The Guardian's Scores

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For 5,503 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 5503
  2. Mixed: 2,461 out of 5503
  3. Negative: 77 out of 5503
5503 music reviews
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    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    El Camino
    They sound like a band who think they've made the year's best rock'n'roll album, probably because that's exactly what they've done.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    American Love Call
    There simply isn’t a weak or even middling track, and the strongest can go toe to toe with the best of Al Green or Bobby Womack.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fuse
    It’s an album that manages to be different from anything they’ve recorded before yet perfectly in keeping with their past: a comeback worth waiting for.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    They're Calling Me Home
    This is a big, beautiful album, a showcase for direct, punchy emotions and Giddens’ vocal versatility. She trained as an opera singer and executes astonishing levels of beauty and control on Monteverdi’s Si Dolce è’l Tormento and When I Was in My Prime, a folk song previously covered by Pentangle and Nina Simone.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Infinite Granite
    This is a great, great album, one that exists entirely on its creators’ terms.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Broken Politics
    The loose instrumentation lets Cherry lead the way: her lines often sound extemporised, shifting easily between wisdom and soulful desolation. The effect is intimate yet expansive.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rough and Rowdy Ways
    For all its bleakness, Rough and Rowdy Ways might well be Bob Dylan’s most consistently brilliant set of songs in years: the die-hards can spend months unravelling the knottier lyrics, but you don’t need a PhD in Dylanology to appreciate its singular quality and power.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Soul Mining (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) [Box Set]
    A patchwork of catholic musical influences stitched tightly together by one man's peculiar, expansive vision of pop: Soul Mining is a brilliant and very idiosyncratic album.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fleet Foxes
    It all adds up to a landmark in American music, an instant classic.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Greater Wings
    Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell is perhaps the closest comparison in terms of musical and emotional tenor, but Byrne’s album is ultimately as singular as the woman singing it, and as unforgettable as a departed friend.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Complete Matrix Tapes [Box Set]
    It’s fascinating stuff, even for those for whom a 37-minute version of Sister Ray is pushing it a bit. It’s actually where the band stretch out that it becomes most fascinating.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Neighbourhood
    It is difficult to find fault with Blue Neighbourhood--it does what it does so well.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Velvet Underground [45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition]
    It’s revelatory to hear this most intense of bands playing with such ease and fluency, and utterly compelling.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Road To Rouen
    While the music is eclectic and teeming with exotic textures, it always feels coherent and easy to love, and might even earn the band a nomination as Britain's Best Pop Group.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Honey
    Whether the album ends up exerting the kind of influence over the Top 40 that her earlier releases did seems questionable--it feels almost too opaque and inward-looking for mass appeal. As evidence of a unique artist pursuing a personal vision in a world filled with the commonplace, however, Honey is perfect.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Paranoïa, Angels, True Love
    Hypnotically melodic, clever, stylish, serious, fun, addictively unexpected and euphorically danceable, it’s the kind of pop they don’t make any more.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    You & Me
    Intimate, intense and beautiful, You & Me demands repeat plays and the Walkmen deserve a new respect.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    American Interior
    Its songs are not weighed down by the Evans concept, and are hugely enjoyable on their own merits.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Morph The Cat
    The album is imbued with a post-9/11 dread, which deters Fagen from recycling the nostalgia and Lynchian fantasy of his previous albums.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light, Vol. 2
    This is easily the equal of, if not superior to, its illustrious companion.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Honeycomb
    He's discovered a mellow maturity in Southern soul - and without losing his punk rock perversity or poetry.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The ArchAndroid
    To say it's ambitious feels like damning with faint praise; its sheer musical scope--from the James Brown funk of Tightrope to the English pastoral folk of Oh, Maker--is spellbinding.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Double Negative
    This ranks alongside the likes of Anselm Kiefer and Cormac McCarthy as a document of contemporary social collapse, and as such is the most important, devastating album of the year.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Make Do With What You Got
    This is late-night listening that pulses with pain.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Alright, Still
    The female Mike Skinner? She's far, far better than that.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hit Parade
    A really masterful album.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Midnights
    That confidence is the thing that binds Midnights together. There’s a sure-footedness about Swift’s songwriting, filled with subtle, brilliant touches.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Saturn's Pattern
    Weller’s renaissance has not come at the expense of his musical identity. The sunshine-pop haze of Phoenix is from the Tame Impala playbook, but you could imagine Style Council-era Weller singing it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Haha Sound
    Every note, every lyric, is perfect.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Medulla
    Medulla may divide Björk's audience, but, combining intellectual rigour and sensual ravishment, it is brave and unique.
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