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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    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Black Up
    A killer second act.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Negro Swan
    He’s given us not just a great album, but a piece of himself that stands as a whole truth that need not be escaped, but rather, treasured.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    You're Not Alone
    In addition to a pack of his best songs since I Get Wet, he brings with him a trio of spoken-word interludes that further expand on his philosophy, and as stupid as that might sound on paper--and even on first listen--it makes sense in the world of Andrew W.K. ... His confidence is unassailable and contagious.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    World Eater
    World Eater represents a true stylistic leap. It’s a mammoth collection of songs that carve out a unique niche between apocalyptic anxiety and brief, cathartic bursts of ecstasy--a feeling that should resonate with just about everybody these days.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pedestrian Verse
    Hutchison falls in with another proud Scottish tradition: the ability to make the gloomy anthemic.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    American VI: Ain't No Grave
    The 10 songs on American VI find Cash sounding frail but determined, and the material doesn't let him down.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Cancer4Cure
    Cancer For Cure is a triumph of imagination and intelligence in service of a pervasive sense of personal and political unease.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Majesty Shredding
    Majesty Shredding lives up to its name and doesn't waste much time catching its breath, and along the way Superchunk delivers something that used to be expected of the band: an album on which every song sounds as inspired as the next one.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Greatest Story Never Told
    Told is worth the wait; raising Saigon's profile is probably Entourage's greatest/only gift to the world, at least where hip-hop is concerned.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fearless (Taylor's Version)
    She has launched the re-recorded Fearless (Taylor’s Version), adding a mellifluous upgrade to an already remarkable album. Sure, it works as a throwback, but it’s mainly a showcase of Swift’s mature, confident vocals, with a sharper sense of musicianship and instrumentation this time around.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Big Doe Rehab
    Rehab packs the visceral, transgressive punch of the best crime fiction but it's equally adept at old-school Sunday-in-the-park jams (the infectious single 'Celebrate') and wiggy conceptual tracks like 'White Linen Affair (The Toney Awards).'
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    There Is Love In You
    There Is Love In You, his first proper album in five years, is smoother still, and to great effect—if this isn’t the best Four Tet record yet, it’s certainly a fresh face for Hebden.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
    Laced throughout all of it are generous, wide-eyed melodies of a kind that makes for swooning sighs and curious feelings of instant nostalgia.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hell-On
    Case’s restless exploratory impulses are contained within relatively conventional song structures, with much more compelling results.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Food & Liquor
    By boldly expanding the parameters of mainstream hip-hop, Fiasco's threatening to make rap a welcoming place for geeks and iconoclasts as well as pimps and thugs.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Elephant
    All the elements of previous White Stripes records surface again, but in weirder, more intense strains that don't break with Jack and Meg White's past, yet don't slavishly adhere to it, either.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Transatlanticism
    A lush, impeccably produced, musically adventurous, emotionally resonant examination of the way relationships are both strengthened and damaged by distance, the album surpasses Gibbard's other career highpoints, which is really saying something.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Distortion
    The songs themselves are as lush and prickly as anything Merritt's ever made.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Marry Me
    Marry Me, seduces with one hand and stabs with the other.
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