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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    • 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.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Van Lear Rose
    Less rehearsal, less production, and fewer layers of sound let Loretta's Lorettaness shine through.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Stankonia
    When talking about an album as multilayered, thematically diverse, and sonically rich as OutKast's Stankonia, though, the best thing is to boil it down to its essentials, its influences, its approaches. You know, the uppercase conceptual stuff. This album, the acclaimed Atlanta duo's fourth and best, contains so many hummable hooks, so many snap-your-head beats, so many break-'em-out-and-talk-about-'em metaphors, that it's easy to get lost in the sauce.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    Kanye is rapping and singing better and with more tenacity than he ever has on Fantasy, but also less often, wisely allowing others to speak for him-every single guest artist on this album senses the moment and rises to the occasion.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Madvillainy
    An outlandishly imaginative collaboration.
    • 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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
    This is nightmare music--a blue-collar purgatory made of American mythology and populated by its grotesques.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Guitar Song
    It's got a few clunkers and slow spots, and, especially given the depressive tempos Johnson's so fond of, it's inadvisable to ingest in one sitting. But surprisingly Guitar is packed at least as solid as his last set, and it's less conventional to boot.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Is This It?
    If you like one Strokes song, you'll like their whole album.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Funeral
    Funeral is a remarkable record, hard to hear at first, then hard to stop hearing.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
    The resulting, mercifully final product is, as you might have suspected all along, fantastic, by turns triumphant, defiant, and gleefully crass.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Untrue
    While the percussion-free 'Endorphin' and 'Dog Shelter' paint haunting pictures of isolation and heartache, a warm and generous humanity runs just beneath the surface. It's this quality that lends the propulsive woodblock throb of the closing 'Raver' its muted euphoria.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Merriweather Post Pavilion
    MPP is filled with enough new achievements that it's a waste of space to lament the past. It's a rhythm record with an atmosphere.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hell Hath No Fury
    Make no mistake: Hell Hath No Fury is a major event.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Greatest Story Never Told
    What really strikes you about its 17 tracks (only two failed to make the final cut due to sample- and guest-artist-clearance issues) is Saigon's sincerity.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    69 Love Songs
    Like a great romance, it's consistently lovable even when stupid or frustrating, and its best moments are absolutely breathtaking.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
    It embraces rock guitar again with the same gulping pleasure with which Harvey is for once embracing her man.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Destroyer's Rubies
    The stupendous Destroyer's Rubies, recorded with a full, swaggering band, is maybe his best and certainly his least theoretical album.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fishscale
    Ghost's Fishscale is the most creative album to come out of New York hiphop since his own 2000 Supreme Clientele.
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