The Guardian's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 83 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Secret Wars
    Secret Wars is a sobering demonstration of what repetition can do in the wrong hands, as the Brooklyn trio funnel the most endurance-testing excesses of Suicide, Can, Sonic Youth and stoner rock into a joyless, oppressive piece of work.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Blood Mountain
    Syrupy, multi-tracked vocals akin to Supertramp in a particularly foul mood have replaced the primal roar of old, while their tectonic hugeness has been supplanted by the wearisome over-indulgence of musos at play.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Tigers Have Spoken
    It never sounds like much more than a bar band playing songs for friends.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Take Care
    Former child actor Aubrey Graham's much-vaunted sensitivity and introspection is more hollow than ever on his second album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Feels Like Home
    Feels Like Home is so inoffensive you have trouble remembering whether you put it on.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Electric Arguments
    Their website trumpets the "pure musical possibilities" of Electric Arguments, but this is heavily laboured hackwork.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Blueberry Boat
    A crashing disappointment.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    That Lucky Old Sun
    Every single note feels forced, in hock to a sound and a set of attitudes that date from a time before many of us were born.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Dumb Blood
    For every Lemonade you’re likely to get 10 sixth-form common-room jam bands wailing about “TONY B-LIAR”. Dumb Blood, the debut album from London outfit Vant, unquestionably falls into the latter camp.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Which Bitch?
    Some half-decent anthems and a sweet little love song are shifted further towards the bin by Kyle Falconer's singing, which sounds as though he has forgotten to put his teeth in. By the end of it, you may need a long bath.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Massacre
    With nothing musically fresh, attention is focused on [50] himself. Bad idea.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Bedlam In Goliath
    The "songs" (a relative concept on planet Mars Volta) sound as though they are competing to unleash as many prog-rock cliches as possible: portentous guitar riffs and twiddly bits are interspersed with all manner of atonal wind instruments and sonic pomposities.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin
    Gershwin and Wilson are among the 20th century's greatest writers of popular music; no one wishing to learn more about either should start here.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    R.Y.C.
    This is one of the most profoundly, wondrously mediocre albums of our time, which is to say that it’s not even entertainingly bad.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Wildflower
    It's all too dull to make anyone care but Crow.
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Fly Rasta
    The only risk Marley takes is on You're My Yoko, where he attempts to woo a lucky lady by likening her to the avant-garde artist, while casting himself as John Lennon. Julian Lennon would have been nearer the mark.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Suit
    Hackneyed songs grind drearily.
    • 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    First Kiss
    I don’t know if those [other Kid rock] records feature as many torturous lyrical cliches as this one (whisky, Jesus, Johnny Cash and beers with the old man all feature, and that’s just the track titles), or are sung with such constipated insincerity.
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Long Road Out Of Eden
    Disc one sounds like the band's Desperado years left out in the rain--damp, shrunken and fetid, with songs such as Guilty of the Crime and Fast Company giving out as much spark as a dying novelty lighter.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    St. Jude
    The Courteeners sound like troglodytes on the rampage.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Spine
    Every now and again they hit on a promising musical idea, then ruin it.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    I Created Disco
    I Created Disco is witless and forever tripping over its own feet.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The High End Of Low
    The Marilyn Manson blueprint holds fast, and all the familiar elements are here. The difference is that even Manson sounds unconvinced by his "antichrist superstar" persona; maybe because his target demographic have grown up and moved on.
    • 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
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Boy With No Name
    There are plenty more wishy-washy guitar tunes present like the drippy, tambourine laced Battleships, the wheezing Out in Space and the sub-danger of Eyes Wide Open; all riddled with Fran Healy's girlish croon. Spare us.
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    California Son
    He wheezes through Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s Lady Willpower like an exhumed Tom Jones, and hearing him preening on Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow--given an arduously heavy makeover by his band--feels like a violation of Joni Mitchell’s mythically light original.
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Happy Xmas
    Clapton sounds barely recognisable on these ghosts of Christmas songs past. His diminished voice heaves out Away in a Manger as if between sobs. On a collection profoundly lacking in seasonal trimmings, he occasionally buries some cursory sleigh bells deep in the mix.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Around The Sun
    Lifeless, as if the air had been sucked from the band's lungs.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Emergency
    As Emergency proves, what they do is entirely generic, but it's hard to argue with its melodic efficacy.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Kylie Christmas
    Even listened to while off your knockers on sherry, Kylie Christmas is a confusing package: the first three songs are orchestral, big-band numbers delivered with all the joie de vivre of a Sainsbury’s advert. Then it gives up entirely on that genre, and fires off random collaboration ideas that border on Monkey Tennis territory.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Life In Cartoon Motion
    At their most laudable, Queen eschewed good taste in order to make unique records: Bohemian Rhapsody or the baffling Bicycle Race. Here, you get all the kitsch and none of the ambition.... With little behind it except a desire to be loved, the showboating becomes wearyingly relentless.
    • 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Latest Record Project, Vol. 1
    Tinfoil millinery is interspersed with a variety of more predictable and even more enervating rants.
    • 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Unpredictable
    Unpredictable resembles another legendary thespian's venture into pop, William Shatner's 1968 opus The Transformed Man, in that you start to wonder whether Foxx is actually serious or not.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Rebirth
    The album's drawback lies not with the producers or the material, but with Lopez herself.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Grown & Sexy
    An hour of boredom.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Body Faucet
    It's not so much that the songs lack shape, it's that this suggests Reptar lack conviction – every song borrows from something else, something vaguely similar but different enough to make this an incoherent mess, albeit one with oddball pretensions.
    • 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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Underclass Hero
    Sentiments are rendered as blandly as lazy graffiti tags, with the music accompanying them as bold and portentous as a light shower.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Dark Horse
    The hilarious, parodic single 'Rockstar' excepted, Nickelback's music reaffirms every sex-and-stupidity cliche hard rock can offer.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Forget the World
    The best efforts are Dynamite, featuring Snoop Dogg, with its low-slung Cali feel, and Three Strikes, which bangs--and features the vocals of Martine McCutcheon's husband, Jack McManus ("one, two, three, get the fuck up"). The worst is everything else.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stealing Of A Nation
    However tiresome the slogans, worse is the fact that the beats are lazy.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Chapter V
    How can this dork-metal silliness still be going on in 2005?
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    This Is A Fix
    Elsewhere, the Welsh four-piece are merely witless. Utterly awful.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Sorry for Party Rocking
    Stretched out over an hour, their solitary idea wears unbearably thin: pretty quickly, your reaction is less LMFAO than WTF? and, ultimately, FFS.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    MEMORIES DON'T DIE
    Astonishingly hackneyed, aggressively chameleonic LP.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Tourist
    If it's possible to imagine a gutted Coldplay or an even more comatose Snow Patrol, Athlete is it.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Earth To The Dandy Warhols
    To the rest of the western world, they are the arrogant stars of rock documentaries and Vodafone adverts, and their achingly dull eighth album does little to alter that assessment.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Some Kind of Trouble
    Shallow, soulless and strangely cynical, Some Kind of Trouble is a thoroughly depressing listen.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    All That I Am
    Santana proves that even endless high-sustain soloing cannot heal the generically lame.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Good Morning Revival
    A fourth album of stunning fatuousness.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Better Than Heavy
    Lazy attempts at grime and rapcore are consigned to the doghouse courtesy of some well-meant but terrible political raps.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Weirdness
    Pop's lyrics about his penis and ATMs are beyond self-parody.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    LP1
    LP1 is a terrible pop album, but very effective contraception.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Generation
    Generation betrays Audio Bullys' aspirations to say Something Important, undeterred by the absence of either insight or eloquence.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    If On A Winter's Night...
    Using top folk musicians means everything is expertly crafted, but Sting's Christmas pudding is over-egged.
    • 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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Liz Phair
    Where she used to be smart and provocative, Phair has become crass and bloated, her lyrics crude and her image apparently a grotesque exercise in self-parody.
    • 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.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    United Nations of Sound
    Too much of United Nations of Sound feels like a vanity project gone horribly awry.