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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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All That You Can't Leave Behind
    All That You Can't Leave Behind returns to the grand gestures of old. Practically every song a potential hit single. Soulful, exuberant, at peace with its own clichés, this is one U2 record that will never be called antianything.... Call it their R.E.M. album, monster rock filtered through a sophisticate's restraint.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    So This Is Goodbye
    Junior Boys' brand of synthpop can't help sounding rooted in the '80s, and with Scritti Politti and thePet Shop Boys recently resurfacing to scratch the same itch, there may be no burning need for what Manitobans Jeremy Greenspan and Matthew Didemus do. Which doesn't mean they don't do it well.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Desire
    What Desire offers instead is at times cerebral and at times depraved, but invariably provocative.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Year Of The Gentleman
    Ne-Yo's fantastic third CD, The Year of the Gentleman, reconfigures "grown and sexy" by detailing relationships with an often uneasy mix of heartache, reflection, wit, lust, and resignation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hip Hop Is Dead
    A Dante-channeling journey through the many diverse facets of hip-hop.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last Summer
    There's not much screaming on Last Summer. Like I'm Going Away, it's a basic, modest studio-rock record, the kind common in the '70s, with flavorful detours reminiscent of that era.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Way I See It
    Even while Saadiq pays homage to soul's golden era, he brings his own flavor through his tell-tale tenor; still, if it ain't your cup of tea, just slip this in your parents' record collection and they won't notice a thing.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    II
    This is a definite step up from the all-pall-and-no-pulse feel that made Espers' 2004 self-titled album too stuffy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    So...How's Your Girl?
    Albums like this one ... are by definition not great personal statements, nor even necessarily artistic peaks for the acts involved. But they keep going, A to the B to the C to the D, and right now that's more than enough.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Youth & Young Manhood
    Youth & Young Manhood is 2003's finest rock debut.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Audience's Listening
    The Audience's Listening is not only witty and lighthearted, but also artfully constructed, and you can hear the depth in its machinations.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Show Your Bones
    No, local slump-spotters, this isn't the Yeahs' Room on Fire. Far from it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Autumn of the Seraphs
    Opener 'From Nothing to Nowhere' also makes the case that Pinback's ready for some new fans: It's fast and furious, nicely setting a tempo that suggests they're not fucking around while conveying a (much-needed) immediacy through Rob Crow's voice.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Reminder
    Listening to this thing is like watching a pitcher throw a no-hitter.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Black Parade
    For all that sonic triumph, the lyrics feel like an empty gesture, sub–Trapper Keeper woe-mongering that'll thrill suburban teens but sounds odd coming from guys old enough to know better.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Supernature
    Supernature is their most radio-friendly work yet.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dedication
    Zomby's early work stood out for the care with which it was created, but even given that, there's something startlingly mature about the production here.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Music For Imaginary Films
    A&C really cook, no matter how low-key or deliberately trivial they're sounding, and this is one way that they (usually, not always) avoid being camp or kitsch or cute.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beaucoup Fish
    A shiny little appliance that fragments its 11 tracks into nearly as many subgenres, doing away with the seamless sprawl of their earlier records.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uh Huh Her
    Uh Huh Her is as discrete--and ravishing--as her other works.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Time Being
    He emerges from a two-record slump contemplating sand though the hourglass with perspective beyond his 42 years.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wincing The Night Away
    While Mercer's writing is still more satisfying than that of his peers, filler tunes like "Pam Berry" and "Black Wave" are a far cry from the tenacious stuff that made Chutes the subject of lavish hyperbole.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Graduation
    Grating bouts of narcissism aside, Graduation contains killer pieces of production: 'Stronger' uses Daft Punk's 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger' to practically revive Eurodisco, while 'Champion' snarkily snatches its hook from Steely Dan's 'Kid Charlemagne.'
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Strawberry Jam
    Just because there's an onslaught of verbiage and weird noises (like most pop these days) does not a pop album make. It is their most oxymoronic, though.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In The Future
    Too quick and severe on the brakes, Black Mountain stunt their own grandiosity in the name of dynamics or patience.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Idiot
    As a rock opera, Idiot is a mostly three-penny thrill.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Accelerate
    'Sing for the Submarine's' winking nods to old song titles ("electron blue," "gravity's pull," "high-speed train") are painfully self-aware. It's a sharp contrast to the rest of Accelerate, on which R.E.M. stop overthinking things--and start roaring toward the future.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nouns
    Nouns' title stinks compared to that of their 2007 debut, "Weirdo Rippers," but the jams are way better.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    When The Pawn...
    Apple's arty predisposition and prodigious gifts allow this 22-year-old to wax poetic and make it rock because her delivery is so dexterous and forceful.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    House With No Home
    Singer Justin Ringle often muffles his words or loses them altogether (as though a wool scarf were covering his mouth) as he trudges through cadences reminiscent of Ryan Adams or Iron & Wine's Sam Beam, delicately dotting his stanzas with multi-dimensional characters weathering the winters of their existence. Which is more enriching than it sounds.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pick A Bigger Weapon
    Their low-slung rhythms imagine what might have happened if Reagan-era Prince had been less into getting some action and more into kicking up some activism, or if P-Funk had dabbled in politics as well as psychedelics.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black City
    The lyrics themselves--overstocked with darkness, paranoia, and bodily fluids--are as indecipherable as the vocals are buried. They're scene-setters. It's the death-disco groove that intoxicates and defines this City.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Double Night Time
    His new Double Night Time is a relatively introspective affair. It's also more satisfying as headphone fodder, thanks largely to a phalanx of synthesizers (burbling arpeggios cushion most tracks) and vocals from Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grown Backwards
    [A] marvelously sophisticated, extremely political album.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Seventh Tree
    This whole thing sounds great, though: rue, clenched fists, and closed eyes mixed at an arena pitch.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carried To Dust
    The group never abandoned its orquestra live, and that may be why this return to form sounds so welcoming.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cease To Begin
    With 10 tracks adding up to a mere 34 minutes, this follow-up is much more wan and insubstantial than its predecessor.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Saint Dymphna
    These tracks are meticulously constructed to engulf and consume, making layers out of the Casiocore and stone-drones that contemporaries like Black Dice and Growing use to build careers.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Water Curses [EP]
    By submerging listeners gently, Water Curses never goes off the deep end.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hot Shit
    Protest songs that are both insidiously hummable and foot-stompingly rocking.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Mad & Faithful Telling
    'Basso Profundo,' sticks out like a sore thumb, overindulging the band's penchant for melting-pot quirk before the listener's had a chance to acclimate, throwing off the balance of an otherwise perfectly paced album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me
    The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me builds on its predecessor's articulate wordplay, with lush tones that evidently evolved over the band's extended break.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Made In The Dark
    They're very much of their time--friendly indie kids from the Go! Team to Hot Hot Heat are cheerily dabbling in dance music nowadays--and much better than most of those peers.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sirens of the Ditch
    The record smoothly lures and detours familiar, '70s-based rock-blues-country sounds and expectations while highlighting Isbell's character-actor flair.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Friend Opportunity
    [It] doesn't pack the out-of-nowhere melodic turns that enlivened Runners.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night
    Love Is All's boisterous clamor is the real draw here. The band skips over cerebral tricks and hep posturing, instead going straight for adrenalized kicks, and it's a rush that lasts long after the record ends.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    New Magnetic Wonder
    Both familiar and surprising.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Stand Ins
    The Stand-Ins, reportedly taped at the same time as "Stage Names," is an improvement, not least because Sheff punishes himself (rather humorously) for the sin of relying on tragic heroes at all.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fort Nightly
    Nearly embarrassing levels of enthusiasm, sincerity, and energy inform Fort Nightly, the band's surprisingly meaty debut.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    End Of Love
    It's sweet and sad and frequently hilarious.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Renegades
    The most penetrating and engaging album of their career...
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Receivers
    Receivers is what die-hard fans refer to as the record too far.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rancid [2000]
    Their new record rules, but in the party-punk, young-dumb-full-of-aplomb manner of their eponymous debut and the following year's Let's Go--not in the guitar-often-on-the-offbeat, more mannered manner of . . . And Out Come the Wolves (1995) and Life Won't Wait (1998).
    • 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.
    • 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...
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Transnormal Skiperoo
    Earthy rhythms provide both a welcome backbeat and a sense of history.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    30 Year Low
    They've said their piece and torn each other into pieces–we're left to rubberneck at the crack-up.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revelling/Reckoning
    While the acoustic simplicity of Reckoning seems thin at first, particularly beside Revelling's sensual, bombastic joy, the croons and ballads grow on you, if not for their melancholy navel-gazing, then for their languid, old-school folksiness.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
    Imagine the cheerful fatalism of "Float On" without the hooks, which is bizarre: Hooks would seem to be Marr's specialty.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Promises Promises
    Shattered, scattered voice and guitar can't help planting some bizarre memory garden of l-u-v.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Hour of Bewilderbeast
    It putters here and there across 18 ditties and doodles gracefully arranged, but played with two left feet and recorded to match.... This English Elliott Smith's got a plainspeak voice that compels with repeated listenings, and the subtle tunes are likewise sneaky, enlivened by all sorts of quirky bits...
    • 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
    Ash Wednesday
    At its best, Ash Wednesday recalls the command of Arcade Fire's Funeral, as Perkins finds empathy through his whimsy-fueled, sad-bastard songs of experience.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flesh Tone
    These songs, for all their Top 40 disco glitter (will.i.am. signed her to his label and executive-produces here), compel with their tradeoffs between vulnerability and euphoria, though if you aren't paying attention, they're slick enough to pass as merely exceptional pop-radio or club-floor fodder.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hey Venus!
    There's a newfound depth of feeling in their eighth-album expertise that bitters the sweetness of Beach Boys tributes like 'Show Your Hand.'
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gift Of Screws
    When he flexes his craft, he corrals multi-tracked vocals of himself that coast over static guitar arpeggios, like a priest who prefers to clack his rosary beads in his bedroom rather than pray aloud in a chapel with his peers. If there's a Lord, he's grateful for the devotion, but for eavesdroppers, it does get tedious.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Once Again
    There are a number of words to describe contemporary mainstream r&b, but "elegant," "mature," "breezy," and "sophisticated" aren't usually among them. Luckily, they apply to John Legend's subtle follow-up to 2005's Grammy-winning, multiplatinum Get Lifted.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Cool
    A neat trick folded into The Cool is that Lupe proves rap is still creative enough to indulge bugged-out ambitions, and he doesn't just brag about what a smart-ass he is.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Quality Control
    As they proved on their debut EP a couple of years back, Jurassic aren't just Furious Five retro: They summon visions of lightly rocking grace like "I'll Take You There," the intro to "Dance to the Music," or the Harlem Globetrotters passing the ball around to "Sweet Georgia Brown." Like the more serious underground hip-hop acts, though, in the end they're not quite sure what to do with themselves beyond boasting.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Chief
    Chief, like Church's other work, walks the line between hard Southern boogie and softie singer-songster sap, but with plenty of chug.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beautiful Dreamers
    In every way that matters, it's typical Frisell-as lyrical in approach as it is eclectic in outlook, touching on Stephen Foster, Blind Willie Johnson, Benny Goodman, the Carter Family, and Little Anthony and the Imperials, together with its characteristically wounding originals.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room On Fire
    Great, better even than the last.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
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