The Guardian's Scores

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For 5,511 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 Lives Outgrown
Lowest review score: 10 Unpredictable
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,970 out of 5511
  2. Mixed: 2,464 out of 5511
  3. Negative: 77 out of 5511
5511 music reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What Happened to the Beach?
    Dissociative, distinctive album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Peepers
    Rochford's mix of circus-oompah patterns, punchy funk with neatly-spliced jazzy offbeats and encyclopaedic world-rhythm references mean you could listen to this compelling set just for him.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    D
    It doesn't matter whether White Denim are playing glowing, Lee Hazlewood-style country or chugging, meaty metal: the sound is always unmistakably their own.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kicking The National Habit
    The first seven tracks are nearly flawless, and the occasional wobble thereafter doesn't mar one of the year's most scintillating debuts.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ode To Joy
    These are songs where the expressiveness of the lyrics and the baldness of the music – usually big, simple blocks, put together like Lego – work in tandem. The plainness of the instrumentation heightens the uncertainty and ambivalence in Tweedy’s writing.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pray for Rain
    Pure Bathing Culture’s sound is so consistent--melodic, but slightly gauzy and blurred around the edges--that one gets caught in the sonics, and the singing becomes just another texture in the recording. And it’s their strength with melodies that will keep listeners coming back.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eyes Open
    Snow Patrol are poised to eclipse Coldplay as pop's greatest anthem-makers.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big Conspiracy
    Big Conspiracy leaves you wanting to hear even more.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heavy Pendulum
    Heavy Pendulum is certainly the sound of a renewed band and is, like everything they’ve recorded since 2003’s Antenna (their ill-fated attempt at commercial crossover), an unapologetically fierce beast.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Something to Give Each Other
    This is one of the year’s best and most distinctive pop albums, and it’s to Sivan’s credit that even as the genre speeds up around him, he’s keeping pace while making sure to feel the breeze rush by.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Playing Favorites
    Even at its most melodious, Playing Favorites still sounds fierce and raw, an object lesson in altering your sound without losing your essence.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hairless Toys
    Hairless Toys is pure, evocative elegance, her performance as flamboyant and fragile as the subculture she celebrates.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    MiniDiscs [Hacked]
    It reveals the inner workings of what is regarded by many as the greatest album of the 1990s, showing how they walked alongside and then turned away from the brash Britpop that surrounded them. ... The MiniDiscs aren’t short of scrappy Yorke solo takes, but these are at the very least always interesting – and in some cases startlingly beautiful.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jellies
    There are unusual sonic touches--the way the deep harmonies in Pour It Out recall church singing; the combination of early 60s balladry and bleached psychedelia in ESTWD--that continually pique the interest.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sound the Alarm
    For every step back, however, there are two steps forward: most of the tracks find Jones collaborating with some hot young artist.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Warning
    [A] fantastic collection of nu-dance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seeds
    Even at their most euphoric, there’s a gentle melancholy in Tunde Adebimpe’s soulful vocals, while lyrics such as Trouble’s mantra of “Everything will be OK” suggest a band emerging from the darkness to throw open the curtains.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blood
    The detailing throughout is fabulous: the way Phoenix builds almost imperceptibly, introducing the slightest of funk guitar, then sotto stabs of horns; the way Feel Your Weight keeps shifting and building without ever losing direction.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Live at the South Bank
    This is crossover free-jazz of a rare power.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uneasy
    The title track (from Iyer’s part in Karole Armitage’s 2011 ballet UnEasy) turns quiet, low-end murmurs into Oh’s tranquil, unhurried bass solo and then fiery exchanges with the drums. The hip, distantly boppish Configurations develops some of the most exciting collective improv on a set rammed with it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hawk Is Howling
    The lyric-free songs are awe-inspiring, yet accessible.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    in•ter a•li•a
    In places the production lacks the spark that Ross Robinson brought to Relationship of Command, but nonetheless, Inter Alia is a blistering return to form.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Neon Limelight
    They’re blessed with two great singers in the Dylanesque Matt Meyers and the more classically country-styled Katie Toupin, and when the members’ four voices combine, they really sound like they are breaking loose from their moorings.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Delivery Man
    He sets tales of sexual double dealing and domestic violence to a sound somewhere between the two albums he made in 1986: the Americana of King Of America meeting the over-amplified rawness of Blood and Chocolate.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dancing Queen
    Dancing Queen is often surprisingly ingenious. Occasionally Cher uses her trademark Auto-Tune like a crutch--it’s a cop-out on One of Us--but mostly it acts as a kind of interstellar portal that elevates Abba from the dancefloor to the cosmos.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mon Pays
    He celebrates Malian music first with a traditional song, and then revives his father's Safare, which sets the mood for his own elegant desert blues.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Understanding
    Even more melodious, lush and seductive than... Melody AM.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pay The Devil
    He sounds enlivened, even happy, nestling among the steel guitar and bottomless suffering.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Small Town [Live]
    It all sounds as natural as talking or singing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction
    Overall, this is nothing less than the sound of an entire music genre shifting on its axis.
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