The Guardian's Scores

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For 5,507 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 49% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 All Born Screaming
Lowest review score: 10 Unpredictable
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,966 out of 5507
  2. Mixed: 2,464 out of 5507
  3. Negative: 77 out of 5507
5507 music reviews
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fin
    Talabot has a knack for capturing the very specific kind of bliss associated with dancing on Mediterranean beaches at the height of summer.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light, Vol. 2
    This is easily the equal of, if not superior to, its illustrious companion.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Break It Yourself
    It's the perfect album: tender without being sentimental, experimental yet accessible, utterly unique to its maker.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Locked Down
    No one makes music like this: the Night Tripper rampages inimitably through swamp blues, voodoo funk and Afrobeat, with his trademark piano.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blunderbuss
    Blunderbuss is White at his most strange, contradictory and unfathomable, and therefore at his best.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Standing at the Sky's Edge
    Despite the guitars crashing and howling around him, and the presence of a rather West End-sounding chorus of backing vocalists, he sounds exactly like Richard Hawley. The same, but different: a tough trick, pulled off in style.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Live in Detroit 1986
    This was Fela on classic form.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    L'Enfant Sauvage
    This is metal taken to a higher plane of brilliance.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    MTMTMK
    As with Graceland, it's not scared to be too pop... plus the lyrics are of a sounder political hue than anything Simon essayed.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Channel Orange
    For now, the best tribute you can pay Channel Orange is that, while it plays, you forget about the chatter and just luxuriate in a wildly original talent.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Big Inner
    For all the 40-year-old reference points, Big Inner never feels like a pastiche; it's audibly more than the sum of its influences, in the same manner as Lambchop's Nixon.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    World Music
    Beautifully realised, immaculately recorded, and one of the year's loveliest vinyl artefacts to boot.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lonerism
    It feels digital, alien, the sound of modern machines going wrong. All this is underpinned by genuinely great songwriting
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
    The Godspeed ethos of wordlessly eliciting universal truths is remains as devastatingly effective as ever.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Lines: 2012 Mix/Master
    Now, 21 years on, beautifully remastered, Blue Lines still sounds unique.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Desertshore/The Final Report
    Desertshore/The Final Report ends up a perfect epitaph, not merely for Peter Christopherson, but for the band whose name isn't on the cover.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Light Up Gold
    Parquet Courts have produced a debut that's both instantly addictive and lastingly rewarding: a smart, snappy concoction of worldly wisdom and garage-rock gratification.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Goldenheart
    Goldenheart is dazzling and imperious.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Waiting for Something to Happen
    What an unexpected and wonderful treat this album is.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    M B V
    The songs on m b v, however, are more melodically complex, intriguing and often pleasing than anything he has written before.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Without a Net
    Without a Net is free to bursting point, but it's a triumph.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Raven That Refused to Sing and Other Stories
    This album shows Wilson to be one of modern rock's most cunning and soulful protagonists.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pale Green Ghosts
    A genuinely remarkable album: self-obsessed but completely compelling, profoundly discomforting but beautiful, lost in its own fathomless personal misery, but warm, funny and wise. It shouldn't work, but it does.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tales From Terra Firma
    Stornoway make unconvincing space rockers--but that's the only caveat about a triumphantly expansive album.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Beautiful Africa
    It succeeds because of the sheer quality of her singing and the thoughtful, varied songs from the light and then furious Kouma to Mélancholie, a highly personal reflection on sadness and solitude.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Trouble Will Find Me
    It's the subtlety, and the self-awareness, that make this album exquisite.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Graceless Age
    I don't expect to hear a better album this year.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Run the Jewels
    Run the Jewels is remarkably fun.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Doris
    This is knockabout punchline rap made into high art, a psychedelic visionquest to the taqueria on a skateboard.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    American Radical Patriot [Box Set]
    He wanted change but loved America, as shown by this remarkable box set of material recorded for the US government.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Marshall Mathers LP 2
    The jokes, in places offensive, are relentless and ribald. There is no apology, though, no concession; just a considered, virtuoso application of talent.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Satanist
    The Satanist is as untamed and direct as its title suggests: a flawless paean to free will and the human spirit.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    St. Vincent
    St Vincent's 40 minutes offer an embarrassment of fantastic songs.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Places of Worship
    This new album contains 10 sublime reflections on religious sites and buildings.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    In Each and Every One
    Rochford's creative mix makes the album seem like an integrated, large-scale work, and the overall effect is eerily beautiful.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hot Dreams
    Saxophones are smokin' and guitars twang, making Hot Dreams sound like the soundtrack to a western directed by David Lynch.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    American Interior
    Its songs are not weighed down by the Evans concept, and are hugely enjoyable on their own merits.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Distant Satellites
    A darker and more eccentric record than its predecessors, Distant Satellites may not be the album to change all that, but it's still another masterclass in supercharged emotional songwriting and fearless sonic curiosity.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Typical System
    Postpunk, hardcore, krautrock and odd, spacey lounge-jazz are all sucked up and bent brilliantly out of shape over the course of an album that's abrasive but accessible, awkward but assured. Properly special stuff.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Trouble in Paradise
    In truth, the songwriting quality never really dips. Almost sickeningly overburdened with fantastic tunes, Trouble in Paradise may well be not just a triumph against the odds, but the best pop album we'll hear this year.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Soul Mining (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) [Box Set]
    A patchwork of catholic musical influences stitched tightly together by one man's peculiar, expansive vision of pop: Soul Mining is a brilliant and very idiosyncratic album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pale Communion
    This is an admirably coherent collection of songs that are as uncompromisingly intricate and strange as they are incisively melodic.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Everything Changes
    Everything Changes and the agonised We Watch You Slip Away (written with Kate St John) are among the finest new songs I have heard his year.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mean Love
    Each track, often on the theme of soured love, has a simplicity and a directness that is characteristic of the best pop.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller
    Some Waller devotees will recoil, but this is a respectful tribute from a remarkable modern-music mind.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Our Love
    This is rich, strange, endlessly fascinating music: a subtle, beautiful triumph.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    You're Dead!
    As each song merges into the next, as one style succeeds another, the sensation is that of being in a dream.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rips
    Here are 12 succinct, speedy, riff-happy gems smothered in snarling backtalk and shameless, glorious guitar solos.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Soused
    Soused is surprisingly melodic, Sunn O))) provide a menacing but rich backdrop to Walker’s distinctive baritone.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ultimate Painting
    Every arrangement is perfect for the melody, and every melody sticks: the cardboard-box drum machine, walking bassline, cheap keyboard and simple guitar arpeggio of Riverside would be nothing individually; together they’re perfect.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Start Together [Box Set]
    As Start Together proves, that was never a question anyone would need to ask Sleater-Kinney [“Where’s the ‘fuck you’?”].
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11
    In spring 1967, Dylan and the Band were out of step, but ahead of the curve. Now, 47 years on, even the listener overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of what’s on offer here--who doesn’t want to hear the false starts and fragments and gags--might conclude that the highlights are as timeless as rock music in the 60s got.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lost on the River
    Lost on the River recalls the spontaneity and sheer love of music-making of the original, but it’s not hamstrung by reverence or caution.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nothing Important
    More than most noise albums, or deliberately confrontational music, this is a record that unsettles and subverts.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Velvet Underground [45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition]
    It’s revelatory to hear this most intense of bands playing with such ease and fluency, and utterly compelling.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bloodstone & Diamonds
    Striking an exquisite balance between brute force, insistent melody and bold experimentation, this is the finest mainstream metal album of 2014 by a huge margin.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Man It Feels Like Space Again
    Indulgent and trippy and sometimes off-kilter--but a whole heap of fun.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Natalie Prass
    The touchstones here, such as Dusty in Memphis, are all records that revel in a particular kind of musicality, yet this is a record that never feels retro, just timeless.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Apex Predator - Easy Meat
    Untrained ears might shrivel in terror, but those who appreciate the joy of noise will recognise the sound of veteran masters on unassailable form.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shadows in the Night
    Shadows in the Night works as an unalloyed pleasure, rather than a research project. It may be the most straightforwardly enjoyable album Dylan’s made since Time Out of Mind.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    I Love You, Honeybear
    For all the layers of irony on I Love You, Honeybear, the biggest irony of all might be that such an ostensibly knotty and confusing album’s real strength lies in something as prosaic and transparent as its author’s ability to write a beautiful melody.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ten Love Songs
    It’s both appealingly direct yet perfectly thought-through.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Physical Graffiti [Remastered]
    It’s an album that actually deserves a monolith of a box, and one whose title was supremely well chosen. Physical Graffiti is the sound of a group writing their identity, in huge block capitals of sound, across popular culture.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hand.Cannot.Erase.
    This is a smart, soulful and immersive work of art.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Duke of Burgundy OST
    Orchestral textures, such as the eerie woodwind motifs of Moth and austere strings of Lamplight, conjure the darkly sexual charge of the film.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit
    Gentle, subtle, poignant, Barnett is almost crooning as she talks disappointment and expectation, and she has a photographer’s eye for detail when it comes to the otherwise mundane.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Fade in Time
    The most emotional songs are bravely straightforward but quite unexpected.... Surely one of the albums of the year.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Carrie & Lowell
    Carrie & Lowell is a delight in every way, surely one of the albums of the year.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Smithsonian Folkways Collection [Box Set]
    It’s remarkable for its power, freshness and range.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dream a Garden
    It’s strange and disorientating, idiosyncratic and frequently astonishing, a modern-day psychedelia that owes almost nothing to that genre’s hackneyed conventions and never forgets to temper the sublimity with darkness.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Same As You
    It’s another uncategorisable and understated triumph.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Culture of Volume
    More impressive still is how good at marshalling his ideas Doyle seems to be--for all that you’re never quite certain what Culture of Volume is going to do next, it never sounds ragged or incoherent.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    White Men Are Black Men Too
    They manage the rare feat of melding pop and politics into a potent mix, and continue a tradition--begun by the likes of Smith & Mighty, Tricky and Massive Attack--of reinterpreting pop, hip-hop and soul through the filter of black British life.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bonxie
    It amounts to Stornoway’s best work yet: big music, which deserves the largest stage.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Constant Bop
    It’s a great album to listen to on headphones--the level of detail and the clarity of the aesthetic choices really become apparent.... It’s bliss.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Saturn's Pattern
    Weller’s renaissance has not come at the expense of his musical identity. The sunshine-pop haze of Phoenix is from the Tame Impala playbook, but you could imagine Style Council-era Weller singing it.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    From Kinshasa
    As with a lot of From Kinshasa, listening to it feels like arriving in a bustling, unfamiliar city, a very long way from home: a gripping mix of excitement, apprehension and sensory overload.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Monsanto Years
    Young is still a force to be reckoned with. There is urgency and energy here.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Currents
    Like all great psychedelic music, it perfectly evokes a deeply weird altered state, albeit that of a head wrecked by grief rather than lysergic acid diethylamide.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Coma Ecliptic
    From the rock opera crescendos of the opening Node onwards, the album dares to be both a quintessentially prog-rock experience and a timely act of modern metal derring-do. Frontman Tommy Rogers’ effortless versatility has at last found songs worthy of his gifts.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Instrumentals 2015
    Instrumentals 2015 is Flying Saucer Attack’s first album in 15 years, and it can only enhance their mystique.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    High
    It’s what an Australian rock record, at least one made by four men, should sound like in 2015.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Have You in My Wilderness
    The result is a genuinely exceptional and entrancing album, opaque but effective, filled with beautiful, skewed songs, unconventional without ever feeling precious or affected.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Elaenia
    Elaenia flits, swoops and soars beautifully, impossible to pin down, let alone cage.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Joy of Living: A Tribute to Ewan Maccoll
    On this remarkable double album, 21 artists rework his songs, ranging from poignant studies of working lives to political comment and love ballads.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Complete Matrix Tapes [Box Set]
    It’s fascinating stuff, even for those for whom a 37-minute version of Sister Ray is pushing it a bit. It’s actually where the band stretch out that it becomes most fascinating.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rivers and Streams
    Melnyk’s titles are often fitting: Parasol sounds like sunshades spinning in the daylight, and Ripples in a Water Scene like ripples in a water scene; the crushingly sombre The Pool of Memories might well induce a pool of tears.... Melnyk’s truly defining quality is surely the constant tingle that his music leaves in your heart.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Delusion Moon
    One of 2015’s most addictive, pulse-racing noisy joys.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Neighbourhood
    It is difficult to find fault with Blue Neighbourhood--it does what it does so well.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dystopia
    Dystopia is an absolutely blistering return to the state-of-the-art bombast and refined technicality of past glories like Rust in Peace and Endgame.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Christine and the Queens
    You never find yourself in the presence of music that sounds self-consciously clever. Everything flows easily, nothing jars.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Up to Anything
    It is a deceptively difficult trick, to capture the humanity and irregularities of music in a way that does not feel cloying, but over 12 tracks on their debut album Brisbane’s the Goon Sax manage it again, and again, and again. This is some kind of wonderful.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hopelessness
    When Anohni sings about mass graves and drone strikes, it doesn’t feel like a lecture. It can be strangely empowering. For all its bleakness, Hopelessness leaves you feeling anything but.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Culcha Vulcha
    Jazzers might still balk at the high-concept planning, but it’s remarkable how much polish has been applied without cramping the band’s irrepressible creative energy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Stranger to Stranger
    Simon’s lyrics are finely honed, from the conversational The Werewolf to the confessional title track, a moving exploration of his creative process.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Patience
    You listen to it and wonder how anyone arrived at the idea that this song should suddenly do that, struck by the delightfully confounding sound of pop music made by genuinely original minds.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Magma
    Magma is the kind of album that metalheads would love non-believers to check out, if only because it confounds all the usual stereotypes about the genre being unimaginative and dumb.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Guidance
    Doom has never sounded so good.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blonde
    Realign your expectations, and what gradually emerges is a record of enigmatic beauty, intoxicating depth and intense emotion.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Skeleton Tree
    The same voice sings the final lines of an album that is no less brilliant, but perhaps less straightforward, than initial reactions suggested: not so much an exploration of grief as an example of how grief overwhelms or seeps into everything--a subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.
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