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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    When It Falls
    Perhaps spurred by the ease with which the Boring Solo has been grafted on to their chosen template, When It Falls finds Zero 7 expanding their horizons and going on to be boring in other areas.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Blueberry Boat
    A crashing disappointment.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Around The Sun
    Lifeless, as if the air had been sucked from the band's lungs.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Human After All
    Apparently knocked off in just six weeks, Daft Punk's third album sounds like it took six days. Six short days. With long lunches.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Paris
    She sings like a woman who has heard of something called singing, can't be sure of exactly what it might entail, but is fairly certain you do something a bit like this. She sounds both distracted and bored stiff, as if making an album is keeping her from the more serious business of standing around a nightclub in a pair of really enormous sunglasses.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Rebirth
    The album's drawback lies not with the producers or the material, but with Lopez herself.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    In Space
    Half the 12 tracks are risible throwaway genre and covers. The other half are, at best, extremely mellifluous Big Star tribute band songs.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Amber Headlights
    As he points out in the sleeve notes, these were "works in progress", but that doesn't excuse using stagnant rock riffs to obscure his lack of inspiration.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Press The Spacebar
    The trouble is, they've... stopped writing songs. Instead, there are collages of sound devoid of subtlety; colliding rhythms that make noise rather than sense.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Chapter V
    How can this dork-metal silliness still be going on in 2005?
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jagged Little Pill Acoustic
    Like Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells II and Meat Loaf's Back Into Hell, it doesn't so much play as fall out of the speakers with a flump: the sound of a towel being thrown in.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Wildflower
    It's all too dull to make anyone care but Crow.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Rock'n'Roll
    Throughout Rock N Roll, Adams is too busy winking, smirking and showing off to convey anything approaching an emotion.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Astronaut
    Before long, though, Duran Duran are adrift in an unforgiving sea of disco-dad dance-pop, anaemic vocals and lyrics too distressingly awful to repeat in a family newspaper.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Under My Skin
    The music is so anodyne that you don't pay much attention to Lavigne's lyrics. This proves to be a small mercy: examination of the CD booklet reveals that prolonged exposure to her words could leave a previously healthy adult rocking backwards and forwards in a foetal ball.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Grown & Sexy
    An hour of boredom.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    20/20
    What 20/20 does best is portentousness and the empty brag - essentially male traits that make listening rather like being hectored by the pub bore.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    All That I Am
    Santana proves that even endless high-sustain soloing cannot heal the generically lame.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Rudebox
    A scant handful of highlights aside, it is packed with half-baked ideas, bad jokes, music that any other star of Williams' stature would be terrified of the general public hearing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Gettin' In Over My Head
    Everyone wants Brian Wilson's story to have a happy ending. The worst thing about Gettin' In Over My Head - far worse than the mediocre songs and the MOR guest appearances - is that it doesn't sound terribly happy.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Suit
    Hackneyed songs grind drearily.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    I Am Me
    Her sense of self-importance [is] so prevalent on her second album that it negates the mild pleasure you might otherwise get from it.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Between Darkness & Wonder
    The beats are intricate but ineffectual, the songwriting is thin and every song is enveloped in a suffocating orchestral shroud.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Out Of Nothing
    While their first album had a stirring anthem or two, their songwriting here is both flimsy and overblown, like an empty carrier bag temporarily inflated by a gust of wind.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stealing Of A Nation
    However tiresome the slogans, worse is the fact that the beats are lazy.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    This Is A Fix
    Elsewhere, the Welsh four-piece are merely witless. Utterly awful.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Satan's Circus
    Disembodied bleeps and European synth drifts opt for bleak, alien magnetism but just end up sounding utterly depressing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Myths Of The Near Future
    The songs descend the same chords repeatedly and ponderously, as if the band were falling down the same flight of stairs over and over again.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Cloud Nine
    The lyrics are as earnest and emotionally inarticulate as a 19-year-old on Tinder. Well, this is pop, where cliche can be transcendent, but these joyless songs are chemically castrated of any passion or sexuality.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    St. Jude
    The Courteeners sound like troglodytes on the rampage.
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