The Independent (UK)'s Scores

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For 2,189 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 47% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT
Lowest review score: 0 Donda
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,172 out of 2189
  2. Mixed: 988 out of 2189
  3. Negative: 29 out of 2189
2189 music reviews
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    More Life [Mixtape]
    Pleasingly, two of the best [guests] are British, Sampha capping “4422” with an emotive outburst, and Skepta getting an entire “Skepta Interlude” to himself to muse about how he “died and came back as Fela Kuti”. Elsewhere, the likes of Giggs, Young Thug and 2 Chainz add furtive but menacing sketches of thug life to tracks like “No Long Talk” and “Sacrifices”, the latter offering Drake’s most elegant mea culpa for past transgressions.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Country Hustle
    Nichols’ explanation of its development--starting out in the mould of country legends The Stanley Brothers, but metamorphosing through exposure to Malian desert-blues master Ali Farka Toure--reveals the blend of influences his music subtly weaves together.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Room 29
    One can’t help thinking the ghosts and echoes of previous scandalous indulgences are rather betrayed by the project’s neat, sentimental manner.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Salutations
    The result is probably the best work of the singer’s career, a wide-ranging survey of contemporary shortcomings in which the frequent bursts of offhand spite and bitterness are perfectly balanced by the warmth of the folk-rock arrangements.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hot Thoughts
    Not bad, but not brilliant.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Republique Amazone
    It’s a proud, forceful demonstration of the strength and variety of modern African music, brilliantly combined by producer Liam Farrell into arrangements where funk, afrobeat, desert-blues, dub and congotronics swirl infectiously around the women’s voices.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Digging a Tunnel
    The found-sounds quickly become irritating--as too, unfortunately, does Wastberg’s wan falsetto, which imposes a mood of victimhood where uplift might be more appropriate. It’s rather sad, because there’s genuine invention in some of his J Dilla-style arrangement assemblages.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Order of Time
    Her follow-up to 2013’s sublime Pushin’ Against A Stone finds Valerie June expanding her unique blend of blues, soul and mountain music to create a distinctive hybrid in which past and future coalesce with gentle power.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heartworms
    Though that melancholy seeps deeper into songs like “So Now What” and “The Fear”, it’s never allowed to dominate, with the latter’s rolling drone groove quixotically tempered by the addition of mariachi horns, a typically off-centre touch.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Navigator
    Augmenting her folksy troubadour style with Latin percussion and an acappella group for that streetcorner-symphony flavour, she effectively expands the notion of Americana to accommodate another cultural strain alongside the usual blues and country influences.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    50 Song Memoir
    Merritt’s refracted reminiscences frequently offer thoughtful and incisive insights into bigger issues, and with deceptive sleight of story.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Divide
    This is a polished, well-executed effort from one of the hardest-working men in music.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Windy City
    Save for a couple of uptempo trotters like the jaunty kiss-off “It’s Goodbye And So Long To You”, it’s mostly melancholy fare.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Volcano
    With the toothless Volcano, they’ve abandoned that path [hinting at deep immersion in psych-rock] in favour of a wheedling, keyboard-heavy electropop sound with much less bite, pock-marked with dubious stylistic potholes.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Preservation
    Nadia Reid’s 2015 debut Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs heralded the arrival of a prodigious talent, the young New Zealand singer-songwriter’s confessional material embodying an emotional intelligence and honesty akin to Laura Marling and Judee Sill, her folk leanings tempered by languid jazz inflections set among a patina of subtle sonic textures. Preservation continues in like manner.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    World Eater
    Unsurprisingly, it’s not a pretty sound, though there are moments of transcendent grace.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last Place
    He wields with sumptuous beauty, from the Floyd-like swathes of mellotron and piano carrying “The Boat Is In The Barn” and the stately “Lost Machine”, to the implacable electropop fizz of “Evermore”.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Semper Femina
    When pondering gets this skilled, and this fruitful, the dividends far outweigh the misgivings.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Drunk
    It’s an enjoyable, occasionally virtuosic romp, fronted by Thundercat’s smooth soul harmonies, which lend proceedings the lustrous sheen of Earth, Wind & Fire.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gang Signs & Prayer
    The usual bouts of brusque dissing rub shoulders with love songs, fond tributes to his mom, and a fulsome, swaying devotional hymn “Blinded By Your Grace Pt. 2”. But it’s the engaging sense of vulnerability and self-deprecation that brings depth and charm to Gang Signs & Prayer.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    English Tapas
    These dozen visceral tableaux of modern life are shot through with flashes of gallows humour and offhand absurdity that tempers the overall vision of a "newborn hell" peopled by "dumb Brits."
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Man vs. Sofa
    It’s an odd alliance of elements that seem at odds, but work beautifully together.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Freedom Highway
    On Freedom Highway, Rhiannon Giddens animates black American history--notably, the arduous journey from slavery to civil rights--in songs which pair her strong, sonorous delivery with arrangements echoing pre-blues minstrel music.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dirty Projectors
    David Longstreth’s account of his separation from former bandmate Amber Coffman told through a welter of autotuned, over-treated vocals and jumble of clashing sounds that, to be generous, may be intended as an analogue of the ground shifting beneath their disintegrating relationship.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hard Love
    It’s a solipsistic affair: and while his good intentions to smarten up his drug-sozzled, road-weary life may be commendable, they don’t necessarily make “Quit It” any more agreeable.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Undying Color
    The calm, methodical “Gravity Wake” blends stately Moondog-like drums with undulating synths and relaxed solo horn lines that inescapably bring to mind Terry Riley. Elsewhere, the use of rhythmic, murmured vocables in “Glossolalia” recalls Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Notes of Blue
    A brave, and welcome, transformation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Prisoner
    Prisoner sticks to the well-trodden highways, whether it’s the echoes of U2 in the grand guitar stabs and earnest vocal tone of opener “Do You Still Love Me”, or the spangly, flanged guitars and relaxed sense of space that lend “Anything I Say To You Now” the laidback stadium sound of The Police.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hot Coffey in the D: Burnin' at Morey Baker's Showplace Lounge
    This recently discovered live recording from 1968 captures [Dennis Coffey] at an earlier stage, just before his reputation soared through contributions to classics like “Cloud 9”, “War” and "Band Of Gold”.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Heavy Meta
    It’s not always pretty--his blast of antipathy “Can’t Stand You” is just relentless disparagement, with none of the subtlety of “Positively 4th Street”; ultimately, it’s small wonder to find him, in “Poor Traits Of The Artist”, caught between loving and hating his need to create.
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