's adventurous.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Human Hearts
    The album bears all the hallmarks of relaxed, unfettered exploration; it's a bold, assured effort that finds Maritime definitively stepping out from the shadows of the past and into a new light.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Luminiferous
    This track [“The Lethal Chamber”], as well as Luminiferous as a whole, aggressively illustrates that High On Fire still deserves its place at the top of underground metal’s food chain.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Attack On Memory
    With Attack On Memory, he's gotten closer to the big rock sounds in his head.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Born Like This
    Three years away has done wonders for the masked supervillain. The rapper who now goes by DOOM (“all big letters but it ain’t no acronym”) comes roaring back to life on the largely self-produced Born Like This.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Burst Apart
    It isn't as conceptual as its predecessor, but Burst Apart is just as much of an event, one that comes with some cautious optimism in the end.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Promises Promises
    The venom is still there, and it's just as potent, but it tastes a little sweeter this time around.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Avi Buffalo
    "What's in it for me?" Zahner-Isenberg sings with a piercing squeak in the chorus of the album's gooiest pop song. He honestly doesn't know, and that's what makes Avi Buffalo such an affecting listen.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Something
    Chairlift still transcends the cool-kid ghetto for more elevated climes.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Painted Shut
    Unfortunately for some, Painted Shut signals the end of Hop Along’s tenure as a little-known buzz band. For everyone else, it’s the sound of being welcomed to the party.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    jj no 3
    They could've fallen out of a high-school locker in a John Hughes movie. They're the best Lou Pearlman demos you've never heard.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    True Love Cast Out All Evil
    Not unlike Bob Dylan's Time Out Of Mind, this is an album by a grizzled veteran of rock's rougher roads who proves in his late career that he still has great work in him. Perhaps even better, Erickson sounds remarkably confident and optimistic; for all the tumult of his life, he's happy to be living it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    News And Tributes
    A happily unpredictable record.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Phases
    With its plaintive lyrics, Phases further shows that Olsen, like those venerable musicians, is a persistent truth teller, an authentic voice no matter what style she’s working in.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
    Waits may call them orphans, but another artist would call this a career.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Knock Knock
    There hasn’t been a more purely enjoyable record released in 2018.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    I Am Very Far
    It's no longer the Okkervil River of The Stage Names or Black Sheep Boy, and that's a plus: I Am Very Far signals that the band's gifts with song and sentiment were never tied to specificity.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Us
    On Us, his deeply humane new album, that mad-prophet intensity can be exhausting, exhilarating, and downright transcendent.
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