The Observer (UK)'s Scores

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For 2,610 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: 1,224 out of 2610
  2. Mixed: 1,368 out of 2610
  3. Negative: 18 out of 2610
2610 music reviews
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    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hugo
    Like Michael Kiwanuka, Carner’s first two albums were occasionally terrific but his third is a masterpiece.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Americana
    There's plenty to like about Neil Young and Crazy Horse's first work together for nine years, a collection of cover versions of essential American tunes.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    PROTO
    The continuity stressed between body and tool, folk history and future, like the work of Meredith Monk or Björk, lures the listener away from the twin traps of techno-evangelist complacency and technophobic retreat with sweet inspiration.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    RTJ4
    RTJ4 supersizes their outsider aesthetic without squandering any hard-won authenticity. Icy disquisitions on the missing soul of modern America jostle with good-natured boasts from the golden age of hip-hop, yielding a remarkable hit rate.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Songdreaming
    The record’s dreamlike atmosphere is seductive and disquieting; a moving tribute to Albion’s troubled soul.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Angels & Queens
    Every song is a wonder. It is unlikely Angels & Queens will inspire many imitators of its retro-future soul, its damaged doo-wop. It’s simply too good to be copied.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Let Them Eat Chaos
    Perhaps Tempest’s greatest achievement is not to fall prey to the pressure for unnecessary revolution; her work sits more comfortably in the tradition of perfecting the groove, not changing it. That perfection might be illusion, but its pursuit can produce wonderful work, as it has right here.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Big Inner
    Over seven elegant tracks, White and his musicians achieve the kinds of loveliness that Spiritualized, Lambchop, Cat Power and the Beta Band have tilted at, at different times in the past, and quite often missed.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Gigi's Recovery
    At their best, which is often on Gigi’s Recovery, the Murder Capital combine muscular drama and skeletal grace with a confidence that Radiohead would be proud of.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Little Seeds
    Reflective and exuberant by turns, it’s an outstanding album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Murmurations
    It is full of indecipherable songs, swaddling the brutal clarity of the techno DJ-producer duo’s early singles in something unpredictable, off-kilter. Choral vocals make you feel everything from terrified to strangely soothed.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Miles Davis at Newport: 1955-1975 The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4
    Summer is traditionally the season for unearthing treasures from the jazz archives, and this is a real prize.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Promises
    Recorded over the course of five years, this extraordinary collaboration deserves excellent speakers and a soft couch to catch the swooning listener.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blood
    Its 10 songs are stark but powerful, their anguish and insight given a deft, minimalist treatment by producer Kenny Greenberg. ... An aching, moving testimony, beautifully realised.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    uknowhatimsayin¿
    Brown’s storytelling is as witty as ever, with pungent bars that pop like pimples, spattering tracks with quotable filth. His best work by a distance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Small Town Heroes
    Small Town Heroes may mourn victims of violence but it is emphatically a record stuffed with good times.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ghosteen
    Ultimately, all are visions, alternately haunted and comforting. Subtle evolutions in mood and instrumentation come to peaks that are made all the more stunning by their scarcity.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lese Majesty
    Hip-hop is constantly being tweaked and nudged in new directions, but rarely is it reconfigured as radically, and thrillingly, as on this second album from Shabazz Palaces.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Negative Capability
    Comparisons with such late-career highlights as Johnny Cash’s American Recordings albums and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker are inevitable, but Negative Capability really does belong in such exalted company.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tunes 2011-2019
    Bevan has jettisoned the sleep paralysis pop of his early work for something even more dissociated and peripatetic. You might head for the vicious rave of Rival Dealer or Nightmarket’s sumptuous, pealing melody first, to swerve some long, austere, beatless passages, but this is a compilation of rare bravery and beauty.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Believe
    To Believe is heartbreakingly brilliant: a collection of exquisitely assembled songs that appear delicate from a distance before revealing a close-quarters core strength. ... A triumph.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte
    There’s not a weak song here. A genuine pleasure to listen to.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Muna
    Released from both internal and external shackles, Muna feels like phase two for one of pop’s best bands.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    We Buy Diabetic Test Strips
    An exceptional record that deserves your time and headphones.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ignorance
    This is an album whose bone-deep grief sits inside music that’s very easy to tap a toe to.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Riderless Horse
    It’s an unsettlingly raw album, the sparse instrumentation – Nastasia’s soft voice and acoustic guitar, recorded, as ever, by Steve Albini – making her lyrics all the more stark and powerful. ... An astonishingly moving record.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fragments
    With less dissonance and psychedelic experimentation than Jon Hopkins or Four Tet, Fragments may be too care-home comfort for some, but it’s brilliant, wondrous work.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Turn the Car Around
    The band’s intoxicating, questing spirit throbs through the strongest suite of music Coombes has assembled in 20 years.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Summerlong
    In an increasingly fraught world, it’s an unashamedly sunny sound. It makes for a gorgeous record in which to lose yourself for 40 minutes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    For the First Time
    If the interplay between the band’s instruments makes gleeful mincemeat of genre, singing guitarist Isaac Wood’s equally remarkable lyrics regularly float to the top of the mix. Half-spoken, half-sung, they riff on granular scene references (“I told you I loved you in front of Black Midi”) and Gen-Z witticisms, but pack in plenty of timeless tenderness and anomie.
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