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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    • 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...
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ONoffON
    MoB trounce obsolescence because their typical peak moment is a flash of hard truth about a situation, a bolt of clarity about action to be taken.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Soft Bulletin
    The Lips may have been inspired by the easy-listening craze, but the seeker's quality within their music tugs against that style's instinctive cheapening of sentiment.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room On Fire
    Great, better even than the last.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Evening Of My Best Day
    Her magnetism radiates as powerfully as ever.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uh Huh Her
    Uh Huh Her is as discrete--and ravishing--as her other works.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Is This It?
    If you like one Strokes song, you'll like their whole album.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nellyville
    A great pop album that reconciles his sudden wealth, attachment to home, and desire to rule the world.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Real New Fall L.P. (Formerly Country On The Click)
    What makes Real New real good is that it's got more of the really good shit.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Birth Of A Prince
    It's as esoteric as you'd expect RZA to be. But it's also more Wu.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Play
    A perfect blend of sacred and secular--exactly what Moby's been looking for all along.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Decoration Day
    Darker, more personal than political, Decoration Day rocks easier and rolls harder than Southern Rock Opera, but nevertheless proves beyond a doubt that the DBT engine's got enough horsepower to keep on.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
    Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is basically a good album, even a great album if you're in the mood, though if you listen to a lot of hip-hop (or house music or basement bhangra or any other genre not dominated by white people), it probably won't be the most extraordinary album you'll hear all month.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cee-Lo Green Is The Soul Machine
    There are chakra-smacking pleasures here that could only have come from an artist of Cee-Lo's expansiveness.
    • 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).
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Showtime
    A brash, dazzling dispatch from a parallel universe.
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    C'mon C'mon
    Only the tragic decision to duet with former employer Don Henley mars the ride.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gold Medal
    Their craft has gotten way deeper than hey-ho blitzkrieg bop.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seven Swans
    His beliefs take periodic diva turns, but Seven Swans is still far more preoccupied with the banjo than God: Stevens's tenderly picked chords fly higher than any golden harp, and his delicate, lapping vocals lovingly complement all that tinny stroking.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Grind Date
    A superbly sequenced set chock-full of clever entendres, oozing with existentialisms on par with those of Buhloone Mindstate and De La Soul Is Dead.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Turn On The Bright Lights
    If I like them because they remind me of eating bad bathtub mescaline in the woods and listening to Cure singles, well, that'll do. You might like them for completely different reasons.
    • 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.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Madvillainy
    An outlandishly imaginative collaboration.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chain Gang Of Love
    While a certain sameness sets in after minute 30, glittering amid the downtuning are perfect bazooka pop songs, both bubblegum and firepower.
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