The Telegraph (UK)'s Scores

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For 1,234 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 63% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 33% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 77
Highest review score: 100 All Born Screaming
Lowest review score: 20 Killer Sounds
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 880 out of 1234
  2. Mixed: 352 out of 1234
  3. Negative: 2 out of 1234
1234 music reviews
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    • 100 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Revolver Special Edition (Super Deluxe) [Box Set]
    The new version certainly sounds fuller, brighter and deeper, but unless you are a committed audiophile with studio standard hi-fi, most listeners could achieve a similar experience by turning up the volume, or perhaps investing in a pair of decent headphones. All interest therefore lies in extra tracks, which are not so much outtakes as works in progress – as the Beatles settled on arrangements, they would continually build on their chosen version. ... The truth is that the Beatles released everything they considered worthy whilst they were together, leaving nothing of outstanding quality in the vault.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [50th Anniversary Edition Deluxe Version]
    [Giles] Martin and co-engineer Sam Okell have done a loving job, getting away from some of the oddities of the familiar stereo mix done by Abbey Road engineers. ... It is like seeing a favourite movie again in high definition. It doesn't replace the original, it enhances it.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Abbey Road [50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition]
    Giles Martin (son of George) has created an immaculate remix but all it really does is separate and boost sounds so that they can punch their weight alongside modern recordings on digital streaming platforms. It sounds good, but then it always did. ... What this painstakingly assembled 50th anniversary release demonstrates is that you can’t improve on perfection.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966
    The Cutting Edge allows fans to bear witness to perhaps the most astonishing explosion of language and sound in rock history, a new approach to song being forged before our very ears.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fetch the Bolt Cutters
    Apple’s lyric writing is of the highest standard, even as it moves into the abstractions of her depression incantation Heavy Balloon (“I spread like strawberries/ I climb like peas and beans/ I’ve been sucking it in so long/ That I’m busting at the seams”). Her melodiousness holds together these strangely structured songs, whilst the boldness of her unusual arrangements forces you to adjust your ears and delve deeper into what she is trying to convey. ... This is an album that conveys one woman’s rage, vulnerability, confusion and wisdom in ways that we haven’t quite heard before.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sound System [Box Set]
    The content is lovingly packaged in a box neatly dressed-up as one of those giant beat boxes hipsters used to lug around before the advent of the Sony Walkman and the digital revolution that followed.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Pimp A Butterfly
    [A] bravura masterpiece. There is no sugar rush of digital synthetic beats and radio-friendly hooks. This is a dense, intricate mesh of free-flowing jazz, deep Seventies funk and cut-up hip hop with a verbose, hyper-articulate rapper switching up styles and tempos to address contemporary racial politics in a poetic narrative built around a long dark night of the soul.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ghosteen
    A long, sad, brooding mediation on grief, the 17th album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is simultaneously their loveliest and most terrible.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fountain Baby
    Amaarae – real name Ama Serwah Genfi – has crafted and compiled 14 captivating and refreshing tunes, touching on topics from sensuality to spirituality.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Smithsonian Folkways Collection [Box Set]
    A brilliant tribute album, showcasing properly Lead Belly's cultural legacy.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    From DNA’s punchy electro mantra about identity to LOVE’s tender sing-song reggae pop meditation on fickle emotions, DAMN is an album of surface sheen and hidden depths, where words and music operate in beautiful synchronicity, a constantly unfolding dance that lends each new approach a sense of investigation and revelation. It is dazzling.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rough and Rowdy Ways
    At its heart, this is a serious work, with an underlying somberness. ... Almost 60 years since we first heard from him, the old protest singer is still composing extraordinary anthems for our changing times.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 1984-2014 [Box Set]
    If you were enchanted by Skeleton Tree’s other-worldly sadness, Lovely Creatures offers an extraordinary illustration of Cave’s restless creativity. It leaves you relishing the possibility that the best is still to come.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Skeleton Tree
    The album is a melancholic masterpiece not for the fainthearted.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    It's certainly good to have West's unique talent back in music, but this ambitious behemoth may be easier to admire than to listen to.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Motomami
    The pure beauty and emotion of Rosalia’s vocals and the sensational grooviness of her rhythms all speak for themselves, offering a fantastically fresh take on Latin flavours and modern urban pop.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Desire, I Want To Turn into You
    She has drawn comparison with Kate Bush and Bjork, not because she sounds like them, but because she has a similar blend of extraordinary vocal ability, florid imagination, and genre-bending boldness. Desire is the album where it all comes together for this late blooming art-pop siren.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Golden Xplosion
    This isn't mere cleverness, it's instinctive musicality, buoyed up by three other fine players.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blur 21
    The five and a half hours of unreleased demos/live recordings do give a warmly inclusive insider's feel but there's nothing I'd listen to more than a couple of times.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Supernova
    In lesser hands, an album that at times sounds like R2D2 breakdancing in an industrial spin-dryer might make for trying company. Yet, for all their Day-Glo stridency, Nova Twins not only know how to write songs, but how to arrange them too.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    Lemonade is Beyoncé’s finest hour.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976) [Box Set]
    The Gouster [is] raised from the archives as the centre piece of a handsome new 12-CD box set, Who Can I Be Now? (1974-76). ... Finally given its moment in the light, The Gouster is unlikely to become a belated part of the canon, but it is nevertheless a welcome testament to the real heart beating at the centre of Bowie’s pop genius.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
    The sound of the album is deliberately vibrant and varied.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All Things Must Pass [50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition] [Box Set]
    There’s a directness, freshness and intimacy to these performances that puts the late, great Beatle George right in your ear, untarnished by time. Not all things must pass, it seems.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    You Want It Darker
    Leonard Cohen’s 14th studio album is a bleak masterpiece for hard times from pop’s longest-serving poet.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Channel Orange
    Channel Orange is as dazzling as it is baffling, rarely staying still long enough to get a grip on.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle
    The movement back and forth between the chiselled simplicity of the core Suite itself and the freedom of the improvisations that spin out from them creates a sense of epic scale. It’s a more than worthy addition to the Coltrane recorded legacy.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Palo Alto: Live at Palo Alto High School
    On this album he is in especially playful and inventive form, perhaps because at a high school gig with no critics around he could afford to take risks. The numbers are nearly all those Monk standards familiar from numerous well-known recordings and endlessly replayed by later pianists, but they are reimagined in ways that make them seem utterly fresh.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Divine Symmetry: The Journey to Hunky Dory [Box Set]
    Divine Symmetry shows that this metamorphosis didn’t happen without a good deal of huffing and puffing. Therein lies its intrigue, as the groundwork is revealed. ... It’s a fascinating journey.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Carnage
    Carnage is infused with profound and almost inescapable grief. But as this particularly audacious singer-songwriter grapples with isolation, loneliness, loss and the hard emotional graft of endurance, all set against a backdrop of apocalyptic threat, the personal becomes universal. Carnage may just be the greatest lockdown album yet.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Melodrama
    There is a palpable depth of feeling and meaning in her songs, operating on both personal and universal levels, delivered with subtle dynamism and dizzying imagination. She is a breath of fresh air with the power of a hurricane.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    COWBOY CARTER
    Clever, sexy, angry, soulful, witty and fantastically bold, Beyoncé stirs up the western and puts the you know what into country. I think it’s a masterpiece, but don’t expect to hear it at the Grand Ole’ Opry any time soon.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
    The most accessible album from Mike Hadreas (aka Perfume Genius) to date, without sacrificing any of his otherworldly strangeness and rich emotionalism. ... It is an album of vast depths that will reward a lot of listening.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Studio Albums 1968-1979 [Boxset]
    This anthology provides a marvellous opportunity to revisit Mitchell in her glorious prime. Indispensable.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Island Years [Box Set]
    It's expensive but for Martyn fans it will offer hours and hours of fresh enjoyment of one of British folk's true greats.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Renaissance
    This is a vast superclub of an album. But for all its inventiveness, its flavours exist within fairly narrow parameters. Still, these songs will be blasted out of cars, at house parties, in hotel rooms and on dance floors for years to come.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Weekend
    Blue Weekend both refines that sound and takes it in dizzying new directions. Rowsell’s lyrics have never been more absorbing in their examination of friendship, heartache, anxiety, acceptance and self-confidence.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Guts
    Unfortunately, most of Guts sounds like a simple continuation of Sour – there is little musical growth or thematic change, with Making the Bed and Pretty Isn’t Pretty seeming like mere overhangs from her debut
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    S.O.S.
    It’s an expansion of her wonderfully experimental R&B, with all the candour listeners expect from this masterful songwriter. ... SOS is well worth the wait.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Carrie & Lowell
    At every turn he unfolds the fists of self-pity into upturned palms of generosity.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Punisher
    Bridgers’s modernity is actually a kind of timelessness, yet delivered in an emotional and lyrical lexicon that speaks directly to this moment.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    An American Trilogy: Looks Like Rain/'Frisco Mabel Joy/Heaven Help The Child
    This fabulous box-set finally unites the trilogy. Tragic, poignant, yet uplifting, Newbury's tough-guy singing will often inexorably reduce the listener to tears.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rio [Live]
    There are good things here, but nothing especially new.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    1989 (Taylor's Version)
    Swift’s remake is astonishing in its exactitude, another reminder that she is a star of a different magnitude with a mastery of her own talents and a bold business acumen. .... All of the new songs are satisfyingly deft and clever, replete with sinuous melodies, burbling synths and agitated percussion that correspond with the updated eighties stylings of the original. .... The one new song that really punches its weight with Swift’s original 1989 singles is the razor sharp Is It Over Now?
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
    There are plenty of artists who make music occupying the same space as Mitski – reflective, weepy, introspective – but she stands alone in her lyricism and heart; on this album, she also seems less frightened by the potential fruits of her own talent.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Could Be Texas
    With This Could Be Texas, Leeds-based quartet English Teacher have crafted a record really quite striking in its lyrical and sonic ambition.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    the record
    The album sounds like something knocked out almost live in a spirit of excitement, rather than with objective vision or commercial muscle. I’d be hard pressed to assert that this (unlike CS&N) amounts to more than the sum of its parts, rather than a celebration of great parts. But it is impossible to argue that as a group, Boygenius are pretty super.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    St. Vincent
    These songs are the strongest she’s written to date, with terrific hooks and melodies throughout.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Honey
    Real emotion never gets old. Honey is moving in more senses than one, a hypnotically groovy dance floor opus, set to the beat of Robyn’s tender heart.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Kiwanuka
    Ultimately, this is an album in which a troubled spirit seeks the relief of music to mesmerising and charged effect. And that is timeless.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    That! Feels Good!
    As a follow-up to What’s Your Pleasure?, it’s inevitably a little doomed, lacking that record’s magical conditions: the unexpectedly fresh energy amid the lethargy of lockdown. Still, after Pleasure’s anticipatory teasing, That! Feels Good! offers a perfectly competent climax.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nevermind [20th Anniversary Edition]
    It's an album undiminished by time, that can still make me want to throw myself around an imaginary mosh pit or curl up in a fetal ball.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Love You Jennifer B
    Ellery and Skye have managed cohesion amid the cacophony. I Love You Jennifer B is a dramatic outing that combines the modern, the classical and everything else in between.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Heart Under
    Just Mustard have said they wanted their second album, Heart Under, to make the listener feel like they are driving through a tunnel with the windows down. And on this noisy, wonderfully chaotic record, the band seems to have nailed it. ... The inventive beats make you want to dance.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Natural Brown Prom Queen
    While this album invigorates and intrigues, in future I would hope to hear her expand lyrically, while exploring the hauntingly melancholic sounds her violin can produce. For now, at least, the defiant joy her work evokes is a stimulating jolt to the senses.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Fade in Time
    This is a terrific album, full of dignity.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shortly After Takeoff
    Adopting a very domestic lyrical setting whilst grappling bravely with big issues, Shortly After Takeoff offers ideal lockdown listening, a touching black comedy of emotional isolation.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Chris
    For a flag-waving LGBTQ artist riding the transgender express, the secret of Letissier's crossover charm is that she never lets polemic get in the way of a slick hook. It may be pop with a purpose, but first and foremost it is pop with a damn catchy chorus.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tigers Blood
    Another beautiful slice of country-tinged magic that never descends into nostalgia.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All Born Screaming
    Clark never makes the mistake of letting an instinct for experiment detract from her elegant pop songcraft. All Born Screaming is an art-rock classic for the ages.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dear Scott
    Shackled by its own turgid competency, Dear Scott fizzes with all the life of a demo tape recorded in a local community hall double-booked with a bingo night. No matter how loud you turn up the volume, it still sounds quiet. It sounds uncomfortably naked, too.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Riderless Horse
    Riderless Horse is far from an easy listen for obvious reasons. But hearing the 56-year-old Nastasia describe and attempt to understand these stark events is never less than compelling.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Women in Music, Pt. III
    Women In Music Part III just hits it from top to bottom. It is the album in which Haim at last fulfil their potential, a summery California pop rock treat in which the blissful ambience is backed up with emotional grit and substance.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    folklore
    These are beautifully turned songs filled with empathy for downtrodden characters battered by life but always ready to fight back, bridging social distance with langorous melodies and deep emotion. The lockdown may have been a terrible moment for music and musicians, but it has resulted in Taylor’s Swift’s most powerful and mature album to date.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Song for Our Daughter
    Her most measured and mature work, and perhaps the most accessible to those as yet
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Future Nostalgia
    Not every track is a solid smash of that wit, brio and sheer quality, but even minor tracks such as Cool and Hallucinate keep up the melody and movement with a spirit of sensual fun that would make Kylie Minogue weak with envy, whilst monsters such as Physical and the slinky Pretty Please are going to have Gaga pulling her pop socks up.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Divers
    For the most part Divers is a magic carpet ride that finds Newsom still spinning wild (and generally impenetrable) interwoven yarns with the jaw-dropping dexterity of a modern-day Scheherazade.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    30
    This is certainly her strongest album yet, a work of catharsis, therapy and succour. It does what pop music is greatest at: gathering up emotions, focusing them and pouring them out to songs that everybody can sing, but few can sing quite as well as Adele.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The New Faith
    The New Faith is hymnal, rich with chants and layered, organic instrumentation. It is deeply and spiritually moving, vibrant and celebratory. Revelatory, even.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bad as Me
    The wild, rattling bawlers are each distinctively turbocharged with reckless and richly textured energy, while the ballads run poignantly on their rims, leaking emotion.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Moon Shaped Pool
    Radiohead's most melodically accessible collection, almost meditative in its ethereal mid-tempo loveliness, yet shot through with the kind of edgy details that never quite let a listener relax. It is chill-out music to put your nerves on edge.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
    Her magnificent fourth album demonstrates that she is one of the best rappers in the world, period.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Big Time
    Whatever Big Time’s genre, it is a mature and accomplished album; a requiem yet also a quiet celebration. It’s probably the most honest album you’ll hear all year.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Originals
    Creating songs for female artists, he fully (if somewhat licentiously) inhabits their personas, deadpanning about greeting a lover in his camisole over the electro pulse of Apollonia’s Make-Up. The highest compliment that could be paid to Originals is that if Prince had released it in the Eighties, no one would have batted an eyelid.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Angels & Queens, Pt. 1
    As a package, Angels & Queens Part I is a soothing and soulful antidote to life’s slings and arrows, of which there are many right now.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Magdalene
    Magdalene is a magnificently twisted sci-fi torch album, an enthralling account of love, loss, heartbreak and recovery. It is erotic and neurotic, confounding and revelatory, summoning the spirits of such iconoclastic talents as David Bowie, Kate Bush and Björk while affirming its own unique personality.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Letter to You
    Its beauty lies in the intuitive simpatico of the playing, with different elements rising to the surface at just the right moment. It used to take them months in the studio to achieve this blend. Now these old road warriors can conjure it in a single take.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Undun
    The music is astounding, threading erudite raps through ghetto soul jams and panoramic orchestral interludes.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King's Disease III
    Although King’s Disease III might have some tonal missteps, Nas and Hit-Boy should be applauded for bringing warm soul samples back into hip hop culture at a time of such darkness and uncertainty. This is Godfather: Part III if Michael Corleone retired without all the treachery; music about being comfortable with your place and making it to the other side.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Art Angels
    Art Angels is made of the same dark candy, with even more weird and wonderful flavour combinations. I began to think of songs as three-minute gobstoppers in which layers dissolved unexpectedly.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dawn FM
    Dawn FM is his most ambitious album to date, and one that shows welcome signs of emotional and psychological growth.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hardest Part
    The Hardest Part doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It knows what it is: undisguised, accessible songwriting pulsing with country lifeblood which manages to avoid being swallowed by its own ennui.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Homegrown
    Five of the 12 songs have been previously released in various versions over the years. Collected together with seven previously unheard songs, the effect is to compound the sadness at their core. There a couple of pleasantly throwaway druggy jams to lighten the mood, including the title song and the amusing We Don’t Smoke It. ... I have little doubt it would have been acclaimed in 1975, but it rings just as sweet and true in 2020. Heartbreak never gets old.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    i/o
    This ranks with the very best of Gabriel’s work, which means it is very great indeed. Peter Gabriel is a genius. i/o is a masterpiece. That is all ye need know.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dirty Computer
    Dirty Computer establishes itself as a contender for album of the year, in more ways than one. The witty, interlinked songs tackle subjects that have fuelled much of the discourse around “woke” social consciousness in the age of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blackstar
    It feels as bold and weird as anything in Bowie’s back catalogue, sure to delight some and infuriate others.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Something More Than Free
    Happily, the words are wonderful and Something More Than Free is an album that grows and grows on you. Producer Dave Cobb is in fine action again and gets the best from the settings behind Isbell's effecting voice. Some of the songs are simply splendid.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    M B V
    Those same multilayered textures [in Loveless] are all here, and if anything there are more finely chiselled planes of fresh variation: there is a discipline as well as wildness behind the distortion.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Billion Heartbeats
    The album offers a rousing, belligerently upbeat response to global crisis, albeit at the time of composition they were addressing climate change, environmental activism, the impact of austerity and rise of fascism. ... This is the sound of a group breaking out of their shell and demanding to be heard.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Skellig
    Whatever philosophical conundrums are addressed, the gorgeously staggered harmonies on the chorus of Dares My Heart Be Free offer profound answers in the music itself, a tangible spirit of human connection that warms the cockles of Skellig’s querulous heart.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last Night in the Bittersweet
    Nutini has a voice that could transform any song, riding melodies with lazy restraint until suddenly unleashing notes that would have any throat specialist reaching for their speculum in alarm. On Last Night in the Bittersweet, he sounds like he’s having the time of his life.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    More Love, Less Ego
    [Wizkid's] finest body of work so far, showcasing a maturity and an artistic vision that cements his status as one of the most influential people in pop music today.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Eclipse
    This irresistible album is yet more evidence that London’s musical scene might just be the liveliest in the world.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blonde
    Blonde makes for sensationally beautiful background music that can morph into a bizarre hodgepodge of disparate ideas when you concentrate on bringing it into the foreground.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bootleg Series, Vol. 17: Fragments - Time Out of Mind Sessions 1996-1997
    The joy here is in basking in the creative process, how Dylan chipped away at differing tempos, alternate arrangements and revised lyrics for each composition, ultimately to arrive at the final 11 tracks.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The River & the Thread
    This is an elegant, mature work of a songwriter and performer at the height of her powers.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
    Like our planet, this album is a rare thing of wonder.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    NO THANK YOU
    The brilliance of No Thank You is how Simz uses her brazenly unapologetic narrative to spin out larger points about institutional and generational racism, the danger of business practices indifferent to their human impact, and links all of that to contemporary mental health crises.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vulnicura
    After the wild beach party of 2007’s Volta and the shiny wonders of 2011’s Biophilia, Vulnicura is a windswept trek of a record. But one which gradually repays its difficulties with the raw exhilaration of survival.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Edna
    Drill is a music aimed at dedicated acolytes rather than general listeners. But strip away the lyrics, and the strange mix of electro loops, nervous beats, sad melodies and sci-fi sounds is utterly compelling and contemporary, evidence of a cutting edge local music scene that continues to thrive even with venue doors barred shut.
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