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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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Aw C'Mon
    An enticing dip into melancholy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Argument
    His fifth solo album finds his talents and ambition undimmed.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain
    Raymond’s similarly fearsome precision often feels both portentous and perfect.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Trials Of Van Occupanther
    This could well end up one of 2006's best.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Insecure Men
    It adds up to an album that feels like far more than just a repository for the tunes and musical influences verboten under Fat White Family’s artistic agenda: a slice of darkly skewed pop that’s weightier and much better than the side-project label suggests.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cross Culture
    This music's structural latticework is often on display, but the playing mostly floats blissfully free of it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After Laughter
    The grooves they always possessed are brought to the forefront on this peppy, vibrant record, a contrast to its lyrical themes, which cover masking misery (“I’m going to draw my lipstick wider than my mouth”), spiralling depression and the anxiety of ageing, only with a knowing wink.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Metamorphosen
    If Marsalis is sticking with familiar tunes, his band keep up such a stimulating four-way conversation that it all stays fresh.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wall Of Arms
    With this record the Maccabees join the Horrors and Jack Peñate as supposedly "landfill indie" acts who've come back fighting with far superior second efforts.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Truelove's Gutter
    Ghostly cries from the musical saw and ondes Martenot bring an element of eeriness and adventure--yet it's hard to escape a niggling feeling that Hawley is here polishing a formula, even falling back on cliche, in his continuing quest to make the local and homely sound lushly romantic.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big Fish Theory
    It makes for a challenging, dystopian listen, the blade runner to everyone else’s replicant.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Departing
    These are simple, almost campfire songs, drummer Paul Banwatt occasionally catching your attention with a stuttering rhythm, the focus on Edenloff's plaintive voice and his exorcism of the past.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tigers Blood
    On Tigers Blood, she returns clear-eyed and spirited with a twisting country album of anthemic earworms that evoke long summer evenings, intimate chats and misty-eyed regret.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Confessions On A Dance Floor
    It may be a return to core values, but there's still a bravery about Confessions on a Dancefloor. It revels in the delights of wilfully plastic dance pop in an era when lesser dance-pop artists - from Rachel Stevens to Price's protege Juliet - are having a desperately thin time of it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Sound of Music
    Gloriously silly it may be, but this album is as bright as that favourite copper kettle.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Someone To Drive You Home
    An unexpected delight.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sundial
    You sense some listeners will find Sundial too ethically complex and contrary. Hopefully many more will flock to Noname, who brings piercing intellect and joie de vivre to tough questions. A librarian, yes, but also a moon stalker.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Versions of Modern Performance
    It’s very difficult to read anything even vaguely meaningful into lines like “while Emma eggs her head she looks the same” (World of Pots and Pans). It’s the only element of this album that serves as a reminder of its creators’ inexperience – the rest is a masterclass in a new kind of classic rock.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Patient Number 9
    The songs are tightly written even when their structure tends to the episodic or their tempos shift gear. They’re also finely balanced, the choruses big and bold enough to attract attention but not overshadow the main attraction’s essential essence. Osbourne’s bleakly desperate wail is front and centre, his lyrical preoccupations intact.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trouble the Water
    Shivering with tension, Trouble the Water is an exciting and urgent call to come together and kick off – at once a reflection of, and a cathartic release from, volatile times.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Distant Relatives
    It's thoughtful, sincere, weighty stuff, tackling subjects from African poverty to the diamond trade without sounding preachy or schmaltzy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kveikur
    There's an edge of menace that wasn't there before, and the dirt beneath their fingernails seems to suit them.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Endless
    A rich, varied and – at times – challenging musical feast.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    World Peace Is None of Your Business
    Not as great as you might have hoped, but far better than you might have feared.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anaïs Mitchell
    It’s the work of an artist who has succeeded on a big stage now working in miniature, sweating the small stuff with utterly charming results.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lustre
    The Sussex brooder's first studio album in four years is reflective and occasionally darkish, but he's apparently too entranced by fatherhood to be properly morose nowadays.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    color theory
    Fabulous stuff: Soccer Mommy could go anywhere from here.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Echoes of Silence
    The dragging beats, washes of synthesiser and eclectic musical references – chillwave and crunk hip-hop, Aaliyah and France Gall – somehow contrive to sound not just eerie and desolate but cosseting as well, inexorably drawing the listener into a deeply troubling world.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Riceboy Sleeps
    It all combines to make a delicate, sad, little record, but one that ripples with beauty.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vibras
    Brillo, a sensual track where the delicate and versatile vocals of Spanish flamenco singer Rosalía shine over a minimal background. Tracks such as this still make Vibras perfect as a party playlist, but confirm that the noisy style of early reggaeton hits such as Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina is slowly being left behind.
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