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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    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Liz Phair
    Where she used to be smart and provocative, Phair has become crass and bloated, her lyrics crude and her image apparently a grotesque exercise in self-parody.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    California Son
    He wheezes through Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s Lady Willpower like an exhumed Tom Jones, and hearing him preening on Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow--given an arduously heavy makeover by his band--feels like a violation of Joni Mitchell’s mythically light original.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Earth To The Dandy Warhols
    To the rest of the western world, they are the arrogant stars of rock documentaries and Vodafone adverts, and their achingly dull eighth album does little to alter that assessment.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    United Nations of Sound
    Too much of United Nations of Sound feels like a vanity project gone horribly awry.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Kylie Christmas
    Even listened to while off your knockers on sherry, Kylie Christmas is a confusing package: the first three songs are orchestral, big-band numbers delivered with all the joie de vivre of a Sainsbury’s advert. Then it gives up entirely on that genre, and fires off random collaboration ideas that border on Monkey Tennis territory.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Some Kind of Trouble
    Shallow, soulless and strangely cynical, Some Kind of Trouble is a thoroughly depressing listen.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Better Than Heavy
    Lazy attempts at grime and rapcore are consigned to the doghouse courtesy of some well-meant but terrible political raps.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Good Morning Revival
    A fourth album of stunning fatuousness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Blood Mountain
    Syrupy, multi-tracked vocals akin to Supertramp in a particularly foul mood have replaced the primal roar of old, while their tectonic hugeness has been supplanted by the wearisome over-indulgence of musos at play.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Feels Like Home
    Feels Like Home is so inoffensive you have trouble remembering whether you put it on.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    MEMORIES DON'T DIE
    Astonishingly hackneyed, aggressively chameleonic LP.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    LP1
    LP1 is a terrible pop album, but very effective contraception.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Boy With No Name
    There are plenty more wishy-washy guitar tunes present like the drippy, tambourine laced Battleships, the wheezing Out in Space and the sub-danger of Eyes Wide Open; all riddled with Fran Healy's girlish croon. Spare us.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Spine
    Every now and again they hit on a promising musical idea, then ruin it.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Sorry for Party Rocking
    Stretched out over an hour, their solitary idea wears unbearably thin: pretty quickly, your reaction is less LMFAO than WTF? and, ultimately, FFS.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Take Care
    Former child actor Aubrey Graham's much-vaunted sensitivity and introspection is more hollow than ever on his second album.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Long Road Out Of Eden
    Disc one sounds like the band's Desperado years left out in the rain--damp, shrunken and fetid, with songs such as Guilty of the Crime and Fast Company giving out as much spark as a dying novelty lighter.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Dumb Blood
    For every Lemonade you’re likely to get 10 sixth-form common-room jam bands wailing about “TONY B-LIAR”. Dumb Blood, the debut album from London outfit Vant, unquestionably falls into the latter camp.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Latest Record Project, Vol. 1
    Tinfoil millinery is interspersed with a variety of more predictable and even more enervating rants.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Tigers Have Spoken
    It never sounds like much more than a bar band playing songs for friends.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Fly Rasta
    The only risk Marley takes is on You're My Yoko, where he attempts to woo a lucky lady by likening her to the avant-garde artist, while casting himself as John Lennon. Julian Lennon would have been nearer the mark.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Secret Wars
    Secret Wars is a sobering demonstration of what repetition can do in the wrong hands, as the Brooklyn trio funnel the most endurance-testing excesses of Suicide, Can, Sonic Youth and stoner rock into a joyless, oppressive piece of work.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    First Kiss
    I don’t know if those [other Kid rock] records feature as many torturous lyrical cliches as this one (whisky, Jesus, Johnny Cash and beers with the old man all feature, and that’s just the track titles), or are sung with such constipated insincerity.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Massacre
    With nothing musically fresh, attention is focused on [50] himself. Bad idea.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    That Lucky Old Sun
    Every single note feels forced, in hock to a sound and a set of attitudes that date from a time before many of us were born.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Generation
    Generation betrays Audio Bullys' aspirations to say Something Important, undeterred by the absence of either insight or eloquence.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Tourist
    If it's possible to imagine a gutted Coldplay or an even more comatose Snow Patrol, Athlete is it.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Emergency
    As Emergency proves, what they do is entirely generic, but it's hard to argue with its melodic efficacy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    I Created Disco
    I Created Disco is witless and forever tripping over its own feet.
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