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.
prev
Page: