Village Voice's Scores

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For 764 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 47% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 50% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 5.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 The Naked Truth
Lowest review score: 10 God Says No
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 517 out of 764
  2. Mixed: 199 out of 764
  3. Negative: 48 out of 764
764 music reviews
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    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Pretty Toney Album
    "Hip-hop soul" is supposed to be for r&b singers, but Ghostface's latest redefines the term.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Private Press
    The record sounds like it came a year or so after Endtroducing--which is to say, it goes a little deeper in summoning Gothic textures and awesome drum samples, and arrives as a delayed, well-fitting follow-up to a landmark.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You Are Free
    You Are Free demonstrates a subtle, hopeful change in sentiment--a relief from Cat Power's melancholy.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
    Godspeed's records will either blow your head off or leave you shrugging, depending on where your personal quest for freedom is taking you.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Penance Soiree
    Searing white light and scrappy vocals are replaced by the druggy stomping and weighty grooves of '70s cosmic metal, yet the band's alluringly youthful braggadocio remains.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Get Wet
    After one listen to I Get Wet, you'll swear you've heard it before... but somehow, you've never heard anything like it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One Word Extinguisher
    The rhythms have grown more techy and layered, wilding with drill-happy 16ths (on "Busy Signal," he and L.A.'s like-minded Daedalus cut up a human beatbox then go machine-gunning with piano notes), or throbbing and crackling out of an electronic ether (the radio-transmission lurch of "Detchibe") as though he's been studying glitchy Europeans.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amnesiac
    Where Kid A couldn't help but be seen as a reaction to fame and intense scrutiny, Amnesiac illuminates what Radiohead are now, and will likely be for a long time: an evasive, willfully experimental rock band who feel uncomfortable in their own skins.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Since We Last Spoke
    RJ and his sampler wander the record crates of shared memory, and come up with progressive rock and Northern soul songs that have little to do with anybody's idea of revival.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fever To Tell
    Guitarist Nick Zinner's greatest advantage over his contemporaries is his complete lack of an attention span.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kid A
    It's... really different. And oblique oblique oblique: short, unsettled, deliberately shorn of easy hooks and clear lyrics and comfortable arrangements. Also incredibly beautiful.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    TP-2.com
    TP-2.com is a magnum opus of the genre, milking both Kelly's recent reflection and his baser inclinations for all they're worth.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vespertine
    Vespertine is an album for small curtained establishments, for taking your "little ghetto blaster" onto back streets, for intimate and precious occasions.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Now Here Is Nowhere
    Too bad FM radio still has its head stuck up its pre-1980 ass, 'cause the album is so FM—so non-single-driven AOR—but in such a cool robot-from-the-2004-future-sent-to-save-rock-in-the-past sort of way.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Power In Numbers
    Jurassic 5 value commitment over calculation; that is, they keep it real.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers
    The record floats a Leonard Cohen-Robert Smith vibe or two, but references fail this outfit.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fuckin A
    Fuckin A outsexes the nuevo new-wavers with its dry-hump hum.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blue Cathedral
    The trick to their aural freak-out is not too different from those in the past; it hides in the arcane black box manned by Noel Harmonson. The echoplex, with its Möbius strip of tape loop, warps the guitars and yowls like parallel sheets of Mylar and sheets of acid, focusing the entire band into ray-gun pulses that match the pounding of Utrillo Belcher.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    blink-182
    I miss the penis jokes, I sincerely do, but when life's little fuckups sound like cosmic conundrums--and here I'm referring not just to the new disc's big choruses but, more importantly, to its snaking structures and unrelentingly urgent harmonies--now-and-then comparisons fail.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kill The Moonlight
    The arrangements, referencing indie-rock more than participating in it, pile on heft to the small-life tragedies: Matt Brown's sax toughens up Spoon's welterweight ranking, while [Eggo] Johanson's piano gives it roots, rag, and bonus rhythm.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Now
    Maxwell continues to delve into the sensuality that drove 1996's spacious Urban Hang Suite as well as '97's often over-decorated Embrya, but with a newly pared-back attack. He's in top-notch voice...
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ONoffON
    MoB trounce obsolescence because their typical peak moment is a flash of hard truth about a situation, a bolt of clarity about action to be taken.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Soft Bulletin
    The Lips may have been inspired by the easy-listening craze, but the seeker's quality within their music tugs against that style's instinctive cheapening of sentiment.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room On Fire
    Great, better even than the last.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Evening Of My Best Day
    Her magnetism radiates as powerfully as ever.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uh Huh Her
    Uh Huh Her is as discrete--and ravishing--as her other works.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Is This It?
    If you like one Strokes song, you'll like their whole album.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nellyville
    A great pop album that reconciles his sudden wealth, attachment to home, and desire to rule the world.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Real New Fall L.P. (Formerly Country On The Click)
    What makes Real New real good is that it's got more of the really good shit.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nocturama
    Cave's molasses ballads take you to a warm spot where the big bad world's cynicism gets disabled and the numb parts thaw.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Birth Of A Prince
    It's as esoteric as you'd expect RZA to be. But it's also more Wu.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Play
    A perfect blend of sacred and secular--exactly what Moby's been looking for all along.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Decoration Day
    Darker, more personal than political, Decoration Day rocks easier and rolls harder than Southern Rock Opera, but nevertheless proves beyond a doubt that the DBT engine's got enough horsepower to keep on.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Donnas Turn 21
    A punk-rock attitude and metal licks are all that are necessary for these four chicks to show the world what they want. Turn 21 is way heavier than the bubble-yum power-chord punch-punk they started out with—you know, the kind of three-minute tunes that came so easily when you were rehearsing after school for your first big show. But when they want to, the Donnas can still pull it all out and go Mano.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
    Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is basically a good album, even a great album if you're in the mood, though if you listen to a lot of hip-hop (or house music or basement bhangra or any other genre not dominated by white people), it probably won't be the most extraordinary album you'll hear all month.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cee-Lo Green Is The Soul Machine
    There are chakra-smacking pleasures here that could only have come from an artist of Cee-Lo's expansiveness.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rancid [2000]
    Their new record rules, but in the party-punk, young-dumb-full-of-aplomb manner of their eponymous debut and the following year's Let's Go--not in the guitar-often-on-the-offbeat, more mannered manner of . . . And Out Come the Wolves (1995) and Life Won't Wait (1998).
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Showtime
    A brash, dazzling dispatch from a parallel universe.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Real Gone
    The result is a kind of compactness: a guttural groove so tight it helps Waits come off as a giant.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    C'mon C'mon
    Only the tragic decision to duet with former employer Don Henley mars the ride.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gold Medal
    Their craft has gotten way deeper than hey-ho blitzkrieg bop.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground
    It is frankly sentimental music, lost in memory, full of mistakes. Give it a chance and it will take you backward to a time when you believed in something that you don't believe in anymore.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seven Swans
    His beliefs take periodic diva turns, but Seven Swans is still far more preoccupied with the banjo than God: Stevens's tenderly picked chords fly higher than any golden harp, and his delicate, lapping vocals lovingly complement all that tinny stroking.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Grind Date
    A superbly sequenced set chock-full of clever entendres, oozing with existentialisms on par with those of Buhloone Mindstate and De La Soul Is Dead.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Turn On The Bright Lights
    If I like them because they remind me of eating bad bathtub mescaline in the woods and listening to Cure singles, well, that'll do. You might like them for completely different reasons.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Grand Don't Come For Free
    What hasn't gone away is Skinner's ability to put you right there, in the middle of the action, and that goes for his production as well as his lyrics.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Madvillainy
    An outlandishly imaginative collaboration.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    stellastarr*
    Too bad John Hughes isn't making the kind of movies he used to, because stellastarr*'s self-titled debut is a prom soundtrack worthy of Ducky.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You Are The Quarry
    The Moz croon is more succulent than ever, and the music productively splits the difference between Your Arsenal's thrusting butchness and Vauxhall & I's voluptuous enervation.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chain Gang Of Love
    While a certain sameness sets in after minute 30, glittering amid the downtuning are perfect bazooka pop songs, both bubblegum and firepower.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    College Dropout
    West's witty, self-produced solo debut, College Dropout, frolics in this space between should and can, between playful hyper-awareness and young, willful naïvete.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Margerine Eclipse
    The music is so sunny and luminous it's practically ablaze, radiating positive energy from all angles.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Medulla
    Where 2001's Vespertine was erotic, Medulla is reflexive and awestruck.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With The Lights Out
    So, in theory, this big Christmas stocking of demos, B sides, compilation tracks, and curiosities is mostly useful for its historical value, as context. The context, it turns out, rules.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One Beat
    One Beat is ruthless with SuperGlue riffs that reach back a decade or more, from the Go-Gos pogo of "Oh!" to the stuttering Cure guitars of "The Remainder" to the Buzzcocks toolings of "Hollywood Ending."
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I'm Lonely (And I Love It) [EP]
    With the fabulously synthetic surfaces forming a cozy cocoon around Merritt's reflexive cynicism, the new FBH EP is a shiny, acidic counterpoint to the twilit wallow of [6ths album] Hyacinths.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Release
    Release sounds at once like a last gasp and a reinvention, which makes it all the more moving.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Great Destroyer
    Destroyer simmers with life in all of its noisy, tuneful excess.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Purple Haze
    Intricacy and economy rarely cohabitate in a rapper's flow, but Cam is a model of both, packing an obscene number of rhyming syllables into each line, and sustaining the effect for lengthy runs.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blue Eyed In The Red Room
    Blue Eyed... pegs him as a nimble architect of texture and melody, chiseling experimental forms into something refined.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room Noises
    The spine of nearly every one of their grainy black songs glows with a luminous vocal melody.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    End Of Love
    It's sweet and sad and frequently hilarious.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Arular
    Not for a moment does the violence seem vindictive, sadistic, or pleasurable. It's a fact of life to be triumphed over, with beats and tunelets stolen or remembered or willed into existence.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Massacre
    It is hands-down the most diabolically sensous collection of baby-making gangsta music since Pac's All Eyez.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Silent Alarm
    Bloc Party borrow the soaring melodic guitar lines of Television and sinuous noodling of New Order and the Cure to add a lushness that makes these songs sonically beautiful as well as rhythmically aggressive.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lullabies To Paralyze
    They still cuss (in case you for-fucking-got), and they still gab about drinking and screwing and dabbing their noses in the c-c-c-c-c-cocaine, so all's good in that regard.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alligator
    The rest of the band plays straight man, setting up Berninger's punchlines and peeling him off the floor at the end of the night.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The First Lady
    Her tightest set yet.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Forgotten Arm
    The songs on The Forgotten Arm are too engaging to dismiss their familiarity.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1988
    Blueprint is the antidote to 12 months of Kanye overexposure. His gritty beats pour sand in West's glossy modernist Vaseline, and his rhymes have the anti-anti-intellectual attitude of a loudmouth braggart you'd be proud to have on your quiz bowl team.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mezmerize
    Mezmerize should be enough to keep A.D.D.-ers occupied for six months.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Be
    West presents Common with a real challenge: rich rhythmic compositions that demand equally vivid verses. The elder MC responds with sharp Polaroid poetry, and the result of their collaboration is an uncluttered journalistic counterpoint to the rambling memoir that is The College Dropout.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    OK Cowboy
    Listening to it from start to finish is so bracing it's overwhelming; it sounds like what it would feel like to drink six cups of black coffee chased down with a bucket of ice water.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    X&Y
    Unusually accomplished, fresh, and emotional.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Supernature
    Supernature is their most radio-friendly work yet.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Why Should The Fire Die?
    With any luck (and some marketing muscle), this excellent album will find the Dashboard Confessional fans it deserves.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hypermagic Mountain
    Underneath all the scuzz and spasm, though, they're a groove band, hustling a hard-edged experimentalism you don't have to work hard to enjoy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ten Thousand Fists
    The best mainstream metal release since Judas Priest's Angel of Retribution.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Cadillac
    She emerges with her genius for genre-bending intact.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Congotronics 2: Buzz'N'Rumble From The Urb'N'Jungle
    The pace isn't all breakneck; vocal approaches range from blanket chanting to raucous call-and-response, and some stretches are plain-gasp--pretty.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living
    These tunes function like dispatches sent from the front lines back to chums stuck in Nowheresville; he's updated his characters and settings, but Skinner's working-class fascination with humanity's endearing fallibility is still his thematic calling card.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pick A Bigger Weapon
    Their low-slung rhythms imagine what might have happened if Reagan-era Prince had been less into getting some action and more into kicking up some activism, or if P-Funk had dabbled in politics as well as psychedelics.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Boxing Mirror
    Subtract [a few tracks] and Los Lobos could've made this album if they, too, got John Cale to produce. That's a compliment to all involved.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    News And Tributes
    Their latest one-ups the competition with punk that's theatrical and unrefined, melodic but treacle-free.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Big Bang
    Busta's best record yet.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Audience's Listening
    The Audience's Listening is not only witty and lighthearted, but also artfully constructed, and you can hear the depth in its machinations.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Food & Liquor
    As for that perpetual hip-hop debate as to whether an MC is better served by his beats or his words, the Chicago rapper is deft enough in both arenas that you could carry these lyrics around in your head for days... while message boards light up with claims that hip-hop's first truly great instrumental album lies embedded somewhere in all this.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Black Swan
    As profound as anything in his oeuvre.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like Red On A Rose
    2006's uncanniest country record.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
    This is nightmare music--a blue-collar purgatory made of American mythology and populated by its grotesques.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Good, The Bad & The Queen
    The music, however lean, is the most poignant vision Albarn's devout Anglo-centrism has offered: a beautifully dark, boozy, overcast dream of London, cinematic in its scope and careful in its craft.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pocket Symphony
    The mood is lulling, narrative, and pictorial even when the lyrics disappear—all subtly melodic and gloriously smudged.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
    Whether it inspires bosom-heaving, jersey-rending, or chopper-flagging, Explosions in the Sky will have true believers again faint with praise.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ash Wednesday
    At its best, Ash Wednesday recalls the command of Arcade Fire's Funeral, as Perkins finds empathy through his whimsy-fueled, sad-bastard songs of experience.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    23
    23 is exactly what we've come to expect from this trio: a tension-filled exploration of the human psyche, blistering but still atmospheric.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Twelve
    Smith shifts much of her focus subtly away from the instrumentation and toward a song's intention and lyrics, with often revelatory results.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Don't Mess With The Dragon
    You could always dance to Ozo's beats, but this time they supply more hip-churning swing than alt-rock stomp.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
    A conceptual wonder.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Fragile Army
    The Fragile Army actually has substance—thematically, musically, and lyrically.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Easy Tiger
    The lived-in songs and careful presentation of Easy Tiger make for one of the strongest records of his second career as a solo artist.
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