The Observer (UK)'s Scores

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For 2,623 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 37% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 59% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Gold-Diggers Sound
Lowest review score: 20 Collections
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,235 out of 2623
  2. Mixed: 1,370 out of 2623
  3. Negative: 18 out of 2623
2623 music reviews
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    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sugaring Season
    Her wisp of a voice has found more weight and with it more feeling.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    He Is #1
    It's a slender, amateur volume but delightful.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Food & Liquor, Vol. 2: the Great American Rap Album, Pt. 1
    The tunes are pugnaciously mass-market, with debts to Kanye West. Throughout, though, tracks such as ITAL (Roses) and Audubon Ballroom come inflected with righteous fury and weary humour.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love This Giant
    [Their collaboration] makes for a consistently delicious contrast between the unruliness of sound... and the cool affectlessness of both their voices as every song bursts with the interplay of these two eccentrics' ideas.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Babel
    With every crescendo of catgut and steel, their lack of nuance becomes wearing.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Uno!
    The stadium punks' ninth album, though, is largely throwaway.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Battle Born
    [With] excesses as egregious as the half-spoken echoes of Battle Born, the cheese is amped so far that what this really sounds like is the soundtrack to some lost 90s Disney film.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shields
    It's more likely, though, that Shields is a grower.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Bet on Sky
    Their third post-reunion album is another assured collection, with J Mascis's dazzling guitar work as ever taking centre stage.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Meat + Bone
    If anything, they seem to have gained funkiness on workouts such as Get Your Pants Off and the loose, classy closing instrumental, Zimgar.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Truth About Love
    [The Truth About Love] veers between two modes: workmanlike ballads delivered with beyond-workmanlike shading; and chunky guitar pop stuffed with shouty, bad-girl choruses. Unfortunately the second dominates.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Elysium
    Just another solid Pet Shop Boys album.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Coexist
    Coexist is yet another masterpiece of lush asceticism.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    TOY
    Running to 58 minutes, there are inevitable longueurs, too, where the five-piece nod rather than soar. Still, their full immersion convinces.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tempest
    It's his strongest album since Love and Theft in 2001, and still there's no pinning him down.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Orfeo
    Hield's command of her material is unerring and the outcome compelling.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Election Special
    [On Election Special] the first world is in dire straits and it's all the fault of Republicans – architects of Guantánamo and unfeeling people who tie their dogs to the roofs of their cars then drive off (Mutt Romney's Blues).
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Centipede Hz
    Amid pell-mell songs such as standout Today's Supernatural there is rarely a pause to draw breath on this fine follow-up.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sun
    It will be a relief to most that Sun glows with hard-won contentment.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Come of Age
    [Come of Age] starts off promisingly enough, the infectious No Hope recalling the Libertines jangle of If You Wanna... But from then on there is precious little to set them apart from the retro-indie pack.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bouger le Monde!
    This second outing presents a richer, more percussive sound, albeit one still shot through with the zinging pyrotechnics of tin-can guitar.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mature Themes
    Ultimately it just makes for frustrating listening.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Contact
    Shingai Shoniwa's vocals supply enough personality to elevate them above standard winebar fare.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Antibalas
    Their fifth album is rich and intoxicating: billows of brass, sinuous guitar hooks and squiggles of hammond organ bubble up pungently from the stew.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hot Cakes
    An 11-track galumph through feelgood rockularisms.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Four
    At its best this is the sound of a band rediscovering what made them so special in the first place.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Havoc and Bright Lights
    For the most part these songs are entirely lacking in bite, dragging through limp soft rock and even softer sentiments.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Steam Days
    Midway through Steam Days, Harnser does dark pizzicato things befitting a 90s warehouse rave, while elsewhere, the analogue-melting-into-digital influence of Four Tet is palpable.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    America
    A musical reaction to strife and scandal that comes from a quarter where pretension often trumps fun, America is that unlikeliest of things: a feelgood summer album.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Head Is an Animal
    The sextet's debut album is too empty to excite, its odder, quieter moments all but smothered by windy rock. A shame.
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