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
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Naked Truth
    An easy contender for best rap record of the year.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar
    A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar will be the album of the Indian summer, warm and wistful all the way through.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Broken By Whispers
    Fey, coy, yet rich and deep, track after track on Broken by Whispers emits an exacting, well-crafted melodrama. Subtle electro touches only add to the wondrous acoustic guitars, wondrous and breathy declarations of love, and wondrous early morning seaside atmosphere. Those who balk at dreamy-boy nakedness will want to skip the bathos, but such people are called Americans...
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Marshall Mathers LP
    The ever increasing variety in Eminem's voice (drawled Southern-bounce cadences, impatiently curt throaty staccatos, flat Beck-like deadpans, crying and screaming) somehow feels completely conversational, and the musical backdrop (calypso/Caribbean, Gothic etherea, jiggy disco evolving into P.M. Dawn) is frequently, of all things, beautiful.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Renegades
    The most penetrating and engaging album of their career...
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Try This
    Try This dares Pink's huge but hardly guaranteed audience to hear the world her way--without wasting one moment on indulgent experimentation, rote grandstanding, or retreats into conformism.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Morph The Cat
    Fagen's triumph of rendering post–9-11 New York most recalls how perfectly Steely Dan caught LA on 1980's 'Gaucho.'
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Love And Theft
    The voice you hear on "Love and Theft" is not that of the cocky young rock star who wrecked folk by simply strapping on an electric guitar, nor is it the vengeful and crotchety man who dripped Blood on the Tracks. This Dylan is older, wiser, and grousier, but sweeter, more sanguine if still unsettled too.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Red Thread
    Arab Strap mix the stoic, set-permanently-at-dawn folk whispers of last year's Elephant Shoe with the beat-friendly sense of their best early singles: "The First Big Weekend," "(Afternoon) Soaps," "Cherubs." The music sheds its amateur charm for the sound of a band in control of its art and its drum machines.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Take Care
    Take Care is a carefully crafted bundle of contradictory sentiments from a conflicted rapper who explores his own neuroses in as compelling a manner as anyone not named Kanye West.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
    Where Dre twists Prince remnants to his own astroboyish amorous ends, Big Boi holds up OutKast's P-Funk revival tent.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Late Registration
    Each of these songs offers more exquisite details than I could earmark in twice this space, many of them literary, which the English prof's dropout son rightly claims as his calling. But secret brilliance is more likely to emerge from the sops to his hip-hop base.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    69 Love Songs
    Like a great romance, it's consistently lovable even when stupid or frustrating, and its best moments are absolutely breathtaking.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Two Against Nature
    The music turns Aja's fusion-pop mode jumpier and snappier, sourer and trickier and less soothing--postfunk, whether anyone will admit it or not.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Fool
    Their stupendous debut full-length, The Fool, triangulates Moon Pix–era Cat Power's ghostly, morbid, gorgeous bedroom folk with the Slits' lithe, muscular post-punk.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    Kanye is rapping and singing better and with more tenacity than he ever has on Fantasy, but also less often, wisely allowing others to speak for him-every single guest artist on this album senses the moment and rises to the occasion.
    • 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.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Neon Golden
    Album number five dwarfs its predecessors because the members have started treating this group as the sun around which their musical projects must inevitably revolve, and the home to which they must return.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Phrenology
    Phrenology reveals pulsating growth--a surprising bump on our skulls that some didn't feel before, while others banged their grapes wishing for it.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Stankonia
    When talking about an album as multilayered, thematically diverse, and sonically rich as OutKast's Stankonia, though, the best thing is to boil it down to its essentials, its influences, its approaches. You know, the uppercase conceptual stuff. This album, the acclaimed Atlanta duo's fourth and best, contains so many hummable hooks, so many snap-your-head beats, so many break-'em-out-and-talk-about-'em metaphors, that it's easy to get lost in the sauce.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Employment
    Kaiser Chiefs flow so well that even given the nonstop electro-like riffs, hooks, and knowingly cornball solos played by guitarist Whitey, the songs as a group can over-egg the pudding as only powerpop can. But as a record-making matter, Employment is nearly without flaws.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dangerous Magical Noise
    Collins's way with a hook has blown up into a stack of tunes that stick, ranging from cranked-up faux-arena rock to spine-shaking rhythm and staccato bounce.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Funeral
    Funeral is a remarkable record, hard to hear at first, then hard to stop hearing.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Out Of The Woods
    A masterpiece showcasing Thorn's voice, songwriting, and taste.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Reminder
    Listening to this thing is like watching a pitcher throw a no-hitter.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Boy In Da Corner
    When Dizzee thinks very deeply--worrying about growing up, about those around him who won't grow up, about dying before he grows up--he sounds like, what else can we call it, the real thing.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rooty
    Yes, it's as good as the last one, maybe better.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Red Dirt Road
    Some of the best country rock in over a decade.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Everything, Everything
    A flat-out incredible live recording... it's Underworld as nonstop high, a disc that for 75 minutes keeps seizing and re-seizing the air.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Extraordinary Machine
    The title track and "Waltz" bookend Extraordinary Machine. Both excel, set to Brion's signature command of crisp, idiomatic, Van Dyke Parks-influenced Hollywood symphonics. But the Elizondo-Kehew tracks top them.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
    The resulting, mercifully final product is, as you might have suspected all along, fantastic, by turns triumphant, defiant, and gleefully crass.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rook
    Rook is great, with an emotional clarity and narrative acuity that makes it one of the year's most rewarding listens.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Youth & Young Manhood
    Youth & Young Manhood is 2003's finest rock debut.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hell Hath No Fury
    Make no mistake: Hell Hath No Fury is a major event.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Show Your Bones
    No, local slump-spotters, this isn't the Yeahs' Room on Fire. Far from it.
    • 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.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    SMiLE
    Whatever it was supposed to achieve originally, right now SMiLE sounds like a beautifully modulated, funny, sometimes unintentional meditation on a failed United States and counterculture, and the lost paradise, real or imagined, of Southern California, and the collapse and reinvention of the male ego.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Woods
    Previous albums have never quite captured those onstage moments when the power they generate seems to catch them unawares, but on The Woods you can hear not only the deliberation in Weiss's eyes as she ponders the exact placement of beat and crash, or Brownstein's bedroom-mirror rock-star poses, but also the stunned grin Tucker can never contain after emitting her most gravity-defiant shrieks.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Pig Lib
    The man has an uncanny ability to transliterate the sounds only record collectors can hear--early Thin Lizzy, for instance --into a passionate ache anyone can love.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Let England Shake
    this time, she has found a middle ground therein, an appropriately murky backdrop as she channels another of her early inspirations: Bob Dylan. Like vintage Bob, Shake pores over history's indignities with a fine-toothed comb.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bon Iver
    Vernon seems torn between selling his lyrics and using his voice as just another emotional cue in the thick mix. But if you're looking for an album to get lost in, who knew a guy previously feted for stripped-down "realness" would provide the year's best?
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Destroyer's Rubies
    The stupendous Destroyer's Rubies, recorded with a full, swaggering band, is maybe his best and certainly his least theoretical album.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hip Hop Is Dead
    A Dante-channeling journey through the many diverse facets of hip-hop.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lady Killer
    It remains to be seen if The Lady Killer will continue his hot streak, but it should-it's one of the best records of the year, and also his most commercial, and that's not an insult.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    See You Next Tuesday
    This time everything has coalesced and expanded, double the propulsion, twice the emotional range, the beats doing the ping and the boomerang.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rings Around The World
    SFA uses 21st-century tools to achieve pop timelessness.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Warning
    The album's darn spooky good... Shelving the old Green Day wall of guitars (Dookie and Insomniac) in favor of the youngest (and best) Pete Townshend mod-clanky buzz opens up the band's sound dramatically; it's airy and spacious, lots of room for the vocals. The whole thing breathes with neat ambiences.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fishscale
    Ghost's Fishscale is the most creative album to come out of New York hiphop since his own 2000 Supreme Clientele.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Atlas
    The mightiest alterlatino album in many years. The sound is more rock-oriented and vibrant, and the band has actually learned to write songs.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Confessions On A Dance Floor
    Easily dance record of the year, Confessions is an almost seamless tribute to the strobe-lit sensuality of the '80s New York club scene that gave Madge her roots, which she explores with compelling aplomb.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Antics
    What makes Antics such an improvement over Bright Lights is how capable Interpol have become at complementing Banks's lovely ambiguity with an increasingly precise post-punk throb.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Sunlandic Twins
    Part of what makes Of Montreal notable is the quantity of things Barnes does impeccably.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chase This Light
    Thanks to singer Jim Adkins's bottomless well of high-flying choruses (not to mention the general shittiness of current affairs), the formula still delivers.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Venus On Earth
    Venus on Earth, their third album, contains more English lyrics than their previous two efforts, but it also represents some of the band's most sentimental work.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Forgotten Arm
    The songs on The Forgotten Arm are too engaging to dismiss their familiarity.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thank Me Later
    Drake is not changing rap, because the thing Drake is worst at is rap. It's everything else that can-and probably will-change. Perspectives, tempos, the very notion of entitlement . . . they're all up for grabs.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King of Hearts
    Once the heat and light brought by Lloyd's nuclear P-bomb wear off, King remains utterly replayable.
    • 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
    Medulla
    Where 2001's Vespertine was erotic, Medulla is reflexive and awestruck.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Is Not A Test!
    There's no great leap forward--or backward, depending on your theory of pop--of any sort here.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Laulu Laakson Kukista
    It's chaotic, but extremely beautiful and endlessly fascinating.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Real Emotional Trash
    With Malkmus, a spade is never a spade, and his usual counterinclinations set Trash aquake with tension: pop that's coy but direct but rambling but surreal.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Songs From an American Movie Vol. One: Learning How to Smile
    The new album is looser in the rhythm, has less wall of slash, relatively more lilt and funk, and more variety in the sound ... but in general the music is too diffuse.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sonic Nurse
    Percolates the same melancholy satisfaction and nervous maturity, entropy and growth, in and out--but with an urgency and impulsiveness that risks upsetting the balance.
    • 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.
    • 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
    Raising Sand
    Though Alison Krauss and Robert Plant make strange bedfellows indeed, the result is an engrossing, powerfully evocative collection.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    We All Belong
    They're totally authentic about being inauthentic. Like Guitar Bob, that makes them easy to love.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last Train to Paris
    Paris looks back to dance music as soulful catharsis and emotionalism, not the cold thump that's taken over as of late.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uh Huh Her
    Uh Huh Her is as discrete--and ravishing--as her other works.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stag
    Stag is a diverse non-Indigo mix (the only song that makes me go hmmm starts, "She brings me Spanish clementines, I eat them by the waterside"), intermingling Ray's canny ear for melody with a lo-fi, raw sensibility and attitude aplenty.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Attack Decay Sustain Release
    It's love song 'I Believe,' really sets the group apart from 2007's other big-beat revivalists, draping ex-Simian bandmate Simon Lord's FutureSex'd croon in Italo-disco shimmer. By keeping its heart, the result edges out Justice's more brutal † for most exciting, um, "blog house" debut of the year.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take off Your Pants & Jacket
    The carping is intercut with elegiac little pauses that align Blink 182 with a branch of punk rock you could trace back through the Replacements and Ramones Leave Home, to the more ethereal of early Who songs.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hercules And Love Affair
    The party holds strong into the second half, where the comedown always muddles the songwriting a little. Surprise: Antony's dramatic ululations return to rescue the trawling sonics.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fort Nightly
    Nearly embarrassing levels of enthusiasm, sincerity, and energy inform Fort Nightly, the band's surprisingly meaty debut.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zeitgeist
    Thanks in part to the presence of Pantera producer Terry Date, this is the Pumpkins' hardest-rocking record ever.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The First Lady
    Her tightest set yet.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Teflon Don
    The ridiculously extravagant and extravagantly ridiculous new Teflon Don is certain to only rile folks up further; in its sound, scope, ambition, and arm's-length relationship to reality.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Simply Grand
    Her voice is rich, finely textured, and more expressive now than when it hit r&b charts in the 1960s. But her recordings can sound monotonous. That's not true here.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take Them On, On Your Own
    The sheer mass of sound, the density, the volume, the elaborate little codas at the end of every song are designed to impress and certainly do.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ear Drum
    Ear Drum marks the self-proclaimed BK MC's third full-length feature, and astoundingly, it's a captivating, cocksure rejoinder to everyone who abandoned him.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Majesty Shredding
    Majesty Shredding is the band's first new studio album in nine years, vigorous and kicking, much more so than you'd have right or reason to expect out of a band this deep into their career.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Death Is This Communion
    DITC will still melt your speakers. Jack Endino's clean yet full-tilt production fills out the sound, but it's drummer Des Kensel's ability to push forward and hold back--not simply pound monochromatically from start to finish--that truly creates the thriving, volatile atmosphere here.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Power Of Negative Thinking: B-Sides & Rarities
    These guys were rubbish as careerists, essentially banishing much of their stronger material to the depths. So think of The Power of Negative Thinking as the great unveiling.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Thousand Shark's Teeth
    [The album] exude grace and vocal excellence in the realm of Art Garfunkel or Kate Bush--a consequence of the earth-shattering stakes at hand. The rub is that Shark's Teeth is better than good.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room Noises
    The spine of nearly every one of their grainy black songs glows with a luminous vocal melody.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Musicology
    Musicology is noticeably spare and controlled. This development gratifies its admirers, and rightly so.
    • 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.
prev
Page: