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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    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anything In Return
    [Toro y Moi] now returns to the disco house party with his sharpest album to date.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Don't Lose This
    A gorgeously produced and emotive swansong.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chromatica
    In many ways, the ballad-free, dancefloor-primed Chromatica represents not only Gaga’s most personal record, but her most straightforward.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nocturnal Koreans
    Their 15th album hails from the same sessions as last year’s acclaimed Wire, but while that set was taut and direct, the eight songs here are more textured, full of counter-melodies and shifting sonic landscapes.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides
    Despite software advances, so many electronic producers are content to lapse into nostalgia or a safe, compromised emotional range; Sophie has crafted a genuinely original sound and uses it to visit extremes of terror, sadness and pleasure.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yuck
    The lyrics sound like the work of very young people striving for depth--Suck rhymes crucifixion, benediction, addiction and affliction in a kind of religion-and-drugs bingo--but given that they are very young, that can be forgiven.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle
    Elvin Jones’s elemental muscularity is thunderously upfront in the mix, and Tyner often sounds like the man heading for the exit that he soon turned out to be – but this is a unique document of a landmark 20th-century band at a pivotal moment.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Retribution
    Anyone who loves Jenny Hval’s blood-soaked ruminations or Maja Ratkje’s explosive tics will be transfixed.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Helping Hands
    The sedate craftsmanship of these tunes won't be for everybody, but they are songs to delve into like a good book.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Babes Never Die
    There’s more than enough here to keep them ahead of the pack.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Weird and Wonderful
    Best of all, though, is the dynamism of the music: although songs flit around from riff to riff, as if Marmozets were bursting to fill each song with ideas, they are never too full, never just exercises in technique.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Savage Young Dü [Box Set]
    This beautifully curated set covering their earliest years. ... It often feels like you’re listening to the birth of something more than a band: the contradictions at Hüsker Dü’s heart would fuel American alt-rock for years to come, from the Pixies to grunge to emo.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vows
    The intricate rhythms are the link between these disparate songs, all of which--scattergun or not--are absolutely beguiling.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything Is Borrowed
    Each listen reveals more light and shade, reaffirming Skinner's position as one of Britain's truly interesting stars.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Midwest Farmer's Daughter
    It’s an album for whom “authenticity” is crucial, but it’s all the better for it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hendra
    These songs have all the pretty chords and decorum you'd expect from Watt, best known as one half (with his wife, Tracey Thorn) of Everything But the Girl.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lacuna
    The pace is often just a little slower than you expect, or than feels natural, which allows those hooks room to breathe and creates the slightly stoned, beatific air that permeates Lacuna.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Are You Alone?
    The overall effect is of a bow-tied cabaret crooner singing to no one: awkwardly intense but, if you steal a glance, completely beguiling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Singles 1978-2016 [Box Set]
    There’s a dip in overall quality in the last decade or so, but 2010’s Bury! is among their best.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Someone Out There
    It is a supremely confident record.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do
    It's an album that demands something of the listener, but rewards it in spades.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    How to Socialise & Make Friends
    It’s impossible not to be drawn into the conversational style of the lyrics. McDonald’s singing, to quote Lester Bangs, is “a raw wail from the bottom of the guts”, a perfectly imperfect instrument for an unstable age. Bass player Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich and drummer Sarah Thompson provide a sturdy framework and, crucially, just enough colour to hold the songs aloft.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stainless Style
    Detours into hip-hop and rap slow down the fast-paced action, but Neon Neon have poured as much love and attention to detail in this prototype as their hero put into his.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Age of Adz
    You emerge from the other side of it glad not just that Stevens continued to make music, but that he chose to follow his muse to such a radical, potentially divisive place.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Divided & United: Songs of the Civil War
    It's a classy, mostly acoustic set, dominated by fiddle, guitar and banjo, but T Bone Burnett uses clarinet and piano for a bleak, adventurous reworking of The Battle of Antietam.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mutable Set
    There are fleeting, faraway echoes of John Martyn at his wooziest, but Mills has crafted something very personal and individual.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mr. M
    Wagner's conflicting emotions are reflected in his band's fluid, conversational playing: restless yet sedate, wistful yet furious, the sound is still on the surface but teeming beneath.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Golden Age
    There's enough wide-eyed magic and spellbinding pomp here to make the adventure worthwhile.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Babelsberg
    The further you get into the album, the more you realise how integral the orchestral arrangements are.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reality Killed The Video Star
    You might expect an album this musically surefooted to be triumphalist in tone, but Reality Killed the Video Star is more complicated and interesting than that.
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