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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    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Naked Truth
    An easy contender for best rap record of the year.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Red Thread
    Arab Strap mix the stoic, set-permanently-at-dawn folk whispers of last year's Elephant Shoe with the beat-friendly sense of their best early singles: "The First Big Weekend," "(Afternoon) Soaps," "Cherubs." The music sheds its amateur charm for the sound of a band in control of its art and its drum machines.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Red Dirt Road
    Some of the best country rock in over a decade.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dangerous Magical Noise
    Collins's way with a hook has blown up into a stack of tunes that stick, ranging from cranked-up faux-arena rock to spine-shaking rhythm and staccato bounce.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rooty
    Yes, it's as good as the last one, maybe better.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rings Around The World
    SFA uses 21st-century tools to achieve pop timelessness.
    • 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...
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Atlas
    The mightiest alterlatino album in many years. The sound is more rock-oriented and vibrant, and the band has actually learned to write songs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Renegades
    The most penetrating and engaging album of their career...
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Funeral
    Funeral is a remarkable record, hard to hear at first, then hard to stop hearing.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Antics
    What makes Antics such an improvement over Bright Lights is how capable Interpol have become at complementing Banks's lovely ambiguity with an increasingly precise post-punk throb.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Youth & Young Manhood
    Youth & Young Manhood is 2003's finest rock debut.
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