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
    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
    • 60 Critic Score
    Drag It Up
    Drag it Up doesn't have the gut-level impact of the older stuff.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Until The End
    Tenaciously mindless and effortlessly grim.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hymns Of The 49th Parallel
    What makes this work, beyond Lang's ability to control both prickly and inspiring material, is her sensuality.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Miss Machine
    The last 10 or so minutes of the CD veer between bursts of riff noise more smoothly recorded than expected and washes of music to watch soft porn by, indicating the charm of being proudly abrasive and busy is wearing off.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Autobiography
    [Courtney Love's] American Sweetheart is tragic and blasted and pissed-off and pathetic and desperate and sad; Autobiography is all those things, plus it has Fruit Stripe bubblegrunge guitars and insanely chewy melodies and an ear-tickling production job.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Together We're Heavy
    Grandiloquent, glorious gobbledygook.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Back To Basics
    Back to Basics doesn't always transcend the liability inherent to dancehall albums: Most songs in the genre work best not as finished singles but as 30-second snippets, meant to be sampled in a selector's riddim-based set.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Tipping Point
    For a group who can be so compelling when they aim high and fall short, an effort so squarely average is all the more disappointing.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Seventy Two & Sunny
    Confused rock and r&b conceits wander into onrushing 16-wheelers of c&w—barbershop quartet-ish background vox, crisp git-fiddle plucks, lyrics equal parts syrup and cheer. The tightrope he's walking is dental floss, but he still leans into every note.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hunger For More
    Banks lacks 50's humor, vocal playfulness, and stone-cold articulation.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    a ghost is born
    Wilco's ideas are unremarkable, but are worked out with intelligence and striking conception. And as it happens, the new organic emphasis tables some of Wilco's lamer stylistic obsessions.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Creature Comforts
    On their directionless new Creature Comforts, Black Dice seem confused, in fact, about what precisely their aesthetic is.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    To The 5 Boroughs
    The Beasties of 5 Boroughs seem scared--reluctant to innovate; serving up nonsense lyrics and numbing production that are just plain lazy... sensing that there's nowhere to go but down, so better to establish a passable holding pattern than risk an inexcusable backslide toward irrelevance.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Empire Strikes First
    A bore of an album.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Slow Wonder
    Though there's little of the powerpuff zoom associated with the New P's here, uptempo grins like "On the Table" make denying the pleasantness of it all impossible.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uh Huh Her
    Uh Huh Her is as discrete--and ravishing--as her other works.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Brother Is To Son
    The first few minutes sound like very early David Bowie without Mick Ronson, electricity, or songs. The rest is so annoying that after 15 minutes you'll fondly remember grade-school sing-alongs and eating paste during arts-and-crafts.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Louden Up Now
    Nimble as they are, !!! are definitely a little too certain of their own funkiness.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Hopes And Fears
    Strangely: no guitar, only piano. Which, strangely, doesn't make them sound any more romantic, nor does it add interest to the other songs, which are either too slow, too genre, or too lyrically distracting.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Red Bedroom
    These scuzzy Voidoids are as immature as Blink-182 were; they just have hipper ways of hiding it—like pretending punk and new wave were the same thing.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fuckin A
    Fuckin A outsexes the nuevo new-wavers with its dry-hump hum.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    i
    His Cupid's-arrow vignettes reach deep into the fictional dream through heedless genre-bending, ingenious rhyme and incongruous simile, bleary-eyed dislocation and straight-faced melodrama.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Van Lear Rose
    Less rehearsal, less production, and fewer layers of sound let Loretta's Lorettaness shine through.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Musicology
    Musicology is noticeably spare and controlled. This development gratifies its admirers, and rightly so.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Underneath
    This perfectly pitched record reveals that these hardworking brothers' valiant quest for independence shall be rewarded.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's All Around You
    Tortoise may be the only band that can match the everything-mashup steez, sonic skills, conceptual ambition, and breakbeat heat of the Roots.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    On My Way
    Beatles-style tunes crank out with steady snares, blaring power riffs, and languid keyboard interjections, but feel mundane.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Honkin' On Bobo
    This suspicious move into another moribund genre resembles the frustrated strivings of a band uncertain of how to exist After Rock.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Confessions
    Confessions is a top-of-the-line pop-soul showcase that... manages to be commercially savvy without coming off as too desperate.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Peace Love Death Metal
    The two-man, woogie-filled boogie team is fine for 30 minutes.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Winning Days
    Winning Days is still more interesting than any album by obvious progenitors Oasis because the good parts come up at the most random moments--spontaneous solo here, appealing harmony there.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Madvillainy
    An outlandishly imaginative collaboration.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ten
    Clouddead's problem is their stubborn refusal to express anything.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grown Backwards
    [A] marvelously sophisticated, extremely political album.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
    Much more realized than last year's Young Liars EP, it's also a bit more conventional.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Franz Ferdinand
    Frantic and rhythmic Scotpop with many echoes of so-'90s Blur in the sardonic jabs at middle-class bromides.
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Schizophrenic
    Agreeably pervtastic.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    They Were Wrong, So We Drowned
    Though some sections are plodding and one-dimensional, others lock into place.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Perpetuum Mobile
    In the beginning, Neubauten's music sounded urgent and vital, created out of necessity; now it sounds effortless and natural, moving forward because it has no other place to go.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Feels Like Home
    If the choice of songs and beat and instrumentation were sometimes restrictive, still the piano and the voice endured.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Probot
    There is some entertainment value in Probot. The manufactured praise accompanying Grohl, supplied by a corps of pro fuglemen who lead and escort the illustrious on his vanity venture, is grand.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Body Language
    There's something rote and antiseptic about the album's party mood--the electro-beats' clean squelch, the undercooked hooks, the odd primness of Kylie's singing.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    America's Sweetheart
    America's Sweetheart is one big, juicy fuckup, and fortunately for Courtney, there will always be little girls who hate being little girls, and are looking for a fairy godmother to show them how to self-destruct. Unfortunately, Karen O, Brody Dalle, and Amy Lee all made cooler records.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Grey Album
    Of course it's a gimmick, but about half of it works anyway.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Apropa't
    This is the kind of thing indie boys put on when they want to have sex.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kamikaze
    Suggests nothing so much as Adrenaline Rush part two.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Margerine Eclipse
    The music is so sunny and luminous it's practically ablaze, radiating positive energy from all angles.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Secret Wars
    All in all, expertly wobbling prog metal, constructed out of as few chords as possible.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Can't Stop
    I Can't Stop works as return to form, as proof that Green's groove, voice, and riffs are largely intact. But Green gets tied down when production's slathered on a bit too thick, as if every Hi Rhythm soul lick must be utilized to substantiate the comeback.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shock'n Y'All
    The hilariously blasphemous Jesus number, '80s-AOR-chorded tough-girl ode, Margaritaville-calypsoed frat-band lookback, and outlaw drawler about Willie's deadly herb all movingly balance muscle with vulnerability.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room On Fire
    Great, better even than the last.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kish Kash
    It's not stretching to suggest that they've complicated house music's ease so effectively that Kish Kash often resembles, well, postpunk.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Echoes
    What makes Echoes more than the sum of its inspirations... is that the band audibly, valiantly struggle to create something bigger than they are.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Coral Fang
    Those who looked at the Distillers as the hope of 2003 might be disappointed that Dalle's stuck in 1994.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Evening Of My Best Day
    Her magnetism radiates as powerfully as ever.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Get Born
    The best tunes here have that boys'-club vibe of the best early-to-mid-'70s hard-rock bands, dead-on and nailed.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Want One
    Painful as the backstory gets, the work itself remains lovely and luxuriant.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seven's Travels
    The music is always full of life, and Slug's white-boy flow is brassy, deft, and one-of-a-kind.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Deliverance
    If Eminem is hip-hop's Elvis, then Bubba is its Gregg Allman, the white boy embraced by lowdown Little Africa, especially fellow musicians.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Worldwide Underground
    Although sometimes her reliance on mood threatens to get the better of Worldwide Underground, Badu remains faithful to the old school of flow, a blend of drums and rhythm designed to service soul's best instruments: its vocalists.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Heavier Things
    While he's technically adept at playing the blues, it's perfectly clear the only heartache Mayer knows how to emote comes the morning after a night of hearty partying.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hot Shit
    Protest songs that are both insidiously hummable and foot-stompingly rocking.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It Still Moves
    The songs are still structured with minimal vocals and long repetitive jams, but they seem more crafted this time, not just meandering soundscapes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Her Majesty The Decemberists
    The band's newfound willingness to experiment leads to overkill.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wind
    Despite its rock-star cast, The Wind doesn't match the energy or the wit of Zevon's previous Artemis releases.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Greendale
    The problem with Greendale-the-CD is that too many songs rely on simple blues vamps that neither Young nor Crazy Horse manages to rave up into their trademark protogrunge.... But you keep listening because he's created real setting, plot, and character.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Youth & Young Manhood
    Youth & Young Manhood is 2003's finest rock debut.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    D-D-Don't Don't Stop the Beat
    It's like each song on the album has the dynamics and reach of a DJ set, ramming David Bowie and Fats Domino into K.C. and the Sunshine Band, then gluing it together with full-throated sugar-pop harmonies and a rhythm section worthy of the Beatles at Hamburg's Star Club.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Moodring
    Nothing else on the album [other than single "My Love Is Like . . . Wo"] is quite so perfect a vehicle for Mya's predatory sexuality.[
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Trouble With Being Myself
    Macy's decision to team with [producer Dallas] Austin this time around gives her anarchic brilliance just the right creative counterbalance.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Red Dirt Road
    Some of the best country rock in over a decade.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    So Stylistic
    Listening to FannyPack is, in a sense, aural pedophilia--two of the three girls are in their teens--and while the project carries the sheen of Radio Disney, these girls use their duff way better than Hilary does.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Violet Hour
    The more involved the songs get, the more ethereal they end up, and not always to the good.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Chapter II
    Padded with medleys and between-song skits, hampered by a demonstrable lack of both personality and hooks, it's craven, depressing, and irresistible all at once.
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