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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per page
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Taste The Secret
    It's a hilarious critique of right-wing reactionaries, hypocritical lefties, hyper-commercial consumerism, and the slave-service industry. Like if someone smoked a lot of weed, and turned Fast Food Nation into a hit Broadway musical.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Decoration Day
    Darker, more personal than political, Decoration Day rocks easier and rolls harder than Southern Rock Opera, but nevertheless proves beyond a doubt that the DBT engine's got enough horsepower to keep on.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sumday
    Scattered with belated dispatches from the wreckage of the dot-bom, Sumday is knowingly archaic and all-consumingly derivative.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    St. Anger
    Songs like "Frantic," "Dirty Window," and even the balladesque "Sweet Amber" stop and start, cut to pieces by groove-robbing edits that replace the guitar harmonies on which Metallica built an industry.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fire
    This is the funniest hard-rock album I've ever heard; also, the hardest-rocking funny album I've ever heard, since if you take away the jokes you've still got the power of the music.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rounds
    Sensitive ones will fall in love instantly; Fat Beats futurists might wait for the Jay Dee remix due later this year.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One Word Extinguisher
    The rhythms have grown more techy and layered, wilding with drill-happy 16ths (on "Busy Signal," he and L.A.'s like-minded Daedalus cut up a human beatbox then go machine-gunning with piano notes), or throbbing and crackling out of an electronic ether (the radio-transmission lurch of "Detchibe") as though he's been studying glitchy Europeans.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fever To Tell
    Guitarist Nick Zinner's greatest advantage over his contemporaries is his complete lack of an attention span.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    American Life
    The title track's having-it-all exhaustion, underscored by its bipolar sonics and start-stop rhythms, will endear her to the Allison Pearson crowd; a few other tunes will reinforce her fan base among fellow whiny celebrities.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Boomkatalog One
    They're just two talented Hollywood kids proving how fun it can be to watch TRL.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Elephant
    The second side is the dullest sequence they've put together since tracks five through 11 on their debut.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A.R.E. Weapons
    A.R.E. Weapons is one of the most interesting records ever to use disco electrobeats and synth washes for rock'n'roll effect.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Log 22
    From giddy choruses to whistling hooks to sensual trip-hop to desperate rockers to Velvets chugging to smoky chanteuse atmospheres to guitar workouts over austere-then-soaring strings to dance remixes waiting to happen, these are expert songsmiths showing off their craft, more impressively than ever before.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wonderful Rainbow
    Too mischievous for Led Zeppelin's Valhalla and too self-aware for Bal-Sagoth's Magic Kingdom, Wonderful Rainbow conjures retarded unicorns, copulating robots, and head-banging ogres in one technicolor beat.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Street Dreams
    Most tracks trade impact for cheesy hooks, skittery beats, and rudimentary keyboard riffs that can't help but evoke that jiggly seizure-type shit Puffy's dancers were big into a few years back.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Philadelphia Freeway
    Works its way up to a lively, beat-wise sleekness.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Give Up
    album hits people who love the sound extravaganzas of overdubbed guitar symphonies, can't hang with the folkiness full-service singer-songwriters inevitably preserve, and expect melodic flair and beats, yet sometimes want to hear words.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You Are Free
    You Are Free demonstrates a subtle, hopeful change in sentiment--a relief from Cat Power's melancholy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How I Learned To Write Backwards
    It blows me away when someone can make nostalgia for the '60s or the '80s, or in this case both, sound relevant or recent or worth swooning over.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    100th Window
    Even in the album's most quiet moments, songs rarely waver in dynamics from their liftoff point.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These Are The Vistas
    Merges jazz, pop, and the conservatory in a heady and original way, accessible and seriously playful.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Televise
    Televise's second act stumbles through a glut of mid-tempo glumness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Electric Circus
    Beautifully engineered, Circus sounds chocolaty and recombinant even when it doth protest the Enlightened Guy angle too much.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Evil Heat
    Their catchiest, most compelling record yet.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Brainwashed
    It's a low-key and playful exit, without highs or lows.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D.
    Had little, lyric-less Out Hud arrived in 1993, their recombinant shoogity-oogity would have eliminated the need for a Tortoise, and I never would've had to pretend Iannis Xenakis was "interesting" or take that junket to Nobukazu Takamura's ostrich farm.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    By The Way
    Kiedis's lyrics are absolutely baffling.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Heathen Chemistry
    Nowadays, the Gallaghers can only offer stylized guitar murk and hookless acoustic ditties; even scarier, you can understand their lyrics, which are more mush-headed and lovey-dovey than you'd expect from a band this self-satisfied.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Murray Street
    The new album isn't terrible, just dull.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nellyville
    A great pop album that reconciles his sudden wealth, attachment to home, and desire to rule the world.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Private Press
    The record sounds like it came a year or so after Endtroducing--which is to say, it goes a little deeper in summoning Gothic textures and awesome drum samples, and arrives as a delayed, well-fitting follow-up to a landmark.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Golden Dove
    Weaves enchanting pagan ditties out of cello and euphonium, some cornball New Wave moves, and the serpentine economy of Timony's keyboards and Renaissance-faire guitar.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    18
    Nearly every song sounds like either a redux of or reject from its predecessor.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Maladroit
    Maladroit picks up where the Green Album slacked off, relying on the same chunky sonics that set "Hash Pipe" apart from Weezer's earlier, more lithe singles.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    When I Was Cruel
    Elvis makes you suffer for the good stuff with leaden conceits, overwrought hysterics, a useless reprise. And then he makes it all up to yoo-oo-oou.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
    Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is basically a good album, even a great album if you're in the mood, though if you listen to a lot of hip-hop (or house music or basement bhangra or any other genre not dominated by white people), it probably won't be the most extraordinary album you'll hear all month.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Handcream For A Generation
    Handcream is leaner and less exuberant than When I Was Born, lower on warm drone and Indian elements generally and higher on Singh's sardonic mode.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Release
    Release sounds at once like a last gasp and a reinvention, which makes it all the more moving.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    C'mon C'mon
    Only the tragic decision to duet with former employer Don Henley mars the ride.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Get Wet
    After one listen to I Get Wet, you'll swear you've heard it before... but somehow, you've never heard anything like it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Playgroup
    This is an album where the magic is all in the details: the exquisite interplay of different drum sounds, the textural alternation of succulent and crisp. The songs are merely serviceable.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rings Around The World
    SFA uses 21st-century tools to achieve pop timelessness.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    White Lilies Island
    There's an overwhelming tinny ring that starts on the second track, "Beauty on the Fire," and ends with the last track--it's this young possum's voice.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fever
    Sure, Fever's brushed-steel Eurodisco is old hat, Munich '77 via Paris '98. But mainlined along FM frequencies, it sounds totally 2002.
    • Village Voice
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Under Rug Swept
    I'm just not sure that pop music should come out of a thesaurus.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Source Tags & Codes
    At least it captures the fuzzy-math sound from too many gray-area indie bands--and it rocks hard where geezers like Mercury Rev just drift away.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cake & Pie
    There are tracks on Cake and Pie that suggest Loeb might have been a badass had she realized herself when boofy bangs and women with lightning-bolt guitars were defining pop.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Barricades & Brickwalls
    Chambers's two solo records are more fun than a barrel of Foster's, mostly because she doesn't sound daunted by the history of the music.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gotham!
    By the second and third tunes, the game is up. We get it: Gang of Radio 4. This is Radio 4 Clash. And so on.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scarecrow
    As if hell-bent on rewarding brand loyalty, however, Brooks does himself in by recycling his typical subjects.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love, Shelby
    Mostly all manner of shiny, happy pop.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Party Music
    Many of the lyrics on Party Music amount to no more than slogans, maxims, opinions.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Invincible
    To really care about this album you have to be able to get into the pure hard sounds of the dance-track percussion and the way Michael tends to garnish them with his voice.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Get Ready
    Neither as bad as you might fear nor as good as you might hope.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Is This It?
    If you like one Strokes song, you'll like their whole album.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ten New Songs
    Ten New Songs is all introspection, closer in sound to a technologically updated Songs From a Room.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Let It Come Down
    Spiritualized's latest aural triumph... In truth, half of Let It Come Down is just sludgy crap, but the half of the chalice that's full truly runneth over into the realm of, um, the awe-inspiring. If not the sublime.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Id
    The Id suffers from the conundrum of all post-breakout second albums. You're disappointed either because the songs are not enough like the first one or because they're too much like the first but not quite as good.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strange Little Girls
    Neither a straight feminist critique nor a tribute album, Strange Little Girls is rather a nuanced exploration of the dualities of love and aggression.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    All Is Dream
    Like Rubber Soul and Revolver, or Bowie's Low and Heroes, Deserter's Songs and All Is Dream function as bookends rather than as separate works, though the latter, recorded under the cloud of [intended producer Jack] Nitzche's absence, does strike a few too many morose chords.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No More Drama
    This is Blige's most rhythmic album ever, and even the ballads that can drag r&b down here bristle with bumping beats.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vespertine
    Vespertine is an album for small curtained establishments, for taking your "little ghetto blaster" onto back streets, for intimate and precious occasions.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Now
    Maxwell continues to delve into the sensuality that drove 1996's spacious Urban Hang Suite as well as '97's often over-decorated Embrya, but with a newly pared-back attack. He's in top-notch voice...
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Can Our Love...
    Tindersticks' trajectory, in fact, does have its affinities with R.E.M.'s: an unfairly maligned Difficult Third Album clears the decks and the lead singer's nasal passages, and what's gone from the later work, however accomplished it may be, is that startling strangeness, the rare, eerie thrill of hearing something that sounds only like itself.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rooty
    Yes, it's as good as the last one, maybe better.
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