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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    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    College Dropout
    West's witty, self-produced solo debut, College Dropout, frolics in this space between should and can, between playful hyper-awareness and young, willful naïvete.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Margerine Eclipse
    The music is so sunny and luminous it's practically ablaze, radiating positive energy from all angles.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Medulla
    Where 2001's Vespertine was erotic, Medulla is reflexive and awestruck.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With The Lights Out
    So, in theory, this big Christmas stocking of demos, B sides, compilation tracks, and curiosities is mostly useful for its historical value, as context. The context, it turns out, rules.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One Beat
    One Beat is ruthless with SuperGlue riffs that reach back a decade or more, from the Go-Gos pogo of "Oh!" to the stuttering Cure guitars of "The Remainder" to the Buzzcocks toolings of "Hollywood Ending."
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I'm Lonely (And I Love It) [EP]
    With the fabulously synthetic surfaces forming a cozy cocoon around Merritt's reflexive cynicism, the new FBH EP is a shiny, acidic counterpoint to the twilit wallow of [6ths album] Hyacinths.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Release
    Release sounds at once like a last gasp and a reinvention, which makes it all the more moving.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Great Destroyer
    Destroyer simmers with life in all of its noisy, tuneful excess.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blue Eyed In The Red Room
    Blue Eyed... pegs him as a nimble architect of texture and melody, chiseling experimental forms into something refined.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room Noises
    The spine of nearly every one of their grainy black songs glows with a luminous vocal melody.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    End Of Love
    It's sweet and sad and frequently hilarious.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Arular
    Not for a moment does the violence seem vindictive, sadistic, or pleasurable. It's a fact of life to be triumphed over, with beats and tunelets stolen or remembered or willed into existence.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Massacre
    It is hands-down the most diabolically sensous collection of baby-making gangsta music since Pac's All Eyez.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Silent Alarm
    Bloc Party borrow the soaring melodic guitar lines of Television and sinuous noodling of New Order and the Cure to add a lushness that makes these songs sonically beautiful as well as rhythmically aggressive.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lullabies To Paralyze
    They still cuss (in case you for-fucking-got), and they still gab about drinking and screwing and dabbing their noses in the c-c-c-c-c-cocaine, so all's good in that regard.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alligator
    The rest of the band plays straight man, setting up Berninger's punchlines and peeling him off the floor at the end of the night.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The First Lady
    Her tightest set yet.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Forgotten Arm
    The songs on The Forgotten Arm are too engaging to dismiss their familiarity.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mezmerize
    Mezmerize should be enough to keep A.D.D.-ers occupied for six months.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    OK Cowboy
    Listening to it from start to finish is so bracing it's overwhelming; it sounds like what it would feel like to drink six cups of black coffee chased down with a bucket of ice water.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    X&Y
    Unusually accomplished, fresh, and emotional.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Supernature
    Supernature is their most radio-friendly work yet.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Why Should The Fire Die?
    With any luck (and some marketing muscle), this excellent album will find the Dashboard Confessional fans it deserves.
    • 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ten Thousand Fists
    The best mainstream metal release since Judas Priest's Angel of Retribution.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Cadillac
    She emerges with her genius for genre-bending intact.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Congotronics 2: Buzz'N'Rumble From The Urb'N'Jungle
    The pace isn't all breakneck; vocal approaches range from blanket chanting to raucous call-and-response, and some stretches are plain-gasp--pretty.
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