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
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Philadelphia Freeway
    Works its way up to a lively, beat-wise sleekness.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Some Are Lakes
    Like her game soprano, which breaks apart with the same lucid strength it sometimes uses to soar with trepidation, Land of Talk's music unleashes its own aggressive logic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Peace Love Death Metal
    The two-man, woogie-filled boogie team is fine for 30 minutes.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nightlife
    It still cuts, just not quite as deep.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Doctor's Advocate
    Doctor's Advocate isn't really all that dire, especially if you can get past the constant--and constantly labored--airing of, shall we say, grievances.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Highway Companion
    This rarely works as the heart-heavy traveling music Petty has in mind; while he flees or revisits dark corners in every song, Petty sings like he has nothing at stake.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stadium Arcadium
    Neither disjointed embarrassment of riches à la The Beatles nor conceptual magnum opus like The Wall, Stadium Arcadium is two hours of sometimes middling, sometimes masterful, mostly pleasurable mainstream rock.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Magic
    Magic, a maddeningly uneven record that often sounds like legends coasting, most apparently on 'Living in the Future' and 'Last to Die.'
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Attack Decay Sustain Release
    It's love song 'I Believe,' really sets the group apart from 2007's other big-beat revivalists, draping ex-Simian bandmate Simon Lord's FutureSex'd croon in Italo-disco shimmer. By keeping its heart, the result edges out Justice's more brutal † for most exciting, um, "blog house" debut of the year.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is Not The World
    This Is Not the World sounds more like a Buzzcocks record--a merry collection of punk cut-ups.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Else
    The Else, is as tuneful and rockin' as all the rest.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Information
    Information ultimately suffers from the same hollowness that weakened Guero, but it's bolder at its best and less derivative of previous victories.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ear Drum
    Ear Drum marks the self-proclaimed BK MC's third full-length feature, and astoundingly, it's a captivating, cocksure rejoinder to everyone who abandoned him.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Asa Breed
    Throughout much of Asa Breed, Dear achieves a serendipitous balance between the uplifting and the eerie, the hummable and the hypnotic, the tuneful and the texturally adventurous.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Televise
    Televise's second act stumbles through a glut of mid-tempo glumness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fearless
    Swift may not possess the vocal power to fully sell her more lyrically generic material (Underwood's great gift), but for the most part, this remarkably self-aware adolescent's words don't falter, masterfully avoiding the typical diarist's pitfalls of trite banality and pseudo-profound bullshit.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shine
    Estelle turns Shine into a durable debut, pleasant and shrewd.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Devotion
    Rather than fading into you, they're content to simply fade away.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Knives Don't Have Your Back
    Stripped of their cosmetics, some tunes on Knives Don't Have Your Back seem underdeveloped, but they prove what always needs to be proved in the vortex of postmodern pop--that an artist like Haines can do more than hide behind her influences.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Finding Forever
    With Forever, Common delivers the expected--political, lover-man, and battle rhymes told with wit and complexity over street-commercial beats--in spades.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    We All Belong
    They're totally authentic about being inauthentic. Like Guitar Bob, that makes them easy to love.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Narrow Stairs
    It's their mediocre album.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    4
    Beyonce's art is delivery, and 4 is a gorgeous frame for her voice at its absolute best.
    • 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
    • 50 Critic Score
    Call Me Crazy
    Call Me Crazy arrives and hedges the bet: Downy pop blooms next to pedal-steel-driven barroom weepers. The title is apt--this one’s got a pronounced multiple-personality disorder.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Some Cities
    Bogged in reverb tanks, delays, and other swirly effects, Some Cities' production masks their slovenly musicianship.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Get Ready
    Neither as bad as you might fear nor as good as you might hope.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living
    These tunes function like dispatches sent from the front lines back to chums stuck in Nowheresville; he's updated his characters and settings, but Skinner's working-class fascination with humanity's endearing fallibility is still his thematic calling card.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Want One
    Painful as the backstory gets, the work itself remains lovely and luxuriant.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Release The Stars
    Beneath the haughty schmaltz of his fifth LP—embodying Herb Albert one moment and a particularly peach-scented Little River Band the next—there are only momentary flashes of the high-quality torch songs we fell for so long ago.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mantaray
    Mantaray, Siouxsie's blazing solo debut, earns accolades with no trace of fatigue, padding, or confusion, as on-it and of-the-moment as Justin Timberlake.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Recession
    His first two albums were well-crafted, uncompromising in their focus, and exceptionally entertaining. The Recession makes it three.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Chemical Chords
    Diehards will probably resent their new predictability and homogeneity, but the group's mature phase is capable of generating one hell of a pop album.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Viva La Vida
    When the pastoral Eno flourishes that started Vida off so promisingly return for a quick coda, Martin reverts back to his suavely crooning self, but blows it with his first four words: "And in the end . . . . " Bam, you're thinking 'Abbey Road,' and while Vida is far from a dog, it's just another unflattering comparison that the record itself needlessly invites--an extremely overconfident way to handle a crisis of confidence.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hurricane
    The cast includes Sly & Robbie, Brian Eno, Tricky, Wendy & Lisa, and aristocratic former lover Ivor Guest, who brings his experience as a soundtrack composer to an album rich with cinematic splendor.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Parachutes
    There's little on Parachutes that demands attention or punctures the pensive spell, and, unlike Travis's, Coldplay's hooks are slight.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fate
    Highlights of Fate coming back 'round one last time give satisfying closure, but also tease what's coming when it's inevitably cued up again.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Goblin
    The repugnant misogynistic bullshit on Goblin sort of cancels any goodwill I have toward the guy. Particularly because it feels more like search engine optimization; Tyler makes no bones about his desire to hit the pop charts, and on too much of Goblin, he's doing it in the tawdriest way possible.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Just Like You
    You can't deny the pleasure of finding a ride-or-die chick who's vulnerable, but can still kick your trifling ass.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ditherer
    Ditherer is a collection of noisy pop songs, but the emphasis is mainly on the noise, muddying up the tunes in a way that's both frustrating and titillating.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The First Lady
    Her tightest set yet.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wet From Birth
    Their tracks are consistently both catchy and punky enough to make your lip sneer.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Swimming
    With catchy choruses (hear "Why, tell me why?/I don't know" once and it won't go away), assured self-production, and lyrics that lean on nobody's pen, it won't be long before people start comparing other bands to French Kicks, instead of the other way around.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jukebox
    Jukebox's few truly memorable moments--such as the shimmering 'Silver Stallion,' which takes the jaunty country-rock tune popularized by the Highwaymen and turns it into a late-night whisper, à la her version of '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction'--are dwarfed by the merely adequate ones.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Musicology
    Musicology is noticeably spare and controlled. This development gratifies its admirers, and rightly so.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    X&Y
    Unusually accomplished, fresh, and emotional.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Good Girl Gone Bad
    Good Girl never settles on a sound, and Rihanna vacillates between aping Gretchen Wilson, Ashanti, Gwen Stefani, and Pink. Nonetheless, she often sounds every bit like the superstar she clearly intends to be.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lust Lust Lust
    The Jesus and Mary Chain comparisons are still apt, though they're creeping out from under the shadow of 'Happy When It Rains' and heading toward something far scarier, as traces of Throbbing Gristle seem ready to disrupt their noise-pop vigil at any moment.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Thousand Shark's Teeth
    [The album] exude grace and vocal excellence in the realm of Art Garfunkel or Kate Bush--a consequence of the earth-shattering stakes at hand. The rub is that Shark's Teeth is better than good.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carnival II: Memoirs Of An Immigrant
    Just when Carnival II begins to feel comfortable in hip hop, Paul Simon hops onto the mournful 'Fast Car' and a massive Bollywood ensemble powers the roiling 'Immigrant.' [Dec 2007, p.108]
    • Village Voice
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Warning
    The album's darn spooky good... Shelving the old Green Day wall of guitars (Dookie and Insomniac) in favor of the youngest (and best) Pete Townshend mod-clanky buzz opens up the band's sound dramatically; it's airy and spacious, lots of room for the vocals. The whole thing breathes with neat ambiences.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    King of the Beach
    Williams's record is brisk, clocking in under 40 minutes. But it takes far more risks, dabbling in Animal Collective–ish psych pastiche on "Baseball Cards," Kurt Fauxbain dummy posturing on the riotous "Idiot," and Phil Spector homage not once but twice-on the magical "Da Doo Run Run"–lifting "Mickey Mouse" and, less impressively, with a rip of the "Be My Baby" beat on "When Will You Come."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dynamite Steps
    Gorgeously produced by the Syndicate, many of these tracks are piano-driven, mid-tempo dirges that take a while to get rolling; occasionally, as on "Be Invited," they just circle the block.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fuckin A
    Fuckin A outsexes the nuevo new-wavers with its dry-hump hum.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Black And White Album
    It's nice to have a record with a plan.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Load Blown
    It's the kind of detailed withdrawal that makes for excellent headphone music.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Make Sure They See My Face
    The greatest thrill, however, is that Kenna's square-peg edges still never quite line up with the mainstream hole.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Untitled
    Controversy aside, without any truly addictive tracks, you can't consider Nas's latest among his greatest. But it's hard not to appreciate the effort.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ta-Dah
    Arch and ostentatious, their music both falls victim to and exalts in Warhol's 15-minutes-of-fame declaration. Like a screenprint of a soup can, it's at once timeless and pointless.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Collapse into Now
    What makes this record better than Accelerate is the feeling that R.E.M. have figured out how to be R.E.M. again--how to affect the signature balance of folky and punky that's inspired bands far less worshipful than Pearl Jam or the Decemberists.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    From A Compound Eye
    That Eye is neither great nor terrible and often very good can be attributed to one part talent and two parts luck. But the fact remains that Pollard is far too willing to leave all the heavy lifting to the listeners.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Hair, The TV, The Baby & The Band
    They've become lapidary masters. The trouble is, who's listening and learning?
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    VYP: Voice of the Young People
    Not a bad debut, finally, but someone should tell her that speaking for the young people doesn't mean merely becoming Shanice with attitude.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Larceny & Old Lace
    Righteous dilettantes, the Coathangers' songs are simple and jarring-they're irreverent towards melody and their hooks jut at odd angles.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Loose
    Furtado is game... but Timbo brings beats, not chemistry. Loose isn't a love child, but a bump-and-grind that never finds a groove.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    News And Tributes
    Their latest one-ups the competition with punk that's theatrical and unrefined, melodic but treacle-free.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Quaristice
    Quaristice demands to be heard, but stubbornly refuses to be the soundtrack of your life. That's art, and perhaps it's only pegged as "difficult" because it won't sing along with you; neither will the Chrysler Building, but that doesn't make it any less beautiful.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Donnas Turn 21
    A punk-rock attitude and metal licks are all that are necessary for these four chicks to show the world what they want. Turn 21 is way heavier than the bubble-yum power-chord punch-punk they started out with—you know, the kind of three-minute tunes that came so easily when you were rehearsing after school for your first big show. But when they want to, the Donnas can still pull it all out and go Mano.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Venomous Villain [VV:2]
    VV:2 does have a bit of a for-hire feel.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    LP3
    LP3 is a stronger outing, though it's not necessarily harder or faster.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Born This Way
    For as overblown as Born is clearly intended to be, it's very difficult to love it for its nature--its gentler moments are more rewarding.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Elevator
    It has all of the stomp and swagger of Franz, if not the impeccable grooming.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mr. Love & Justice
    Overall, Mr. Love and Justice is classic Bragg: frequently fantastic folk-rock that keeps both the faith and your attention.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Made of Bricks
    Bricks is consequently more bracing and rewarding than most young-love-lost albums.
    • 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.
Page: