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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    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Brave And The Bold
    There are enough moments of complex, nuanced, lingering beauty here to keep drawing you back.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lights
    There's no getting around the fact that Goulding's appeal is aimed squarely at the middle of the road.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    - (Subtract)
    Subtract is easily his best album. But it’s also the first Ed Sheeran album since his debut for which you can’t confidently predict eye-watering commercial success.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Make Another World
    Put simply, Idlewild have become a band of considerable accomplishment.... But that same proficiency proves curiously deadening.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Oh Inhuman Spectacle
    Much of the music here is less unearthly obscurity and more relatively straightforward indie, dressed up in a rainbow poncho.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Luna
    'Boats,' which sounds like the sun rising over Laurel Canyon after a heavy night, and the battered, beautiful 'Blue Mantle' make a moving finale to an otherwise frustrating record.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Replica Sun Machine
    It's not what you'd call a forward-looking record--these people have a more than passing familiarity with the early 70s work of David Bowie, and are in thrall to the folky psychedelia of a few years earlier than that--but it's expertly executed and swooningly gorgeous.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Evolution of Man
    All in all, it's not much fun, but to depart so dramatically from his previous sound is a brave move.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take the Crown
    The contributions of Williams and his latest songwriting partners, a couple of unknown Australians called Tim Metcalfe and Flynn Francis, are sometimes brilliant and never less than well crafted.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    5 Seconds of Summer
    Aimed squarely at the teenage market, it's shrill exuberance and lyrical mischief all round as songs leap and sometimes creak under the weight of their double entendres.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Made In Sheffield
    Hawley's own sentimental nostalgia is perfectly tailored to Christie's velveteen croon - perhaps too perfectly, because the deep-pile strings and lapsteel reduce too many songs to high-class mood music.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    KEYS
    Unlocked is definitely a better album than Originals, but not an amazing album in its own right. Undeniable, sucker-punch songs are still notable by their absence.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cosmic Egg
    Cosmic Egg is the sound of a serious lack of invention.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Duckworth Lewis Method
    It's a record of beautifully constructed songs--pastiches, yes, but so perfectly rendered as to be melt-in-your-mouth lovely.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Word of Mouth
    His multi-instrumental work is impressive, but his voice still often sounds too urgent.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Planet Earth
    It's all right--in the dispiriting way that everything he's put out since his "Symbol" era has been all right.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Four
    It’s hardly groundbreaking pop, but Four is capably sung and beautifully produced.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    X
    X is business as usual for a Kylie Minogue album: a handful of great tracks surrounded by stuff that's so obviously filler you could inject it into cavity walls and save up to 33% on your energy bills.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Expectations
    It’s baffling trying to work out why her vocals are often lagged in Auto-Tune: she sounds like she’s drowning on Self Control and malfunctioning on the horrid Mine. The songwriting--about bad girls and good boys in miserable, moneyed relationships--is precisely as deep as you’d expect.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Different Gear, Still Speeding
    The best bits of Different Gear Still Speeding sound least like the band Beady Eye used to be: the breezily melodic Millionaire is fantastic, the episodic Wigwam more ambitious than you might expect.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crush Songs
    Several of the songs aren't much more than sketches: a thought, a chord sequence, a fade out. But, as on Moon Song, Karen O displays an ability to articulate raw emotion here, be it on the subject of love, loneliness or strength of will.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Greedy Baby
    The interplay of sound and vision is abstract though often absorbing.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blueprint 3
    Just as The Blueprint 3 seems to have pulled it off, it peters out in a mass of indistinct tracks.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everybody Loves A Happy Ending
    All that's missing is the tunes - title track aside, the hummability factor is nil.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    4:21 ... The Day After
    4:21 shows him exhibiting more vigour and imagination.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation
    Their debut album may not be breaking any new ground in the world of rock'n'roll, but the three-piece don't half know their way around a catchy melody.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    This Is Christmas
    The contents of this cracker are as tired as ever.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Orfeo
    It's an album that impresses rather than excites.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All Hell Breaks Loose
    Between those two poles ["Bound For Glory" and "Kingdom Of The Lost"] falls plenty of enjoyable melodic hard rock, never poor, though not always scaling the heights.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kiss Land
    Killer hooks might transform his singular subject, "the loneliness of filling every need", into a perversely seductive portrait of ennui, but Tesfaye has always been a middling songwriter.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Quarters
    The politeness to his beats won't suit everyone. But there's just enough subtle power for the dancefloor, and enough movement and melodies for Quarters to operate in any environment.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Loved Me Back to Life
    The finished product is almost a reinvention.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Teatime Dub Encounters [EP]
    This unlikely four-track collaboration finds Smith’s daughter Esme providing sublime backing vocals and channels Pop’s formidable wordsmith talents into spontaneous, narrative freestyles.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hard Candy
    Hard Candy is a let-down after 2005's triumphant "Confessions on a Dancefloor." Still, your disappointment is tempered by the certainty that there'll be another Madonna album along in a bit, and it would be a foolish man who wrote off her chances of scaling the heights again.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rockstar
    Rockstar might have got away with the obviousness of its material if it had opted to do something interesting with it, but virtually every cover here seems to have been made as close to the original version as possible.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pocketful of Sunshine
    She sings about the minutiae of modern relationships from a feminine perspective, but a healthy dose of self-awareness regarding the archetypes she plays with and some jolly-hockey-sticks humour prevent her from slipping into Bridget Jones territory.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wanderlust
    This set of minor-chord melancholia often sounds like the product of another artist entirely.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Konk
    Pritchard hits new high notes and rises to the challenge of the vibrant melodies and finely tuned choruses. With guitarist Hugh Harris coming out of the shadows, the Kooks' ambitions look well within their reach.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    L.A.X.
    LAX is an intense and remarkably focused record - almost every syllable concerns Compton, gangsta rap and (as one song title has it) Game's Pain - but the minor-key, would-be emotive beats of tracks such as Money or the Kanye West-produced Angel (featuring rapper Common) don't bring the best out of his expressive flow.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From the Hills Below the City
    It's delivered with such warmth and skill that reservations fade, and the delight of hearing a band do something very well takes over.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Avril Lavigne
    This bratty nostalgia trip is the best thing she's done in years.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Meds
    Molko aims for film-noir sleaziness, but barely warrants a parental-guidance sticker.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Relaxer
    It’s a short yet extravagant blow-out, a Heston Blumenthal banquet of an album, so consumed with its own belligerently perplexing path, it may exclude peripheral fans.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Music to Be Murdered By - Side B (Deluxe Edition)
    Age has not withered the rapper’s astonishing level of technical skill. If you’ve heard most of what he says before, it’s still possible to be awestruck by the way he says it. ... The music is less interesting than on its predecessor.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Fool
    At times, as on Free, there’s a danger of things crossing into the formulaic big-pop sound the Mumfords have spread through the charts. But more often, these songs – written with Passion Pit’s Michael Angelakos among others--are imbued with enough subtle strangeness to remain beguiling.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stranger Things Have Happened
    A collection of classy, retro pop that showcases her chameleonic voice. It’s not a style that holds a huge amount of excitement any more, as indicated by the album’s more banal junctures, such as the rather stale Elizabeth Taylor and various cod-Adele moments. But Maguire proves it can still be startlingly fruitful.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Up All Night
    Originality may not be Razorlight's strong point, but Borrell's raw charisma carries the day.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    AIM
    It sounds as if AIM was made exclusively for MIA’s benefit: one final eruption of inventive and sometimes incoherent ideas.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Phase
    An album that feels entirely of the moment in a way that isn’t entirely satisfying--and, of course, with vast commercial success, which feels inevitable.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    9
    He quivers, moans and pleads in obsessive contemplation of the darling departed in a self-dramatising simulation of catharsis that wrings from his performances an ocean of emotion when a drop of understated restraint would prove more telling.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Because the Internet
    Gambino is observant and often funny, and his loose-limbed flow can sting.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heart of Nowhere
    No one expects urgent, Darkness on the Edge of Town-style danger from a N&TW record: just breezy, bittersweet, hook-laden tunes, and they're offered in abundance here.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ten New Messages
    Their songs are longer and, in a move that is bound to set some fans' teeth on edge, their brash post-punk edge has been smoothed away to a polished pop finish.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    12 Memories
    This pretty diffidence, coupled with the fact the loss of producer Nigel Godrich and his sexifying sheen, makes Travis's fourth album feel small and woebegone.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vision Valley
    Possibly the best 31 garage-rock minutes you'll hear this year.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chinese Democracy
    Chinese Democracy is clearly not the greatest rock album ever made, but nor is it an absolute and utter failure. The irony is, that for all the lavishing of money and time and technology, it's saved by something as old fashioned as a good tune.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Anxiety
    The songs aren't strong enough to make it feel vibrant. Only the chugging Cellophane captures the giddy, filmic qualities of Ladyhawke's early songs.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Continental
    Guthrie's signature-sound is so familiar that you can't help but regret the absence of Cocteau Twins singer Liz Fraser's breathy, spectral vocals.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mixed Race
    Mixed Race doesn't always hang together, but it is the work of someone with a renewed creative appetite.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Here I Am
    This album shows Rowland to be worthy of consideration in her own right.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Into
    Williams uses reverb as sparkling chaff to distract from his lack of melodic ideas, and he forgets that psychedelia needs the threat of a bad trip to make the good ones really worthwhile.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stockholm
    Not all the tracks hit the spot, and some of her edge has been dulled by studio sheen, but the album is bookended by two songs from her top drawer.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    That's Why God Made the Radio
    Just as you're about to dismiss the album entirely, something extraordinary happens. The final three tracks – From There to Back Again, Pacific Coast Highway and Summer's Gone – form a kind of suite that is easily the best thing Brian Wilson has put his name to in the last 30 years.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Intensive Care
    It ends up that most unusual of things, a stadium rock album with a personality of its own.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cage The Elephant
    There's a Red Bull-powered Stooges lurking in here somewhere, and when Cage the Elephant can transfer their live power to record, they'll be unstoppable.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    FramesPerSecond
    It’s a pretty album rather than a potent one, but there is genuine ambition in this small-town boy’s debut.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Brushes With Happiness
    The hazy, literary reverie can start to sound samey, but the Waves are certainly ploughing a unique furrow.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Songs of Innocence
    As a free sample, it’s fine: it has its moments among the longeurs, enough of them to suggest U2 aren’t a spent force. But what Songs of Innocence isn’t is the grand return the band obviously crave.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Battle Born
    You struggle to find the energy till the third or fourth listen, when Heart of a Girl and From Here on Out reveal themselves to be the sweetest, most sincere explorations of a kind of US rock that will always raise hairs on the necks of those who like this sort of thing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dr. Dee
    There's some brave music, and reminders of Albarn's gift for melody.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Build Music
    It’s a strange but compelling set, with reworked bubu favourites such as Angbolieh matched against English-language songs including Santa Monica and occasional Caribbean vocal influences.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Snapshot
    It's all meaty, squalling guitar riffs, foghorn blasts of harmonica, and a confusion of solid speed with actual excitement.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Penny Sparkle
    Even given the band's fondness for equine metaphors, that's pretty obtuse – but somehow it does say something about Penny Sparkle's failure to satisfy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mind Body & Soul
    All the ingredients are thus there for long-term success, and this record is best seen as a stepping stone by which she shouldn't be judged too exactingly.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Until The Earth Begins To Part
    There are moribund string melodies here that would be at home in a BBC costume drama, and when they address global warming, their politicised folk-rock calls the distinctly unfashionable likes of the Levellers to mind.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Ride
    It’s difficult to avoid making endless comparisons when an album feels so miserably storyboarded--the sad fallout of commercial pop that just patchworks trendy styles together. But at least The Rise does so with zeal.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    E=MC2
    She is on fine vocal form throughout E=MC2, whether belting out massive ballads ('Thanx 4 Nothin') or layering her voice into a swooning bank of a hundred Mariahs ('I'll Be Lovin' U Long Time').
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Human
    There’s too much bland, Identikit retro soul, the tasteful production becomes stifling, and the lyrics tip from heartfelt and personal into cliched and overwrought. Thankfully, there are still times when he cuts loose.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Goodbye
    Schnauss sounds like a cross between Chapterhouse, My Bloody Valentine circa Soon, the Cocteau Twins and Enya, chugging along on barely audible Balearic beats.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Violet Cries
    Despite a tendency to drift formlessly, there's true beauty in some of their desolate soundscapes, which get eerier as the album crawls along.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Danger in the Club
    Danger in the Club’s flaws and charms alike are summed up in the way Matador rollercoasts from sprawling mess to tuneful brilliance as the band throw everything in their locker at a heroic charge towards death or glory.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Come Around Sundown
    Here, the Kings of Leon have largely chosen – albeit through audibly gritted teeth – to stick fast to the Bono-approved stadium rock that caused Pitchfork to dub them Y'all 2.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Circus
    Circus isn't bad as pop albums go, but whether by default or design, it's substantially less edgy and exciting than its predecessor.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Love Goes
    An album that exists to waft sadly, but unobtrusively, in the background.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    MDNA
    MDNA turns out to be just another Madonna album. It's already had the biggest single-day pre-order in iTunes history: business as usual for the most remarkable business enterprise in pop.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Maestro
    It's an entertaining set, and makes an intriguing contrast to his early classic, "The Natch'l Blues," recorded back in 1968 and now rereleased, with light, rhythmic songs like 'Corinna' or 'She Caught the Katy' and 'Left Me a Mule to Ride' still sounding as fresh as ever.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wretched and Divine: The Story of the Wild Ones
    There is nowhere near enough invention on display to disguise the blank-eyed earnestness of the lyrics.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Everything
    Despite a cast list that includes Childish Gambino and The Weeknd (and, if you're that way inclined, Harry Styles), there's often a facelessness that defeats even Grande's lush vocal performances.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kings & Queens of the Underground
    Old-school arena punk rockers such as Bitter Pill and Postcards from the Past attempt to restart the Idolmania era, though aren’t always best assisted by producer Trevor Horn’s 80s stadium-rock gloop.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Funplex
    They may not sound as weird and novel as they did on 'Rock Lobster,' but they can still sing 'Keep This Party Going' with some credibility.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tre!
    It's got some pretty good songs--but they never get better than pretty good.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hang Cool Teddy Bear
    Hang Cool, Teddy Bear is of a piece with the rest of his catalogue: the pounding guitars never slacken, emotions are writ very large and the lyrics rarely lack sly wit. Less happily, the tempo never varies--this album desperately needs a ballad--and 13 unrelenting tracks is a good deal more than enough.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Music To Be Murdered By
    If Music to Be Murdered By covers a lot of old ground, it does so in considerable style. It’s a stronger album musically than its predecessor.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Barbara
    We Are Scientists know how to create instantly catchy tunes, unfortunately they've yet to master making them stick in the memory bank.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Como te Llama
    The album is so wide-ranging and open to experiment that it stands up in its own right--unlike most side projects.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Paper Gods
    If Paper Gods isn’t quite as strong throughout as 2010’s back-to-basics All You Need Is Now, Kill Me With Silence and the title track have terrific choruses and Sunset Garage beautifully honours the band’s survival.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bronx III
    You can't help but feel that had they cut loose more often--as they do on the album's highlight, 'Ship High in Transit'--and put a bit more punk in their rock, they would have made the record they'd like us to believe they did.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hello Everything
    For the most part, this is Squarepusher on full beam and Hello Everything is a thing of unbridled joy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Portamento
    Like last year's debut, this employs repetition and deliberate naivety, but it's starting to sound disingenuous, perhaps because of a strong sense of joylessness and duty.
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