Los Angeles Times' Scores

For 1,596 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 62% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 35% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 Dear Science,
Lowest review score: 25 The New Game
Score distribution:
1596 music reviews
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There are tunes here, including “Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” that feel more spirited than anything Springsteen has done in years, with a touch of the careening intensity that made him and E Street a legendary live act. ... The tunes on “Letter to You” get over thanks to the E Street Band, which drives the songs with purpose and provides a level of detail in the arrangements that keeps anything from getting too mopey.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    “Ice Cream,” the song with Gomez, is the most gratifyingly stylish track here. ... [The Album] plays like a transmission from a previous era. “Crazy Over You,” with its airy wind-instrument sample, rewinds even further to the hip-hop exotica of Timbaland’s late-’90s heyday. ... There’s something vaguely oppressive about “The Album.”
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    “Club Future Nostalgia” calls to mind “The Immaculate Collection”: Like that 1990 classic — a greatest-hits comp sliced and diced by Madonna and producer Shep Pettibone to resemble a killer club set — Lipa’s record uses carefully designed pop tunes as raw material for a breathless new creation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The nostalgia in the production — a blend of crisp digital synth textures and ringing grooves drawn directly from '90s house music — further bolsters the shadowed euphoria of a song like "Sour Candy," in which Gaga is joined by the K-pop girl group Blackpink; "Sine from Above," featuring Elton John, gets a similar friction from the interplay between their voices.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Song for song, “Folklore” does not quite rise to the heady level of albums like “Red” (2012), “Reputation” (2017) and “Lover” (2019). There are no dance floor bangers, no irrefutable earworms, no songs likely to stampede to the upper reaches of the Hot 100. As a collection of songs, though, it stands alone in Swift’s discography. It’s her most album-y album, a creation of and for life in the summer of 2020, ideally experienced alone, late at night, in a single sitting, through noise-canceling headphones.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    “Gaslighter” turns out to be the Chicks’ most intensely personal effort yet, with song after song apparently inspired by Maines’ 2019 divorce.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    “Shoot for the Stars,” an ambitious but scattered expansion of Pop’s sound, is widely expected to top the charts by a long shot next week. But it can’t do much more than fill in the cracks of what his life and career should have been.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    “Rough and Rowdy Ways” rolls out one marvel after another, with killer playing from the singer’s road band.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The result is hardly dry or academic: The palpable anger coursing through tracks like “Yankee and the Brave” and “JU$T” — the latter featuring Pharrell Williams and Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha — feels as cleansing as an acid bath. And fury isn’t the only sensation the group articulates on its most emotionally complex album so far.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Moses Sumney and Mike Hadreas have made the albums of our strange quarantine season — bleak but tender, sprawling yet intricately detailed, as suffused with the need for physical contact as they are alert to its dangers and prohibitions. ... Stunning art-soul record. ... Yet as busy as the music can occasionally feel, both albums keep close track of the singers’ voices, which always merit the attention.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Moses Sumney and Mike Hadreas have made the albums of our strange quarantine season — bleak but tender, sprawling yet intricately detailed, as suffused with the need for physical contact as they are alert to its dangers and prohibitions. ... Stunning art-soul record. ... Yet as busy as the music can occasionally feel, both albums keep close track of the singers’ voices, which always merit the attention.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The result of Apple’s self-imposed social distancing is the stunning intimacy of the material here — a rich text to scour in quarantine. Her idiosyncratic song structures, full of sudden stops and lurching tempo changes, adhere to logic only she could explain, which forces you to listen as attentively as though a dear friend were bending your ear.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There’s something oddly reassuring about these songs — not just “12.38,” a laidback R&B slow jam about a drug-addled sexual encounter, or the sweetly romantic “24.19,” but all 12 of them, even those in which Glover sounds close to overwhelmed by his many misgivings.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album is also a fantastic summary of BTS’ accomplishments so far, and charts a path forward in a tumultuous but exciting new era for K-pop. It’s an album about being in a band, about the relationships that form and get tested in the crucible of insane fame, all set to some of the most genre-invigorating music of their career.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Very chill — and often very pretty.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    As on her earlier records, Halsey can feel like something of a phantom on “Manic,” even when her writing is as vivid as it is in “Graveyard,” which deploys an appealingly creepy metaphor about following a lover way too deep. But her singing, with its pleading tone and its slightly raspy edges, is growing more expressive.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There’s also an infectious spirit of adventure to the album’s arrangements that brings you over to Gomez’s side.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    And musically, at least, that journey paid off. ... Martin can be awfully simplistic in these songs — a problem in any context but especially on an album otherwise marked by some of his most nuanced words.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    As with the free-jazz innovators of the 1960s, Sweatshirt continually pushes against the notion that rap music requires any formulas at all.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The new version has been remastered from the original tapes, and the results are spectacular. ... Clark rightly considered it his masterwork, and decades later, this reissue has reaffirmed his belief. A seamless blend of American music — twangy guitars, a rhythm section that taps out dynamic funk and soul patterns, an understated mix of piano, synth and keyboards and lots of backing singers — it connects genres and movements with ease.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    At 18 songs, “No Holiday” is basically a double album, one that sits somewhere along a continuum of epic works that includes the Clash’s “London Calling” and Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville.” The determination, the vision, the energy — it’s real.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A dozen fully formed analog dance tracks into 45 minutes of synth-driven cruising music. ... On “Touch Red,” a distant beat and a few well-chosen keyboard chords offer a monochromatic background onto which Radelet sings, “Touch red, the world needs color.” The shock of luminosity is jarring. Like a rose blossoming in a field blackened by wildfire, it’s one of many moments on the record that capture in equal measure both beauty and bleakness.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The 12 songs on “Memory” reveal musicians who have grown both as artists and technicians, even if their approach is as impatient as ever. ... They’ve dug deeper into their decade-long aesthetic, adding a more accomplished sound below while piling mounds of feathery stuff up top.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unlike “Stoney” and “Beerbongs & Bentleys,” this album feels composed of discrete stylistic exercises; no longer is he boiling down rap and rock and a little bit of country into a kind of smearable paste.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The gratifying thing about this album — beyond its gorgeous melodies and Del Rey’s singing, which has never been more vivid — is that even as she’s mellowed her attack, her sense of humor has grown more pointed.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    “Iconology” is a brief reminder of the performer’s genius. Across the five tracks here — four new cuts plus an alternate, a cappella take on one, “Why I Still Love You” — Elliott offers a crash course on what has made her a vital voice in hip-hop and R&B and an in-demand collaborator in the years since she delivered her last project, 2005’s “The Cookbook.”
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Very impressive.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vernon’s comments are crucial to divining his meaning in lyrics that can still tend toward the almost comically opaque. ... But the music on “i,i” bolsters this newly outward-looking sense; it’s far more spacious than the hushed acoustic laments of “For Emma, Forever Ago” or the cloistered electro-folk sound of the group’s last album, 2016’s “22, A Million.”
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The singer, born Claire Cottrill, delivers on that early promise on Immunity, which widens her sound without sacrificing the intimacy or the charm of “Pretty Girl.”
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    For all the natural force of her singing — best displayed here in “Otherside,” a stripped-down piano ballad, and the grand Oscar-bait closer, “Spirit” — Beyoncé puts more thought into her records than anybody else in music, and what’s on her mind now isn’t just where all these sounds came from but how useful they remain.