The Guardian's Scores

For 5,494 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 The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow
Lowest review score: 10 Unpredictable
Score distribution:
5494 music reviews
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Booka Shade's fixation with lighting up the brain's pleasure circuits is even more shameless than in the past, but from the transcendent riff of Control Me to the hand-claps and whirling synths that propel Charlotte, it is still irresistible.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    7
    As with adding different herbs and spices to a favourite recipe to keep it interesting, Beach House add details that make the songs transcend formula.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fantasies deserves the success "Live It Out" failed to achieve.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Only on Just Like St Teresa does the spectre of dad pop up, and on 99 Simon pulls out the kind of effortless, breezy powerpop moments that Evan Dando used to essay at will.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A relatively understated delight from a band few might have suspected capable of understatement.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anger is still their foremost energy, but there is a much richer seam of humour than they like to let on.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There’s a naturalness and a flow in evidence, and charm, too. You can’t imagine anyone who rushed to the download sites was disappointed with what they found.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It’s a brief set--just over 39 minutes--but humming with diverse musicality.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    That Helm had less than a year to live obviously lends his performance poignancy, but as epitaphs go, Carry Me Home isn’t really one suffused with what-might-have-been melancholy: it’s too exuberant, too vibrant for that. It sounds more like a man going out in a blaze of glory.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paul Alexander's detailed bass and McKenzie Smith's pattering drums bring definition and muscularity: The Old and the Young and the title track are bolder for it.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There’s certainly nothing new about their sound and fury and throbbing basslines--they fit comfortably into a lineage stretching from the Cure and the Chameleons to the Killers and White Lies--but they have timeless, high-quality songs. The new ones are more direct and--potentially impacted by the death of their close friend, Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison--more impassioned.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's different enough to feel like a companion piece rather than a knock-off: less laboured over, more the sound of a rock band kicking back, and less alienated.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An album that transformed Lizzo from an alternative hip-hop curio to a recognised star. But whatever the pains staked in its making, Special pulls its task off with style.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is a vividly youthful album, packed with acid-sharp lyrics and neon-bold choruses, playful vocal harmonies and strikingly confident pop sounds.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The lyrics do, very occasionally, feel a bit phoned in--does a holy revelation really have to be such a sweet sensation?--but that’s a minor quibble about an album this purposeful and tense.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lyrically, Polite rarely strays far from a seducer's template, but the way in which he sells the cliche is compelling.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stuart Staples' shivering baritone is as haunting as ever on Tindersticks' ninth album.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These are magical songs, brimming with understated but powerful hooks and the joys of loss lifted and intimacy shared.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brilliantly, some songs have the effect of Trentemøller’s electro-rockabilly with Ditto as Tarantino heroine, while elsewhere Stevie Nicks dominates, especially on the title track, which coolly updates Mac with a Balearic house beat.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dulli wears these songs like a favourite jacket, and they gradually increase in tension and widescreen melodrama.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A strange but compelling set.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eschewing the bells, whistles and sequinned kitchen sinks of their second album, One Way Ticket, in favour of an approach that shows off their credentials as a first-rate out-and-out rock band, Hot Cakes bulges with infectious melodies, blazing leads and strident riffing, Justin Hawkins' unmistakable falsetto adding pathos and silliness in equal measure.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Not every effect works (the gloom of I’m a Mother is too airless, the electronic pulse of Longpig too enervating), but on the whole, it’s hypnotic.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Between Rousay’s drones and disruptions, melodics and arguments, the album becomes a place for feeling in the present, untethered by time, as familiar as a memory and as placeless as a dream.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yes, I'm a Witch makes a startlingly effective case for Ono's songwriting skills.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fear Fun leaves his previous work in the dust.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like Total Life Forever, Holy Fire rather tails off in its second half.... Those complaints, though, are insignificant when set against the whole: an album by a British guitar band who want to win a huge audience without writing chantalongs for the drinkers' crowd, or lowest-emotional-common-denominator piano ballads.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The result is an album that strides confidently between garage rock (Lateral Alice), ambient (Integration Tape) and even prog (lead single Charm Assault). It’s all tidily done, and there’s barely a misstep.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clearly it requires something more than vocal talent and looks to escape the fate of the featured vocalist, and whatever it is, 21-year-old Kathleen Bryan appears to have it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It ends with Out of My Mind Just in Time, a 10-minute closer that starts as a fairly boring ballad but gradually unravels into the tripped-out weirdness on which New Amerykah Part One was founded. You could argue that's New Amerykah Part Two in a nutshell: as with Badu herself, all is gratifyingly not as it first appeared.