The Independent on Sunday (UK)'s Scores

  • Music
Select another publication »
For 595 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 57% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 40% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score:
One Day I'm Going To Soar
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Last Night on Earth
Critic Score 20
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 379 out of 595
  2. Mixed: 206 out of 595
  3. Negative: 10 out of 595
595 music reviews
view
per page
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 100
    Bird Songs
    Parker's music is approached from a post-Coltrane, post-free jazz aesthetic, with the rhythmic edginess of bebop elided into an all-the-time-in-the-world fluidity. A masterpiece.
    • Metascore: 100
    • Critic Score 100
    What's Going On [40th Anniversary Edition]
    The most perfect suite of music recorded in my lifetime.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 100
    Floreat
    All of this adds up to something very special indeed.
    Posted Sep 15, 2011
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 100
    50 Words for Snow
    To the relief of anyone who carries a torch for the reclusive genius, it's a beauty.
    • Metascore: 61
    • Critic Score 100
    Born to Die
    A delicious hybrid of Portishead and Nancy Sinatra.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 100
    Kinshasa Succursale
    The most vibrant, organic and energy infused African hip-hop debut since K'naan's The Dusty Foot Philosopher.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 100
    Young Man In America
    Marvellous.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 100
    Put Your Back N 2 It
    But where Learning drifted into the ether, this captivating follow-up thrives off harnessing his fragile sensibility to fulsome melodies.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 100
    Always
    Always may well be the Californians' finest yet.
    • Metascore: 89
    • Critic Score 100
    Be Good
    Porter has made the best vocal album in an age.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 100
    Break It Yourself
    If you like smart pop and are not familiar, hearing Bird for the first time will feel like discovering a new planet.
    • Metascore: 89
    • Critic Score 100
    The Hare, the Hound & the Tortoise
    This is a band for fans of Leonard Cohen, Scott Walker and Nick Cave who wondered where their next great love was coming from...it's already here.
    • Metascore: 74
    • Critic Score 100
    Rant
    Wonderful.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 100
    Older Than My Old Man Now
    It's a rather beautiful thing.
    • Metascore: 59
    • Critic Score 100
    Born Villain
    The eighth Marilyn Manson album features some of his finest lyrics yet and, musically, it often approaches the heyday of Holy Wood and Mechanical Animals.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Critic Score 100
    Fear Fun
    Fear Fun is the kind of album that can name-check Sartre, Heidegger and Neil Young in the same song.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 100
    Words & Music by Saint Etienne
    Words and Music, the first full studio album in an aeon from Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, is a masterclass of pop theory and practice in perfect harmony.
    • Metascore: 92
    • Critic Score 100
    Flight
    Stapleton's writing for this recording, satisfies on every level.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 100
    Perlas
    The most compelling Spanish album I've heard in ages.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 100
    One Day I'm Going To Soar
    ODIGTS is the soul album of the century. It might yet turn out to be the album of the year
    • Metascore: 67
    • Critic Score 100
    Hot Cakes
    Hot Cakes is a rock-solid home win from the band who still do feelgood hard rock better than anyone alive.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 100
    Big Inner
    A genuine classic, in fact.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 100
    Coexist
    The world adored the xx's Mercury Prize-winning debut album xx. Coexist is, if anything, an even finer piece of work.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 100
    Love This Giant
    Love This Giant is a skewed and funky instant classic.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 100
    Theatre Is Evil
    In every sense, Theatre Is Evil sounds like a million dollars.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 100
    Where Do You Start
    There's not a duff track or dull moment in this 75 minutes of studio material.
    • Metascore: 99
    • Critic Score 100
    Ten Freedom Summers
    There are four CDs' worth but it's enormously rewarding, like mid-period Miles Davis playing Ligeti.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 100
    {Awayland}
    It's that rare commodity: an album to immerse yourself in and spend time with, both things no one does any more.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 100
    M B V
    MBV leaves all other post-rock experimentalists looking like trivial dilettantes. If jet engines could sing, these would be their hymns.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 100
    Without a Net
    Everything is great.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 100
    Child Ballads
    It is absolutely beautiful.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Critic Score 100
    Pale Green Ghosts
    The occasional familiar, Carpenters-esque track aside, it makes for an exhilarating musical progression--even as his lyrical style remains unchanged.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 100
    Ghost on Ghost
    Ghost on Ghost is as dense stylistically as it is lyrically.
    • Metascore: 72
    • Critic Score 100
    Sing to the Moon
    Drawing on anything from Medieval plainsong to free jazz, she creates an extraordinary sensation of light, air, and space.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 90
    So Beautiful or So What
    The worldy influence remains but never overwhelms and the album contains at least half a dozen songs that are as simple and profound as anything Simon has ever written.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 90
    Who Kill
    Catchy yet abrasive, noisy yet intimate, kind of funny yet also kind of scary, this is post-pop at its most vertiginously original.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Critic Score 90
    Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2
    A welcome addition to the Beastie canon, and if it gets them back out on the road, it'll be an absolutely precious one.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 90
    Everything's Getting Older
    As with some diseases, the album gets worse before it gets better, but by the end you're left stunned in admiration. Hell, there's even a redemptive arc. Amazing.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 90
    Smother
    The Cumbrian quartet haven't fumbled the ball with the follow-up. Smother, recorded in the shadow of Snowdonia, tinkles and twinkles like the classiest adult-alternative pop of the 1980s.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 90
    Bon Iver
    The mood of uplifting-melancholia survives and this time out Vernon needs no dramatic backstory. Clearly, his is a talent that loves company as much as it loves misery.
    • Metascore: 68
    • Critic Score 90
    Gravity the Seducer
    As always, Ladytron make the world feel a more haunted, evocative, romantic place. Faultless.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Critic Score 90
    Bad as Me
    Bad As Me is as good as it gets.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 90
    Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
    It sounds like a soundtrack for the end of the world, or the birth of new worlds. Extraordinary.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 90
    Bootleg, Vol. 3: Live Around the World
    This is Cash at his rawest and most riveting, singing his soul out to platoons, prisoners and presidents alike. Hard to describe in terms that are adequate.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 90
    The Lion's Roar
    First Aid Kit sing harmonies so close you couldn't run a Band Aid between them.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Critic Score 90
    Ill Manors
    This is one of the most exhilarating albums of the year.
    • Metascore: 85
    • Critic Score 90
    The Odessa Tapes
    14 songs of keening, romantic acoustic music of great seriousness and lightness of being.
    • Metascore: 70
    • Critic Score 90
    The 2nd Law
    The none-more-Nietzschean, grandiose-apocalyptic mood continues through the utterly splendid Olympic theme "Survival", with its über-ELO arrangement, and "Animals", with its sound effects of an angry, riotous mob.
    • Metascore: 88
    • Critic Score 90
    Lonerism
    This one's a beauty.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 90
    Bloodsports
    Bloodsports is effortlessly superior to its predecessor A New Morning, and averages out roughly on a level with Head Music (though more consistent in quality).
    • Metascore: 71
    • Critic Score 90
    Praxis Makes Perfect
    Gruff’s gorgeous voice helps humanise Feltrinelli. Never more so than on “Hoops With Fidel”, which, rather than demonising him and Castro, conveys the ideal of international revolution as a beautiful thing. As beautiful, in fact, as this album.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Critic Score 90
    Silence Yourself
    Post-millennial indie boy-rock has taken a savage beating here. And it may prove the best it’s ever had.