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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Cadillac
    She emerges with her genius for genre-bending intact.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mountain Battles
    In many ways, what follows is the perfect distillation of the Breeders' catalog (and Deal's attendant side project, the Amps).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revelling/Reckoning
    While the acoustic simplicity of Reckoning seems thin at first, particularly beside Revelling's sensual, bombastic joy, the croons and ballads grow on you, if not for their melancholy navel-gazing, then for their languid, old-school folksiness.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Double Night Time
    His new Double Night Time is a relatively introspective affair. It's also more satisfying as headphone fodder, thanks largely to a phalanx of synthesizers (burbling arpeggios cushion most tracks) and vocals from Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Emeritus
    Scarface remains trapped in the four-cornered room of his mind, but he seems to have found a measure of peace in solitude, turning out quietly masterful albums like this one, and letting time turn him into a weathered monument.
    • 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Welcome To The Dollhouse
    These gals are older, more cohesive, and more enchanting than before, plus Maxim-approved.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Two Men With The Blues
    Sure, the novelty helps, and if it recurs too often, the glee of hearing Nelson and Marsalis mesh will diminish. But hearing once how they play with and against each other is a real treat.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Murs For President
    So with Murs for President, he just did what he does, churning out another strong album of choppy retro samples that pretend chipmunk-soul and snap never existed.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hyacinths and Thistles
    Confidently ridiculous and matter-of-factly wise, the 6ths record is a lovely collection of songs about pining, yearning, coveting, aching, "kissing the bottle wishing it was you." Needless to say, it's also quite funny.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Room On Fire
    Great, better even than the last.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Give Up
    album hits people who love the sound extravaganzas of overdubbed guitar symphonies, can't hang with the folkiness full-service singer-songwriters inevitably preserve, and expect melodic flair and beats, yet sometimes want to hear words.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Happyness
    Thematically it's a less ambitious record than Pelo (and in terms of scale, Pedals), but listen to it as the Navins' Exile in Guyville and its truths are heartbreaking in their weary familiarity.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    21
    21 probably isn't the best album Adele has in her, but it just might make her famous enough to finally be a pain in the ass.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    X&Y
    Unusually accomplished, fresh, and emotional.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Seldom Seen Kid
    The singer's Mancunian bleariness is such that the bittersweet barfly sing-along 'Grounds for Divorce' rings effortlessly real, while the quasi-spiritual questing of 'Weather to Fly' gets reined in by the sobering image of "pounding the streets where my father's feet/Still ring from the walls."
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strange Little Girls
    Neither a straight feminist critique nor a tribute album, Strange Little Girls is rather a nuanced exploration of the dualities of love and aggression.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Power In Numbers
    Jurassic 5 value commitment over calculation; that is, they keep it real.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living
    These tunes function like dispatches sent from the front lines back to chums stuck in Nowheresville; he's updated his characters and settings, but Skinner's working-class fascination with humanity's endearing fallibility is still his thematic calling card.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hawk Is Howling
    It's a page out of Mogwai grandchildren Ratatat's playbook, and it shows these Scots doing something we haven't seen them do in a while: evolve.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gold Medal
    Their craft has gotten way deeper than hey-ho blitzkrieg bop.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In Our Bedroom After The War
    Only a great fool would be satisfied with just a track or two.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Colin Meloy Sings Live!
    But in clearing away the ear-candy clutter that's increasingly come to define his band's records (for better or for worse), Meloy enables even observers less convinced than those caught on tape to admire the tidy architecture of his material.
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