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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    • 100 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Exile On Main Street [Reissue]
    Everything that made it on the album--and much of what didn’t--belongs exactly where it is. (Yes, even the blazing but unfortunately named blues jam “Turd On The Run.”)
    • 100 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    London Calling [25th Anniversary Legacy Edition]
    The Clash's London Calling stands as one of the few unimpeachably perfect albums... but it doesn't necessarily gain from the added scrutiny.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Spiderland [Box Set]
    It’s a thoughtful look at a legendary act, and one that’s both long overdue and well deserved. Just as Spiderland rewards the patient listener, the box set rewards the patient fan.
    • 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.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Graceland [25th Anniversary Edition]
    The music of Graceland is as stirring as always.
    • 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.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    SMiLE
    The new Smile not only justifies its bearing, but also serves as a major triumph.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Van Lear Rose
    Given a chance to be herself, Lynn responds with a powerful return to form. [28 Apr 2004]
    • The A.V. Club
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Keep An Eye On The Sky
    With only three official albums to its name, Big Star doesn’t seem like a natural for the box-set treatment, but Keep An Eye On The Sky has plenty to offer both neophytes and longtime fans, dropping demos, alternate mixes, and selections from Bell and Chilton’s pre-Big Star work alongside album tracks and the two stunning sides of the only solo work Bell saw released before dying in a car accident in 1978.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Siamese Dream [Deluxe Edition]
    The meticulously constructed cathedrals of guitar sounds on Siamese Dream--so clean and melodic, yet also heavy-make the album more comparable to A Night At The Opera or Boston than Nevermind or Vs.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Histoire de Melody Nelson
    The album’s remarkable 28 minutes still push boundaries, not just buttons.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    Lamar trusts every idea to stand on its own. When you’re making art this substantial, vital, and virtuosic, there’s no need to wrap a tidy bow around it.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dopesmoker [Reissue]
    It's an album of endless pleasures, and its arcane, foggy-headed mysteries never stop revealing themselves.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Promise
    The two-disc The Promise collects 22 leftovers (including "The Way," an excellent unlisted bonus track), none of them previously included on Springsteen's Tracks box set, all of them polished, to one extent or another, in recent years. Some, like "Breakaway" and the title track--a longtime fan favorite previously released only in a version rerecorded in 1999--fit Darkness' themes perfectly.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Icky Mettle [Deluxe Edition]
    The new double-disc edition of Icky Mettle explains why hopes for AoL were so high, and why those hopes may have been misplaced.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Madvillainy
    Like both artists' most transcendent work, Madvillainy retains its mystery and wonder after dozens of listens.
    • The A.V. Club
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Live At Reading
    It’s a monster of a concert film in any case, with a band at the height of its powers--and not yet totally sick of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit.'
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Love And Theft
    Love seems to come from a far more freewheeling Bob Dylan than the one on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, or virtually any other album he's recorded.
    • 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.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Dolly
    The bulk of Dolly comes from the professionally tumultuous, creatively astounding period from the mid-’60s through the Wagoner split.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Blur 21
    The bonus material contains an abundance of amazing, weird, and brilliant moments. But the type of extras included-like a disc of demos from Blur's early years, when the band went by Seymour--will likely only interest completists.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    All over Lemonade, Beyoncé is describing her own personal reality, on her terms and informed by her worldview. That the album simultaneously pushes mainstream music into smarter, deeper places is simply a reminder of why she remains pop’s queen.
    • 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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Brighten The Corners: Nicene Creedence Edition
    Like most modern reissues, this one contains a wealth of B-sides and curios to sift through. Some are fun, like the nasty, thrashing 'Wanna Mess You Around,' but some are for completists only.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
    Waits may call them orphans, but another artist would call this a career.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial
    One strength of this set-apart from its generous but judicious stockpile of Guthrie art, artifacts, and analysis-is that it doesn't overwhelm.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Boy In Da Corner
    It all makes for a bleak spread, but Rascal rises up as a singular musical presence too brimming and perceptive to let the coarse world around him pass by untouched.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    You Want It Darker
    He’s choosing to examine his life (and life’s work) rather than ponder the abyss. That ensures You Want It Darker doesn’t feel like an ending, as much as it feels like one more chapter in Cohen’s songbook.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Archives Vol. 1 1963-1972
    If Archives is ultimately less of a career-redefiner than Decade, that’s only because Young’s become such an entrenched part of rock history that his career has been exhaustively picked-over. Aside from the heretofore under-explored surf influence, there are really only a few new connections made or questions raised with Archives.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Raw Power [Reissue]
    So many Stooges live sets and outtakes are already available that the bonuses risk redundancy (and there's an even longer "Deluxe Edition" available via mail-order), but Raw Power itself remains a landmark.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Goodbye Yellow Brick Road [40th Anniversary Edition]
    An insanely confident effort that, 40 years on, still surprises in its sensitivity. Sequins and all.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Titanic Rising
    Rado’s opulent production gives the experience of listening to Titanic Rising—particularly on headphones—the feeling of being enveloped in sound, insulated from the outside world like an astronaut looking down at the earth through layers of atmosphere. The lyrics on Titanic Rising certainly contribute to the album’s daydream quality.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Melodrama
    What Melodrama confirms most of all is Lorde’s uncanny ability to drill down so precisely on grand emotional themes that would fell lesser songwriters. Tackling a bad breakup certainly isn’t new in pop music, but it’s delivered here with an honesty an energy that is uniquely her own.
    • 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bitch Magnet
    no amount of remastering, as excellent and long overdue as it is, can supersede the murky, mumbling majesty of songs like Star Booty's "Carnation" or the cock-rock deconstruction of Umber's "Goat-Legged Country God."
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Red (Taylor's Version)
    Red (Taylor’s Version) has a happy, free, lonely, and, yes, confused vibe; quoting “22” feels appropriate in this case—it doesn’t get old, it just gets an incredible upgrade.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Good Kid, M.A.A.D City
    Good Kid is an exercise in tasteful restraint, with Lamar employing his boundless budget in creative ways.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Grand Don't Come For Free
    Upping his narrative ante, Skinner goes all-in on Grand, a bold follow-up that sounds beguilingly slight and dry until details start sketching its story.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Canto
    As great as Los Super Seven's self-titled debut still sounds, the new Canto, produced with even more flair by Los Lobos' Steve Berlin, widens the group's scope to include the entire Latin-American hemisphere, acting as an even broader tribute to Latino culture.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The ArchAndroid
    Monae's inexhaustible swagger and singular style sell both the high-concept theatrics and the schizophrenic sonics.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Guitar Song
    On his audacious, frequently excellent third album, The Guitar Song, Johnson shares his dream of outlaw country becoming as dominant a commercial force as it was in the '70s, over the course of 25 songs rooted in the past, but not indebted to it.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Is This It?
    Guitar rock that knows the grit of downtown, understands the seductiveness of a timeless pop song, and recognizes that a great solo can be accomplished in 20 seconds, Is This It may not quite justify its ascent to instant-classic status.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    We Got It From Here...Thank You 4 Your Service
    It’s good, an unexpected victory lap by Tip, Phife, producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and estranged founding member Jarobi.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Illinois
    It's easy to play a spot-the-Illinois-reference game, but it's just as easy to step back and marvel at the songs' musical range and sophistication.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Carrie & Lowell
    Meet Carrie & Lowell on its terms and it’s revelatory.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    No Cities to Love
    No Cities To Love is a bold and deeply revealing look at the band’s past nine years, both together and apart.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Punisher
    Whether she intended to do so or not, Phoebe Bridgers has created a musical monument to our dissociative age with Punisher. It’s an album about sleepless nights and sinking feelings in the pit of your stomach, wrapped in a musical package that’s both feather-light and lush enough to run your fingers through.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Original Pirate Material
    Heard as a rap album, Original Pirate Material provides a compelling picture of the style wrapping itself around a different milieu. But taken on his own terms, Skinner reaches too deep and true to sound like anything but a remarkable talent in any genre.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Alice
    Heartbreakingly delicate even on the up-tempo numbers, Alice contains some of Waits' career's most tender moments.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Funeral
    Funeral's layering of sound and wide-eyed posing can be overly dense, and though the band utilizes nice melodies and lively arrangements, the nostalgia-steeped-indie-rock-orchestra pool was pretty much drained before The Arcade Fire dove in.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    No Depression [Legacy Edition]
    No Depression: Legacy Edition chronicles this collision between restlessness and ambition, and portrays a band successfully wrangling both.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
    Though his partner is absent, this sounds and feels like another OutKast experience--a welcome one.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Live Anthology
    As painful as it is to recommend an overpriced monument to corporate synergy, the deluxe set really is a treat for hardcore Petty-heads.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    græ
    The intensity and diversity of Part 1 hinted at even more bombastic and unexpected songs to come on Part 2, which instead mostly continues the sound he already mastered on Aromanticism. It’s not that Part 2’s songs aren’t gorgeous and poignant; it’s just that, given Sumney’s unwavering focus on shattering longtime boundaries, Part 2’s songs occupy shockingly familiar musical territory.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Z
    It's both rare and marvelous to hear a good band make its first really great album.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    St. Vincent
    All told, St. Vincent is a bold, ambitious, and perfectly overstuffed album.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Dusk in Us
    The Dusk In Us can’t match the apocalyptic power of a classic like 2001’s Jane Doe, but when Converge takes a victory lap, it still does it at a mad sprint.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    RTJ2
    The sequel takes the simplistic thrills of the debut and expands the duo’s natural chemistry. With Killer Mike grounded at the album’s emotional core, El-P is free to indulge in his intrepid production tendencies.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Neon Golden
    The Notwist's previous stabs at fusing pop, techno, punk, and jazz were dominated by post-adolescent melancholy and petulance. Though Neon Golden obsesses over locked rooms and missed chances, it also acknowledges the pleasures of stasis, the distant possibility of change, and an overall affinity with the "freaks."
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Since I Left You
    Quite possibly the best sample record ever made.
    • 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.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Miss E... So Addictive
    Like its predecessors, the disc drags in spots but generally delivers, proving that emotionally and artistically, contentment suits Elliott just fine.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bloodmoon: I
    A group that has long found new, thrilling ways to go hard and fast is softening and slowing its assault, locating (thanks to some choice guest contributors) new dimensions of the Converge sound: songs that slither rather than gallop and whisper instead of roar.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bachelor No. 2 (or, the last remains of the dodo)
    An imperfect collection of remarkable music.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    All Mirrors
    The music is gorgeous but feels labored over, like pottery lacquered with one too many layers of shellac. Hopefully Olsen will also still release her stripped-back take on All Mirrors, as it’s the dressing—not the songs themselves—that stumbles.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Coloring Book [Mixtape]
    Coloring Book delivers one celebratory hymnal after another, emphasizing the natural high that comes with feeling loved and watched over.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Big Fish Theory
    Big Fish Theory veers off the course set by its predecessor, bucking the sophomore slump by ditching the vast majority of his old collaborators and peers in favor of the sort of whole-cloth artistic reinvention generally associated with canonical greats like Kanye or Bowie. What’s even crazier is that he sticks the landing. It’s his second classic LP in a row.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Chris
    Chris more than anything revels in fluid identities--whether gender, personality, mood, or otherwise--and the way they free people from expectations and limits. By extension, this frees up Christine And The Queens from musical conventions, and propels the group to the precipice of greatness.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last Exit
    Junior Boys makes hushed, blippy dance music with a contemporary sensibility, as though Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark had been continuously recording since 1980.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Songs For The Deaf
    Musically and vocally, the band sounds tighter and more accomplished than ever.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wearemonster
    Track-by-track stylistic swerves make the album singular and exciting, but like-minded swerves within the same tracks ultimately give We Are Monster its living, breathing charge.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Hell Hath No Fury
    Fury is as lean and mean sonically as it is lyrically.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    folklore
    In the end, folklore may or may not reflect a permanent musical shift for Taylor Swift. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be a grand step forward—that it’s a whimsical and intriguing album offering new insights into Swift’s work is completely enough.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Yours, Mine & Ours
    Yours, Mine & Ours strikes the same gorgeous, sad tone as its two predecessors.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chutes Too Narrow
    Without the thrill of discovery, it's no shock that the returns have diminished slightly on Chutes Too Narrow. But a minor step down from greatness still sounds damn good.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    To Be Kind
    Throughout To Be Kind, it seems as if Swans can barely contain Gira’s vision of what his music can surround, conquer, and absorb.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Divers
    The sheer array of sounds on this record is amazing--not just in the variety of instruments employed, but also in the ways they are utilized.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    30
    The richest and most musically adventurous album of her career.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Charity Starts at Home
    With his gloriously grown-up solo debut, one of the smartest, most incisive lyricists alive proves it's possible to grow older in hip-hop while retaining your dignity.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bad as Me
    Bad As Me is entry-level Waits for newcomers, and for longtime fans it's a fun reminder of Waits' ability to be a badass when necessary.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Moon Shaped Pool
    It pauses, in awkward fits and starts, even as the overall experience is languid and repetitive, like the daily grind of life itself. The band has figured out how to translate its worldview into an album of tone poems, a record of songs ending in abrupt drops or trailed-off codas, as though each effort--by definition, you get the sense--must inevitably come up short.
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