The Guardian's Scores

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For 5,509 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 You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To
Lowest review score: 10 Unpredictable
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,968 out of 5509
  2. Mixed: 2,464 out of 5509
  3. Negative: 77 out of 5509
5509 music reviews
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    • 94 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    This album offers beats that retread past glories, and an emotional palette narrowed to a range roughly as wide as West's navel.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Depression [Legacy Edition]
    Amid ballads such as Whiskey Bottle, there’s Graveyard Shift, which shifts between Pixiesesque loud and quiet parts; here it’s only Tweedy’s Illinois twang that marks them out from their grunge peers. The demos are, as you might expect, sketchy stuff, but therein lies the appeal of digging into the early work of any rock pioneer.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Z
    Unfortunately, four of the 10 tracks are deeply pedestrian, heartland rock.... Worse, presumably - like Charlotte Church - tired of having the voice of an angel, several songs find Jim James singing with the voice of a brickie.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    When I Get Home
    There are lots of intriguing ideas here, and it might be better thought of as one long fragmentary track than a collection of songs. But it’s an album that feels like it’s hovering rather than actually heading anywhere, diverting rather than impactful.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    To Be Kind
    To Be Kind is uncompromising to the point of overindulgence.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    30
    You couldn’t blame Adele for declining to even tinker with a formula that clearly ain’t broke. But she does, and it makes for 30’s highlights.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    That's the Spirit
    Oh No is more dance than nu-metal, replete with trance breakdown. If BMTH really do want to bring nu-metal back to life, this approach could be just the defibrillator they need.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magdalene
    Sometimes the results are stunning, as on the beautiful microcosmos of tiny, constantly shifting sounds that fade in and out of Mary Magdalene. ... Sometimes, however, the songs are weirdly stifling.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Letter to You
    From its title down, it’s clearly intended as a message to longstanding Springsteen fans, the sound of an artist hunkering down in troubled times. That also represents a scaling down of ambition, but judged by its own criteria, Letter to You is a success.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Undun
    What it isn't--quite--is the magnum opus it could be. The second half loses impetus.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dirty Computer
    You occasionally wonder if an understandable desire to cross over commercially might not be at the root of the album’s less inspired moments: there’s something commonplace and risk-averse about the pop-R&B backing of Crazy, Classic, Life and I Got the Juice.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Place Called Bad [Box Set]
    They’re best known, though, for the swamp-rock they adopted from 1982--distorted, grimy, seedy and just a little psychotic; Swampland was as memorable a manifesto as you could hope for. But there is an awful lot of it here, and you might well find that a little of their midnight-flavoured Birthday Party-meets-Suicide-meets-Iggy stew goes quite a long way.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ohms
    By streamlining their sound, Deftones have made an album that proves that ferocity is not a diminishing resource.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Norman Fucking Rockwell!
    Listening to Norman Fucking Rockwell! is an alternately beguiling and frustrating experience. There are moments when you willingly succumb to its sound and its songwriting, counteracted by moments when you just think: oh God, here we go again.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stumble Into Grace
    Subtle exercises in pushing genre boundaries, these (mostly self-penned) songs deal in profundity without resort to cliche, and they deserve better than to have the life polished out of them.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Comicopera
    If the album has a rough-around-the-edges, askew quality, that just makes it more fascinating: this isn't music that settles in the background.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Are We There
    Van Etten's melodies often feel as if they're not quite taking flight, and rarely cause you to catch your breath the way her lyrics do.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Blackest Beautiful
    Throughout, bursts of radio interference, gentle guitars and even classical music make effective and sometimes welcome moments of calm before the storm.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hercules And Love Affair
    While it lasts, Hercules and Love Affair sound as original and exotic as their backgrounds.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Life Is People
    It's not without a few syrupy moments, and it would be a push to recommend it over the old records, but there are some fine songs here.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    LCD Soundsystem
    Murphy lets the pace slacken - and as soon as it does, interest fades.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harps And Angels
    Anyone who doesn't actually live for updates from Iowan caucuses can safely skip the whole ragtime politicking middle section and, instead, enjoy the work of a true master of popular song.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Boxer
    In the absence of specific moments of revelation, the general melancholy becomes wearing.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shaking the Habitual
    Shaking the Habitual's problem is that the Knife seem to have dismissed the idea of making your point concisely as merely another affectation of a decadent and corrupt society.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Badbea
    You couldn’t call Badbea wildly original; it’s filled with references to Collins’s musical touchstones (northern soul; the Velvet Underground) and an explicit melodic link to Big Star’s Feel in I’m OK Jack. But Collins is in fine voice, and it’s always a pleasure to have him back.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hail To The Thief
    Hail to the Thief's big drawback has less to do with its similarity to its predecessor than the sense that Radiohead's famed gloominess is becoming self-parodic.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pompeii
    Pompeii is noticeably more subdued than much of her earlier work. Where once there was a playfulness in the arrangements, the slow and austere songs here sound as if they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bob Vylan Presents the Price of Life
    If you’re willing to meet Bob Vylan on their rough-and-ready terms, The Price of Life offers a decent return on investment.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Loom
    The album features samples of earthquakes, shovels, shredders and screaming peacocks – an industrial-era Bosch painting turned into music. This nightmare is expertly arranged throughout, though in the second half the maximalism starts to feel like a means of papering over weak songwriting.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Amo
    Grimes collaboration Nihilist Blues convincingly addresses fears of ageing, while the (gulp) classically orchestrated I Don’t Know What to Say – about a friend’s cancer death – is undeniably touching. However, elsewhere, the likes of Medicine, Mother Tongue and In the Dark are anodyne pop that is liable to alienate the band’s fanbase and makes an uneasy fit with their desire to experiment.
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