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
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
    The lyrics are often corny and thin.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
    Godspeed's records will either blow your head off or leave you shrugging, depending on where your personal quest for freedom is taking you.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mar Dulce
    No doubt about it, from first note to last, Mar Dulce (loose translation: "the Sweet Sea") is a most tasty dive.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Secret Wars
    All in all, expertly wobbling prog metal, constructed out of as few chords as possible.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Her Majesty The Decemberists
    The band's newfound willingness to experiment leads to overkill.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nostalgia, Ultra.
    He's an intuitive r&b stylist, with a firm sense of song structure (he's written for Justin Bieber and Beyoncé) and a conversational talk-singing voice that is as indebted to Justin Timberlake and Pharrell as it is to R. Kelly.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In The 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into A Swimming Fish And Ate The Head Of His Enemy By Magic
    The clever (and accurate) branding that associated the warm, metallic grids of those thumb pianos (or likembes) with repetitive electronic music. On that front, 7th Moon doesn't disappoint a bit.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Food & Liquor
    As for that perpetual hip-hop debate as to whether an MC is better served by his beats or his words, the Chicago rapper is deft enough in both arenas that you could carry these lyrics around in your head for days... while message boards light up with claims that hip-hop's first truly great instrumental album lies embedded somewhere in all this.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Game Theory
    They've resurfaced sounding dark, mysterious, and pissed off.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like Red On A Rose
    2006's uncanniest country record.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lisbon
    2008's You and Me arguably represented a high-water mark in the Walkmen's sturdy career; the new Lisbon does nothing to erode that goodwill. On the whole, it's less raucous than its predecessor.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eye Contact
    Eye Contact delights with its danceability and synthetic pleasure, but it's frontwoman Lizzi Bougatsos who holds the jams together.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Red Dirt Road
    Some of the best country rock in over a decade.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1988
    Blueprint is the antidote to 12 months of Kanye overexposure. His gritty beats pour sand in West's glossy modernist Vaseline, and his rhymes have the anti-anti-intellectual attitude of a loudmouth braggart you'd be proud to have on your quiz bowl team.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
    New Amerykah seems adherent to the old "cohesive studio album" mold of the soul/neo-soul eras.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Majesty Shredding
    Majesty Shredding is the band's first new studio album in nine years, vigorous and kicking, much more so than you'd have right or reason to expect out of a band this deep into their career.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Be
    West presents Common with a real challenge: rich rhythmic compositions that demand equally vivid verses. The elder MC responds with sharp Polaroid poetry, and the result of their collaboration is an uncluttered journalistic counterpoint to the rambling memoir that is The College Dropout.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Brighter Than Creation's Dark
    The best song on the Drive-By Truckers' new 19-track monolith, Brighter Than Creation's Dark, will remind you why you like them; the album's worst song, which is in fact the worst song they've ever done by a substantial margin, will teach you to love them again.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wild Flag
    The result is a collection of songs where the choppy, dreamy prog of "Glass Tambourine" can exist within a few tracks of the pogo-inducing "Short Version" and still come off as a cohesive, energy-rush-inducing whole.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Am Shelby Lynne
    Don't misunderstand. I Am Shelby Lynne is a standout... Still, if the range of reference marks Lynne's hard-won liberation from cookie-cutter Nashville, there's a different sort of plasticity to this sound, which may explain why it broke not in the heartland or on VH1, but the U.K.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Midnite Vultures
    It's a pastiche festival that works in the interest of groove every bit as hard as it does for knowingness and yuks.
    • 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
    • 90 Critic Score
    Morph The Cat
    Fagen's triumph of rendering post–9-11 New York most recalls how perfectly Steely Dan caught LA on 1980's 'Gaucho.'
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    23
    23 is exactly what we've come to expect from this trio: a tension-filled exploration of the human psyche, blistering but still atmospheric.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Black Up
    That's Black Up's predicament: It wants to be experienced viscerally, but it's being stripped of life by over-intellectualization.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Weather
    With Weather, Ndegeocello shows how she's poised to follow Animal Collective down the rabbit hole and into a promised land of greater musical freedom.
Page: