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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    29
    Adams mines American Beauty and Workingman's Dead respectably, but his attempts at early-'70s Neil Young piano ballads come off as tear-stained love letters to himself, and hardly distinguish him as the guy who dropped out of high school to become Paul Westerberg.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Breakthrough
    The Breakthrough improves on 2003's Diddy-helmed misfire Love & Life but lacks the character of 1999's eclectic Mary.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unpredictable
    Unpredictable is pure product, buffed-and-shined modern r&b.... But Foxx has also created a work geared toward sexual pleasure that will work its way into many a late-night floating-world session.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Somebody's Miracle
    On Somebody's Miracle, Phair is more confident than on her previous mass-appeal bid, 2003's Liz Phair.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All Jacked Up
    Yeah, Jacked contains a few shadowy rewrites of Here for the Party tunes, but the players this time are more in sync with the star--the music is louder, beerier.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Naked Truth
    An easy contender for best rap record of the year.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ten Thousand Fists
    The best mainstream metal release since Judas Priest's Angel of Retribution.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Plans
    Death Cab succeed by refusing to offend. That can be an admirable trait in a person, but never in a musician.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blitzkrieg Pop
    What keeps Blitzkrieg from descending into petulant shtick is Haas's compositional ear.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Body Of Song
    Sure, the electrifying attack of Zen Arcade and New Day Rising is a distant memory. But Body of Song closes with two guitar anthems oversized enough to point back to Mould's best work in Sugar.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Honeycomb
    The set is just a curio, banking everything on Black's low register, which has the texture but not the stamina to pull off so many slow, velvet lullabies about sour romance.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Cookbook
    The results of this musical promiscuity are mixed, but The Cookbook yields far more bangers than bombs.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    TP.3 Reloaded
    Somebody press more charges against this fool--he's losing focus.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Out-Of-State Plates
    Establishes both how hard it is to turn out material worthy of Utopia Parkway and Welcome Interstate Managers and how often Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger come close.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    TheFutureEmbrace
    Corgan does his level best to make the whole affair as joyless as possible.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Anniemal
    If much of Anniemal isn't vibrant enough to move physically or resonant enough to move emotionally, its peaks suggest a worthy midway state.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    X&Y
    Unusually accomplished, fresh, and emotional.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Monkey Business
    It's zany, antiseptic kitsch, like the soundtrack to the ultimate Old Navy commercial.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Don't Believe The Truth
    In the end, it's Oasis's attempts to capture former pinnacles, from trying to re-create the simple sunny-side-up pleasures of "Live Forever" to trying for another album-ending mountain like "Champagne Supernova," that keep their latter-day output so entirely forgettable.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mezmerize
    Mezmerize should be enough to keep A.D.D.-ers occupied for six months.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Seadrum/House Of Sun
    Their most monotonous album ever.... It sounds beatific in paradise, or soundtracking vegan Thai cuisine and organic sunflower seed muffins.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Oceans Apart
    McLennan's guitar enlivens even Forster's sketchier contributions ("Mountains Near Dellray" is a complete enigma); his own writing is harder to get behind.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Forgotten Arm
    The songs on The Forgotten Arm are too engaging to dismiss their familiarity.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    With Teeth
    A record that's half as long as The Fragile but just as plodding and mummified.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Devils & Dust
    It's long and boring and preachy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Sunlandic Twins
    Part of what makes Of Montreal notable is the quantity of things Barnes does impeccably.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Elevator
    It has all of the stomp and swagger of Franz, if not the impeccable grooming.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The First Lady
    Her tightest set yet.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Guero
    Beck's sampler-songwriter m.o. feels freshest on songs evoking some version, real or imaginary, of Southern California.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Lost And Found
    The lamest album that'll be released this year.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Bravery
    Endicott, who jumps skin from Julian Casablancas to Robert Smith to the guy from the Killers in just three tracks, has less charisma than a mustard plug.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hotel
    Impeccably made, hedonistic, lovelorn, catchy, compelling. But spiritual, messianic, visionary? Not by a long shot.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Best Little Secrets Are Kept
    Nicely mimics the timbre of Tony Visconti-ville circa '71-'74.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Human After All
    Human After All is determinedly monochromatic aurally, compositionally, and mood-wise. Gosh, they really are robots--the music is flat, barely inflected, sitting there like a vending machine waiting patiently for your quarters.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kasabian
    Still waiting for the next Lo Fidelity Allstars album? Wish there were more Stereo MC's-like stuff in car ads? Wondering where great songwriting teams like Gallagher/Gallagher have gone? Then Kasabian were made for you! They offer all the same thrills of the aforementioned artists, and they sound like Primal Scream, too!
    • 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
    The Massacre
    It is hands-down the most diabolically sensous collection of baby-making gangsta music since Pac's All Eyez.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Some Cities
    Bogged in reverb tanks, delays, and other swirly effects, Some Cities' production masks their slovenly musicianship.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Back To Me
    Edwards's lapses are largely counteracted by her sturdy melodies, her hard-hitting session drummers, and, mostly, her voice, which conveys acres of chin-up melancholy without even rolling up its heart-bedecked sleeves.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Aha Shake Heartbreak
    Only once do the Kings offer an identity worth bugging out in a club over, on the reckless and fantastic "Taper Jean Girl." The rest of the time, it all seems more confused and cynically gimmicked than inspired.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Beekeeper
    Mainly there's either promising melodies (the "Crucify"-aping "Parasol") ruined by cringe-y lyrics, or decent lyrical ideas executed like a Yoplait commercial. ("This is sooo good." "Pirates good!" Cue bongos.)
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    End Of Love
    It's sweet and sad and frequently hilarious.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tree City
    The infectious melodies and wealth of diminished seventh chords on the Robbers' debut, Tree City, almost play like Maroon 5 for kids too cool to be seen with Songs About Jane.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    LCD Soundsystem
    LCD Soundsystem shares some of Slanted & Enchanted's sloppy-but-right brio, but where Pavement used their album to expand, LCD's first disc... sounds like a contraction, each song its own discrete postcard from a field trip rather than a canvas on which to mesh multiple ideas.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Manzanita
    One problem though: Mia peaks too soon. That opener is by far the strongest song. The rest is by turns meditative, breezy, intimate, and snoozy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room Noises
    The spine of nearly every one of their grainy black songs glows with a luminous vocal melody.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Before The Poison
    Unless you dig Nick's poetry, grab the Polly songs and run.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    World's Apart
    It's all so precious; let's hope they still break shit live.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Digital Ash In A Digital Urn
    Up against the carefully realized Wide Awake, Digital Ash is a mess, and not just sonically.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning
    A handsome channel 13 complimentary tote bag of an album that polishes his image as the fantasy rebellious son who hangs at socialist bookstores and swipes your Gram Parsons records.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Great Destroyer
    Destroyer simmers with life in all of its noisy, tuneful excess.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Documentary
    A rep-building, played-out retread of gangbang reveries set to so-so def beats by this hiphop minute's latest multiplatinum matinee thug-idol for the girls-gone-wild set.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black Mountain
    I'd call it "psych-drone-sludge" except it's more tuneful and lively than those words imply.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb
    This time, Steve Lillywhite and the other producers assembled simply construct a U2 album in miniature, mixing in the Edge's processed-guitar trademark whenever you fear they're straying into unforgivable un-U2ness. That's just not enough.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love, Angel, Music, Baby
    And while LAMB is adventurous and playful--with nary a ska-punk riddim to be found--it's when Gwen reaches back and goes totally '80s that the CD reverberates with unwavering charm.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gold Medal
    Their craft has gotten way deeper than hey-ho blitzkrieg bop.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Island
    Even more staunchly pop than their previous records.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    New Danger
    A couple of creative notches below 2000's gleaming Black on Both Sides.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Around The Sun
    Structure trumps texture throughout: "Make It All OK" is a formally tight breakup ballad, with spiritual overtones, that could fit neatly on a good singer-songwriter record, and others are arranged semi-acoustically, highlighting Stipe's cleanest melodies and most inviting vocal performances in years.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Size Matters
    Hamilton's vocals are occasionally plotted now with pronounced melodies, which is nice. But his strikingly affectless, prep-school delivery is abandoned in favor of a gritty, generic bark.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Has Been
    On the scale of Singing Shat, Has Been ranks above the Shakespeare rap in Free Enterprise, but below "Mr. Tambourine Man."
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Chronicles Of Life And Death
    Good Charlotte have hooks for days and the fun, gloomy Life and Death sounds like a moody missing link between Fountains of Wayne and Thrice.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burned Mind
    Every track is a pure battle, with searing bursts of abrasion chopping at lava flows of insane density.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Damage
    Damage seems yoked to the early '90s.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nancy Sinatra
    Jack White took Loretta Lynn indie-rock Nashville with an unquenchable musical hunger and attainment that never had to feel sheepish about following the work of a music maestro as juicy and august as the late Owen Bradley. AJ Azzarto, Matt Azzarto, and Don Fleming, Sinatra's producers, do something else. They craft an indie-rock Nancy Sinatra, way too much of which is way too 1994.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Beautiful Struggle
    Is cumbersome when it seems self-conscious, and works well when it seems effortless, when Talib ceases overcompensating with overproduction, diva guest spots, or repetitive political invective.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Week
    On This Week, Grae's tracks sound diverse and accomplished but rarely more than serviceable.... There are few sounds, or peers, in hip-hop right now who can do justice to Grae's emotional sophistication.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Idiot
    As a rock opera, Idiot is a mostly three-penny thrill.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sweat
    Anchored by predigested melodic hooks, Nelly's songs seem composed with the sole intention of ending up as your next ringtone. [Combined review of both discs]
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Suit
    Anchored by predigested melodic hooks, Nelly's songs seem composed with the sole intention of ending up as your next ringtone. [Combined review of both discs]
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Showtime
    A brash, dazzling dispatch from a parallel universe.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Funeral
    Funeral is a remarkable record, hard to hear at first, then hard to stop hearing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wet From Birth
    Their tracks are consistently both catchy and punky enough to make your lip sneer.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What I Do
    The enjoyable What I Do is similarly assured and clunker-free, but it also returns to the emotional compression that Drive often detoured.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beautifully Human: Words And Sounds Vol. 2
    Beautifully Human isn't quite the conceptual masterpiece it strives to be: Too often, the music falls short of Scott's lyrical brilliance.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Medulla
    Where 2001's Vespertine was erotic, Medulla is reflexive and awestruck.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happy People / U Saved Me
    Happy People is, if this is possible, the smoothest and frothiest album of the year. U Saved Me is chicken soup for the soul man. Its born-again ballads are fundamentally frothy, in their heavy-handed, gospel-tinged way.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Winchester Cathedral
    Every new song of theirs could be three old ones, though, and while their drummer can pound out four on the floor, their organ player still can't squeeze out that 97th tear.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Revolution Starts Now
    It makes sense that, of the improvised songs, the rockers turned out best.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dirty South
    Although this could get tired eventually, the Truckers haven't run out of stories yet, and their acute awareness of themselves and their forebears suggests they'll know when to say when.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Venomous Villain [VV:2]
    VV:2 does have a bit of a for-hire feel.
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