The Guardian's Scores

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For 5,504 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: 2,965 out of 5504
  2. Mixed: 2,462 out of 5504
  3. Negative: 77 out of 5504
5504 music reviews
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New Moon
    The albums Smith released before his probable suicide in 2003 had a bruised, fragile quality, and these sparse songs... are no different.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ekstasis
    The more time you spend with it, the more its structures make sense, the more the melodies begin to sparkle, the more the sense of some unsought truth fighting its way out becomes apparent.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chubbed Up +
    This isn’t music that seems as if it’s got much room for manoeuvre or development. For the moment, though, they seem genuinely vital in a way few other bands are.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Song for Alpha
    The old bodily pleasure is here, but it’s approached in altogether sterner, more serious ways.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Functional Arrhythmias
    While some of the ascetically curt melodies, edgily avant-funky grooves and impassively entwined counterpoint are familiar Coleman traits, the music is several degrees warmer: full of sparky ensemble writing, varied percussion sounds and vivacious grooves.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hippopotamus
    For anyone yet to experience the Maels’s unique charms, their best album in decades is as good as any place to start.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Audio, Video, Disco
    There are at least four top pop songs on this collection and while they may not sound like the future any more, this group have definitely moved forward.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Favourite Faded Fantasy
    He claims not to care whether his comeback is a commercial success, but one suspects it will be regardless. It deserves to be.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Truth to Tell
    Yet another thoughtful and classy album.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tamer Animals
    This is sublime, transportive music to spend hours with.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust
    An English-language debut, 'All Alright' proves as unintelligible as past forays into nonsensical Hopelandish, but 'Ara Batur,' featuring both the London Oratory Boys' Choir and the London Sinfonietta, is Sigur Rós' most satisfying epic yet--commercial, credible and glistening with glacial cool.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Wasteland Companion
    Ward's seventh album finds him mixing up the country-blues picking of the title track with a rockabilly-noir portrayal of the musician's life on Me and My Shadow.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Odd Blood
    Not so much a step-up, but a masterclass in modern, multicultural, weirdo pop music, Yeasayer's second album is both odd and bloody marvellous.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Power Punch
    Impressively original.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fight Softly
    With sounds plucked from here, there and everywhere, it's an ambitious collection, but singer Ryan McPhun's gentle voice lends this second album by the Kiwis a beautiful tone.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The King of Limbs
    Listening to it, you're reminded that Radiohead are the only band of their size and status that seem driven by an impulse to twist their music into different shapes.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Your Future Our Clutter
    This incarnation of the Fall is the most stable in 15 years, with good reason: it's a ferocious unit, propulsive, choppy and playful.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bring on the Sun
    Bring on the Sun is the more interesting release, one that sounds as if Laraaji has jumbled up 600 years of music from every part of the world--medieval plainsong, Javan gamelan, Hindustani classical music and so on--and arranged it into eight pieces of minimalism.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revelations
    The countertenor sings with an emotional, otherworldly raw power, whether he is conducting an imaginary conversation with an industry exec who dumped him (Games) or beautifully musing on coping with stress and pressure (Cloudy).
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Masculin Feminin [Box Set]
    Along with 19 extra tracks (including a KCRW session of crystalline poise), and their jazz sensibility means their songs can be loose to the point of slackness--but at every impetuous right turn, there’s another kick-ass riff, tom-tom flurry or singsong melody to tighten them back up again.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jazz Codes
    Her spoken words, songs and sighs give shape to this tempest of jazz, hip-hop and R&B, whirling together a who’s-who of Black classical.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mind of Mine
    That the sound he’s chosen--clipped beats, hazy production flourishes, oodles of falsetto as a shortcut for emotional honesty--is basically 2016 writ large may seem bandwagon-jumping, but there’s more than enough good stuff here to suggest it’s been created with love rather than with an eye on ticking boxes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Head Down
    The perfect soundtrack for the summer we never had.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reward
    Reward is appropriately titled. Give it time and it fully reveals itself, getting under your skin in the process.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Constant Pageant
    This is an album of strong songs and strong vocals; Lavinia Blackwall is soaring, operatic and bravely full-tilt.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Only Revolutions
    The melodies are instant, the hooks as hefty as Nikolay Valuev's--this is a big, obvious, step forward.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    a ghost is born
    This is a dramatic, ambitious album that dares you to rise to its challenge.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Scratch My Back
    He slows the songs' tempos and sets them to string arrangements that range from filmic and lush to something approaching the icy screech essayed by John Cale on Nico's Marble Index.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zeros
    If he’s capable of writing stuff like this at 21 – and indeed of taking on the influences of the past without just regurgitating them – McKenna’s future looks intriguing. For the time being, though, he’s making the tricky business of shape-shifting and growing up in public seem painless.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Stupid World
    It’s not perfect – the title track is seven and a half minutes you might better use boiling eggs – but it is its own small wonder, as every Yo La Tengo album seems to be.
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