Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    This Is Me... Then
    Jennifer Lopez makes albums for the same reasons you and I give holiday gifts to people we don't exactly like: vanity and obligation.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Audioslave
    Less than the sum of their parts, the album and the band don't even amount to an interesting failure, because the known quantities do what they have always done only this time in tandem.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lucky Day
    Lucky Day isn't about transforming the human condition, just about remaining Mr. Lover Lover--the man with a fluid waistline and the promise of good bed time.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stripped
    t's nü-Mariah on mood stabilizers, extended with pseudo-pastiches of semi-popular songs.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Original Pirate Material
    Original Pirate Material is England's first great hip-hop record mostly because it isn't a hip-hop record. It's hard to say exactly what it is.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Happyness
    Thematically it's a less ambitious record than Pelo (and in terms of scale, Pedals), but listen to it as the Navins' Exile in Guyville and its truths are heartbreaking in their weary familiarity.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Power In Numbers
    Jurassic 5 value commitment over calculation; that is, they keep it real.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last DJ
    Tom's not quite so lovable when he's preaching his anti-non-Petty doctrine in a series of songs that often don't rise above the level of mediocrity themselves.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nextdoorland
    It definitely doesn't disgrace the Boys' past, but that might be because Hitchcock's wise enough not to try to upend his classic material.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sea Change
    The most disappointing aspect of this record is that Beck has fallen into the trap of confusing earnestly repeated clichés for personal lyrics.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dirty Dancing
    While it's tempting to write it off as but one more retro paste-up, Swayzak's uncanny sense of texture, timbre, and space justifies an approach that otherwise seems like a drift toward Alzheimer's.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Eve-Olution
    Eve-Olution lacks its predecessors' element of surprise.... On the other hand, for my money, Eve remains in the increasingly scant selection of MCs we don't mind spending an entire album with.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Rush Of Blood To The Head
    Coldplay's new record is a little edgier, trancier, and more conversational than their last. It is called A Rush of Blood to the Head, and in waves and swells of major tunes and frisky then looping time signatures, that's just about the effect it has.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lost In Space
    Lost in Space finds Mann in a rut, albeit one with clear sightlines on relationship stasis, occupational drift, and the balm of (unspecified) addictions.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    We Love Life
    A magnum opus four years in the making, We Love Life is, like This Is Hardcore's epic cold sweat, a disco-nnection record, well stocked with mis-shapes, mistakes, misfits. But Pulp's glamorama has never tingled so invitingly, thanks to the full-body massage administered by producer Scott Walker.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Blacklisted
    Blacklisted is soaked to the bone in rueful wit, luxurious miserablism, and morbid cold sweat—c&w virtues too often reduced to self-pity by lesser latter-day sweethearts of the rodeo.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zoomer
    At times it's a bit like a post-techno Jesus and Mary Chain, burying tambourine rattle and two-chord bangers beneath an avalanche of clicks and static.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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."
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kissin' Time
    At times smart, sometimes schlocky, and frequently both, there's an unmistakable hit-seeking aura to Kissin' Time that flirts with Tina Turner's Private Dancer career-resurrection formula without stooping to be conquered by it.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Miss Fortune
    The record is a female country album for people who dislike female country albums. It's not too smooth, too shrill, or too Stepford.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Daybreaker
    Like Trailer Park, her first full-length, the new Daybreaker is less about melody and being lovely than about instrumentation and experimentation with the elements--electronic, acoustic, and lyrical.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Reanimation
    Why didn't they travel this far out of the box initially?
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Rising
    He sounds as genuinely hurt and confused as any of us, but if he's gained any insight into that hurt or confusion, he's not about to express it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fashionably Late
    Nearly everything on Fashionably Late has a pristinely modulated solemnity, a refined, literal-minded perfection.... In a sense, Fashionably Late is too good--too enamored of the aesthetic straight and narrow, of reverse sentimentality--for its own good.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unleashed
    There is care and artistry throughout.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Highly Evolved
    The Vines have trouble faking both the depth of feeling and the noisome mischief that good garage-punk requires, and the two rote Britpop numbers they tack on don't help.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
    The lyrics are often corny and thin.
Page: