The Boston Phoenix's Scores

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For 1,091 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 63% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 34% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 74
Highest review score: 100 Pink
Lowest review score: 0 Last of a Dyin' Breed
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 956 out of 1091
  2. Mixed: 88 out of 1091
  3. Negative: 47 out of 1091
1091 music reviews
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Strange Mercy
    Strange Mercy becomes more intriguing the more you listen to it--even if that means you also get further away from comprehending its idiosyncrasy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    American Central Dust
    There's an easiness and directness to these tunes that was missing the last couple of times out, aided by Joe Henry and Ryan Freeland's no-nonsense mix but owing mainly to Farrar's vivid songwriting.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Return Of The Wu & Friends
    Mathematics conjures a distinct Wu melancholy that outsiders can only imitate. Most impressive here, however, is Method Man.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tarot Classics [EP]
    For now, these four remaining songs from their indie days are perfectly competent, reminiscent of the Pixies, and hard to remember even though they're perfectly tuneful.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nostalgia, Ultra.
    It's supposedly winnowed down to seven excellent tracks you can pay for, versus an album-of-the-year candidate you can cop free legally (for now).
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Everything in Between
    It's an effortless move to help firm up No Age's place as one of the most bi-polar party bands around.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Funhouse
    Give Pink three spins and half a chance and by track five's killer New Order riff, you'll be singing 'Please, Don't Leave Me' back at her.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Royal Toast
    Hollenbeck leavens the severity of his attack with instrumental warmth and unusual ensemble timbre: reeds (Chris Speed), accordion (Ted Reichman), vibes (Matt Moran), bass (Drew Gress), percussion--plus, on Royal Toast, frequent collaborator Gary Versace on piano.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Catastrophe Keeps Us Together
    In a genre dominated by sensitive boys in sneakers and second-hand cardigans, Rainer Maria have had an edge: ... There’s barely a male voice to be heard on Catastrophe Keeps Us Together.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Inner Mansions
    The Inner Mansions is much more interesting than your typical bedroom pop album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Jewellery
    Levy's unorthodox and, in some cases, homemade instruments strum and stutter with calculated abandon; her heavy British accent slumps itself across this glitchy bubblegum arcade and blunts it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Running For The Drum
    Even if Sainte-Marie tries to cram too much into her joyous return to the limelight, Running for the Drum is proof that a path that began with the powerful "Universal Soldier" back in the early 1960s won't be fading gracefully into the usual sunset of folk retirement.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    I Am...Sasha Fierce
    My advice is to skip directly to disc two, though I'm happy to report that the typically melismatic Mrs. Jigga shows a shocking degree of vocal restraint on the ballads.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Confess
    Even if he's stuck in the past, Lewis's best songs feel timeless.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sports
    The shoegazy noise genre is again slowly creeping toward the pop spectrum, and Sports might push it even farther toward the indie mainstream, but it needs a new tag - let's call it blackout pop.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    New Magnetic Wonder
    The disc’s best stuff — such as the hard-rocking opener, “Can You Feel It?” — makes it easy to get swept up in his limitless enthusiasm.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Small Craft On A Milk Sea
    Like everything Eno touches, the album is riddled with baffling and stimulating forays into unexpected territories.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Popular Songs
    You still get an album's worth of pristine, beautifully constructed songs that enhance Yo La Tengo's literate reputation.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    For All I Care
    For All I Care adds vocalist Wendy Lewis to the line-up of pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer David King, and though it inches the Bad Plus closer to the pop mainstream, it never loses the particular rhythmic and harmonic quirks that have defined them so far.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    March Of The Zapotec/Holland [EP]
    Like the most artistically successful EPs (Magical Mystery Tour, the Who's surf-rockers, the Beta Band's glory-days output), these do the job without overstaying their welcomes.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Shade Of Poison Trees
    A self-conscious return to Dashboard’s acoustic-troubadour roots. The good news is that the mellower sounds don’t come with mellower sentiments.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Untrue
    Why anyone would want to be subjected to such gloom is a good question, except that Burial is a witch with the kind of drum programming that leaves no choice in the matter.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dark Night Of The Soul
    Every song here showcases Linkus's gift for pinpointing little benchmarks in hopelessness with brittle gestures of melody and ambiance. It's also another reminder of Danger Mouse's ability to whittle lean pop shivs from gnarly splinters.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Beware and Be Grateful
    Beware and Be Grateful's main flaw: an occasional quirk overload.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Knowle West Boy
    Knowle West Boy is a survey of Tricky’s sonic versatility--straightforward rock and oppressive, moody atmospherics all have a home here--and it is frequently gorgeous.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Holy Fire
    Foals haven't lost their math-rock edge; they've infused it with fun.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Watch Me Fall
    Reatard wants to do it all, and he comes pretty close.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Smart Flesh
    Smart Flesh won't just set many a lonely heart aflutter - it will stick around in the morning to make breakfast.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Wreck
    The structural maturity, in this case, is merely a Trojan horse, meant to smuggle in the music's core brutality in a facade of lean indie mournfulness.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Noise Floor (Rarities 1998-2005)
    Noise Floor is a smattering of moods and modes all tied together by Oberst’s love-it-or-loathe-it voice.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Beast
    There might be something deeper rolling around here than "There's nothing that will change me/There's nothing sure as shit" ("Bring the Fight"). Probably not, but if you want to bang your head, this will do the trick.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Dutchess
    An eclectic, danceable collection of hip-hop, R&B, and pop confections.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Un Dia
    Un Día takes everything the former Argentine TV star used to establish her musical style in the 12 years since she released her first album--her sometimes grainy voice, folk-leaning acoustic guitar, odd sampled sounds, and an impossible degree of looping-- and shows Molina’s music in its weirdest, most mesmerizing, ideal version of itself.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Awoo
    He’s brought together his best batch of melodies yet, along with lyrics that aim less to shock than to amuse.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Song Of The Pearl
    Song of the Pearl may not be full of surprises, but it provides a fresh trip through familiar territory that's more than idle nostalgia.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Master of My Make-Believe
    Danceable escapism for Urban Outfitters shopping that won't make you question the prices, much less start a riot.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Saint Dymphna
    Saint Dymphna is the sound of a band of psychedelic dabblers finally getting their shit together.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Bakesale [Deluxe Edition]
    Compared to 1996's Harmacy, Barlow's maudlin tendencies are relatively reined in throughout Bakesale's 15 straightforward rockers.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Intoxication
    From 'Intoxication' (a tale of sexual regret) to 'Church Heathen' (about hypocrisy in the church), the lyrics are more stimulating than your typical dancehall fare, and the beats are elegant and catchy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Anything In Return
    Anything in Return is his most melodic album.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Third
    Anyone expecting a return to the slick cinemafunk of ’90s Portishead will be taken aback by Third, but though the album never reaches the eureka moments of old, it’s a welcome step into new territory and a more than satisfying downer dose to set against the onset of sunny days and ice cream.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Blood And Candle Smoke
    His dark visions are overpowered by his colorful writing and pure humanity.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Our Love To Admire
    Attention to the smallest instrumental details and the finest points of every composition have become Interpol trademarks; more complex than its pop song structures might suggest, Our Love To Admire is well worth exploring.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Return of Mr. Zone 6
    The Return of Mr. Zone 6 is an album pared down to the elements Gucci knows best - sinister beats fueled by snare pellets and twisted, carnival-like synths, deadpanned prioritization of cash over women, and collaboration with a slew of Brick Squad compatriots and friends (we hear everyone from Birdman to Master P to Waka Flocka Flame, many times over).
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Chrome Dreams II
    Chrome Dreams II is effective despite the sonic clash because, on both the new material and the leftovers, the loud ('Spirit Road') and the soft (the soul ballad 'Ever After'), it’s unified by its call to give props to spirit and humanity, a sentiment that, whatever it’s wrapped in, never gets old.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Why There Are Mountains
    The good news is that Why There Are Mountains is polished and offers some strong songwriting while still leaving the band enough room to grow into something better.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Turn The Lights Out
    It’s more polished and sonically ambitious. But it’s not a major departure.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    jj no 3
    Their ability to re-create shrewd discordant pairings in a second set of simple pop songs and still leave fans uncertain as to whether the duo are cleverly cloying or cloyingly clever is what will keep listeners in suspense until the curtains have parted.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Horehound
    Horehound isn't White Stripes tea-party cutesy, and it's not Raconteurs good-times eclectic--it's nothing but riffs and 'tude all the way through.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    No Color
    Meric Long, vocalist/guitarist for San Francisco duo the Dodos, makes a lot of broad statements on the band's fourth studio album. Fortunately, the music fills in the blanks.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Days
    This New Jersey quartet is one well-oiled muscle, and they flex it to hypnotic effect for 40-plus minutes.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tonight: Franz Ferdinand
    Here the band, with producer Dan Carey (Hot Chip, CSS) at their side, dip their big toe into electro-pop, Afrobeat (sorta), new-wave seizures, and all manner of groove that bespeak body-rockin' pleasures.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Unknown Mortal Orchestra
    As Unknown Mortal Orchestra wears on, there is some loosening of the pop reins, ending the album on a wandering psychedelic journey reminiscent of Grizzly Bear. A nice trip indeed.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Highway Companion
    Think of it as rock-and-roll comfort food.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Cobra Juicy
    In sacrificing weirdness for conformity, Cobra Juicy shows growth, but somewhat mugs the band of what made them so singular.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    True Love Cast Out All Evil
    Thanks to Okkervil's chiming, handsome folk rock--and also to Erickson's improbably buoyant spirit--the music doesn't sound defeated or even especially vulnerable. True Love makes good on its title.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Noctourniquet
    In a sense, the veil is lifted ever-so-slightly with this new [album]: although they still wump you with weird on sonic gauntlets like "Molochwalker" and the title track, they also hit on some great choruses and comprehensible songcraft that, unlike most of their earlier work, is commendable for something other than the effort it took to create it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
    For the most part an exercise in Prince-like electro-funk, full of squelchy keyboard fuzz and chicken-scratch guitar noise and absurdly complicated falsetto harmonies.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    None Shall Pass
    Aesop's preference for boring "live" beats tends to hit somewhere between the Roots ('Getaway Car') and Linkin Park ('None Shall Pass'), but that hardly matters: it's his delivery that commands the attention here.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Gloss Drop
    Gloss Drop is another infectious, drug-induced carousel ride in which electric guitars sound like short-circuiting circus organs and drums punch through the mix like atom bombs--but there's a distinctly multi-cultural vibe here.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Fast Man Raider Man
    It’s Frank Black on his first real roll as a solo artist.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Plastic Beach
    With synth tones straight outta Miami Vice and dreamy melodies that cut through the fog-machine haze, Plastic Beach is music for piloting your speedboat beyond the no-wake zone, or for looking back from the future with a sentimental affinity for the past.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Under The Skin
    Under the Skin’s tenderly whispered ruminations... are gripping little creations, full of weird acoustic-guitar riffs and uncomfortably intimate vocals and open revelations about the anxiety he feels in trying to reassert his creative identity at this late date.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Like, Love, Lust & The Open Halls Of The Soul
    Their third album sticks to the Neil-Young-meets-Gram-Parsons folk rock of their first two but finds Sykes and [Phil] Wandscher experimenting with rockier blues and psychedelia.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Provincial
    His inaugural gathering of bona-fide solo work summons an aura of full-blown tranquility.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hundreds Of Lions
    Hundreds of Lions marks her return to original material, but it’s clear that the time she spent doing songs by yesterday’s greats inspired her: this is her smartest, slyest set yet, with shapelier melodies, wittier wordplay, and more-adventurous arrangements.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Boys And Girls In America
    As frontman Craig Finn tries singing instead of just reciting and the band hang tighter around their major-chord riffs, the music sounds older than ever, recalling beautiful-loser ’70s rock like Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland.”
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ash Wednesday
    If you’re not in the mood for it, Perkins’s uncut melancholy can be a lot to swallow. Still, this is one of the prettiest bummers around.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Personality
    Although there's still a menacing pulse to be found, anything constituting traditional dubstep is largely forgone.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Zig Zaj
    The 10-minute penultimate track "Tumtum," in particular, is a tiny masterpiece of mood, stamina, and insistent rhythm, built sparingly on overlapping percussion and waves of sound. More of this kind of thing is what will squeak Boom Bip farther from the then and the now, and closer to what comes afterward.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Fountain
    The Fountain reveals that the magic of yore is still there.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    VI
    These tunes shred as po’-facedly as any the Champs have recorded.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Garden Window
    This barrage of relentless noise and pummeling rhythms, when coupled with Garden Window's amorphous arrangements, can make the album claustrophobic, monotonous, and overwhelming. But the record's redeemed by its range.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Clinging To A Scheme
    If Clinging is at all a departure from the Radio Dept.’s previous pleasantries, it’s along the two most valuable vectors: outward and upward. Although their sound has always seemed certain, it’s never been this clear.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Normal Happiness
    Normal Happiness... could be one of his most satisfying sets.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Happy Hollow
    In the end it’s the guitars, which alternate from restrained, melodic jangles to serrated feedback screams, and the general sense that Happy Hollow chronicles life during wartime that hold these 14 tune together, hymns or otherwise.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Light At The End Of The World
    Erasure remain A-level, mid-tempo melody makers, crafters of classic romantic pop songs with electronica serving as the template.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Everybody
    You pretty much know what to expect from a new Sea and Cake disc: breezy lounge-pop tunes embroidered with sleek keyboard blips and gentle drum-machine pitter-patter.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Mission Control
    The 11 songs here clock in at a tidy 37 minutes--plenty of time to flavor the straight-ahead rock jolts with spaced-out country-rock ballads and pop-flavored rave-up replete with a horn section.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Volume 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails
    The smart, funny, fanclub chants herein, each as catchy as Willie Mays in the ’54 Fall Classic, are gemlike tributes to the characters who’ve made that diamond shine, from Satchel Paige to Fernando Valenzuela.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    New Maps of Hell
    'New Dark Ages,' with its layered background harmonies, wall-of-sound instrumentation, and quietly propulsive drumming, is a 27-year career in a nutshell.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pedestrian Verse
    The Scottish outfit have delivered again with jangly pop full of skittering guitars, self-flagellating lyricism, and whimsy under a pall of darkness that no amount of the big spotlight can dispel.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    One Second of Love
    One Second of Love is artfully crafted.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    I Will Be
    Mostly, though, I Will Be is a flawlessly light album that floats to the top of a lo-fi pond overcrowded with sinking debris.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Last Days Of Wonder
    If the lyrics weren’t so surreal, you could imagine yourself dining with George and Tammy before a Grand Ole Opry performance.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Apparitions
    Apparitions is a solid debut that both emulates the band's contemporaries and revisits a once influential genre that most of that peer group have all but abandoned.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Orchard
    The Orchard cracks open a window to dreamy possibilities.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hush
    Hush quells qualms with the relaxed assurance every third album should carry.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Mine Is Yours
    On Mine Is Yours, everything is bigger. King's reverb-tinged production puts the focus on the band's surprisingly tender melodies and slow-burn rock arrangements; the result is 11 melodic, economical tracks that deliver huge hooks without sacrificing instrumental dexterity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Broken Hymns, Limbs, And Skin
    When it comes to production values, Broken Hymns is a marked improvement from 2005’s self-financed "Head Home." Still, songs kinda meant to evoke the 1930s aren’t necessarily better or worse off with snazzier studio treatment.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Waiting For The Sunrise
    Perhaps in the winter this will all seem a lot less charming, but right now, it’s a nice soundtrack for a drive out to the coast or for porch sitting late in the evening.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    No Kings
    The songs justify further replay and analysis just because the group knows how to deliver consistently smart, compelling imagery.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sweet Warrior
    Sweet Warrior finds him spinning epic yarns instead of heroic solos.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    There Is Love In You
    This new release is a work of subtle majesty, sidestepping whatever you might think of as "folktronica" while still keeping everything from running into the red.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Two Dancers
    Two Dancers is expressive without being effusive, polished without sounding stilted, and provocatively playful.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Marry Me
    This disc is both violent and romantic, offering warm singer-songwriter torch songs and jagged avant-noise frays with large-hearted choral flourishes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ouliposaliva
    What makes this inspirational lyrical gimmick work is the quality of the songs and the sure-footedness of Mottet's approach to sound, a not-so-distant European relative of the Elephant 6 palette.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Researching the Blues
    Embracing those basics of simplistic pop, the kind that doesn't need to be over thought, works nearly all of the time, and though a little bit of depth to the proceedings would have been nice here and there, a robust hook will do just as well.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ancestral Star
    It's an atmosphere-setting collection, with little in the way of memorable riffs or melodies. But that's the point: Earth has needed to slow its roll for a minute now. Here's the inspiration.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Farm
    Mascis's unique talents have ossified into a signature, so discerning any difference between this set of tunes and, say, his solo albums of the early oughts or latter-day Dinosaur Jr. albums is tough work. If, to you, that means more awesome Mascis crunchwork, then be psyched, because this record slays, the rocking is sloppy-yet-tight, and nothing on here would sound like a drag if tossed into a setlist amongst older classics.
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