BBC Music's Scores

  • Music
For 1,831 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 68% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 28% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 74
Highest review score: 100 Live in Detroit 1986
Lowest review score: 20 If Not Now, When?
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 7 out of 1831
1831 music reviews
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Somewhere Else certainly reveals itself slowly, but persist and there's real beauty to be found here.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    He sings with such soulful conviction, fitting the wizened candour of these strong, memorable songs like a battered leather glove.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    For many listeners, Foxygen's influences will sound tired. But as they plunder the past, they're enjoying themselves, and the enthusiasm on this messy collection of songs is infectious.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album unfurls at a leisurely pace, the band's characteristic blend of burbling electronica and acoustic instrumentation at its most formidable, and most satisfying, yet.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    With its high-minded lyrical concerns, its family-sized choruses and its authors' buoyant pursuit of what, in lesser hands, could be a restrictive musical form, True North is a superior addition to Bad Religion's already towering body of work.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's this tightrope between bruised self-doubt and fun blasts of noise that gives Wolf's Law its emotional heft.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The result is a bolder, brighter record than their debut.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    He has created a work of insidious beauty: creeping, pervasive and better for it.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Toro y Moi goes longer and harder than before, and the results represent an accentuation of the elements which appealed in his prior work.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This five-part suite expertly blurs boundaries between Weber's sequenced beats and the florid, cascading melodies of the carillon (played expertly by Vegar Sandholt).
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's a consistently intriguing album and, in the long run, may even prove more enduring than its predecessor.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The evocative lyrics sometimes suffer from overly mannered or just overdone phraseology.... But these are ultimately prices worth paying for the pleasingly poetic, adventurous and occasionally florid use of words that mark Villagers out as one of the more interesting, literate and imaginative storytellers of recent years.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yet at every turn, this new album eschews clichés--any strident shrieking, chanting and cod imagery--for something sleek, fluid and effortlessly modern.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Florence, Santigold and the usually brilliant Danny Brown do little more than tick boxes, and ultimately Long.Live.A$AP fails to match its hype with a coherent trend-setting statement.
    • BBC Music
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ultimately, God is less in the details, here, and Lonesome Dreams' success lies largely in the irrefutably vaulting sweep of the music and the ineffable air of melancholy-dented redemption which it so effectively conjures.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Arc
    There are songs here that comprise bite-size fragments of multifarious melodies, drawing on myriad influences. But there are also tracks that sustain one tune and tempo over the duration, where previously only three or four would do.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The real revelation about Fade is that it is the most settled album they've recorded in years.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is a fully realised tribute to early 80s pop-RnB music, filled with candy-sweet keyboard sounds and beats that could be the work of a battered old Casio drum machine.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Predictably but not to its detriment, Signed and Sealed in Blood delivers a mix of rousing rock songs and enough jigs and whistles to get a singsong going at one of their famous St Patrick's Day shows.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The man's bid for a place in the pantheon of gifted and fascinating greats is still on course.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The tunes, riffs and words might not be as impressive as those from the days of yore, but this is still a very arresting example of sonic art: tense and deranged, savage and serrated.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Berberian Sound Studio and Broadcast are a perfect match, and this soundtrack--something you may not want to listen to alone if you keep hearing a weird noise outside the window--gives you an idea of how magnificent this band can be.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ten
    Ten is incredible. It's up there with Gold, Substance and Discography in terms of greatest-hits sets.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It feels rushed, like it needed more time for its many ingredients to blend.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    While The Cast of Cheers are shameless rip-off merchants on more than some occasions here, there's evidently ability at work, and a decent ear for a catchy chorus or two.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Though the vocals never reach that peak [on At The Dancehall] again, they're steady and reliable throughout.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    DNA
    With placid, feline production, tight harmonies and breezy beats, much of DNA ambles along the well-trodden path of the temperate demi-ballad. But it's the ventures away from this that prove Little Mix function far better either side of mid-tempo.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tatum has nevertheless produced an album that, despite its obvious glances back at the past, is smart, sophisticated and of its own pop moment.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The result a stunning, profound, moving and soulful record.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fortunately, the remainder of the album is a powerful, intimate, sumptuous delight in which the orchestra enhances the innate grandeur of Antony's music.