For 5,910 reviews, this publication has graded:
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34% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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62% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.1 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 67
| Highest review score: | Magic | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest review score: | Know Your Enemy |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 3,628 out of 5910
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Mixed: 2,242 out of 5910
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Negative: 40 out of 5910
5910
music
reviews
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- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
Like most of Riley's music, it's full of gorgeous air, exposed emotions and rhythms that have a mathematical integrity.- Rolling Stone
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On A Little Deeper, Dynamite pretty much owns the thin line between love and hate.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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Suggests a marriage of Jeff Buckley and early Radiohead, minus the guitar freakouts.- Rolling Stone
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This aesthetic journey has alienated longtime fans missing the concise, angry Ani while attracting newbies charmed by her chops. Evolve speaks to both camps with a succinct summation of her experimental side, here focused and more refined.- Rolling Stone
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He blows up like an inheritor and improves upon his influences with a few jewels of unique and exquisitely tender rock & roll.- Rolling Stone
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Mellow moments abound, with gentle strings and pseudofolky melodies seeping into the mix, but most songs bank on the winsome charisma of the chunky guitars and Alexakis' grief-tinged Northwestern drawl, both of which manage to sound simultaneously cathartic and hook-y.- Rolling Stone
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Sing the Sorrow is not exactly a concept album, but it does have a singleness of dark purpose that builds in momentum as the disc progresses.- Rolling Stone
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When she really gets her hands dirty, Kim sounds more forceful and engaged than she's been in years.- Rolling Stone
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Their selling point is an eclecticism that evades Oasis-style overkill with compact songs that hop all over the place.- Rolling Stone
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Dull missteps such as "Sickalicious" and "Into You" show a lack of creative vision that stunts him when the hot beats run dry.- Rolling Stone
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These Brits are sort of a New Order for the twenty-first century - fitter, happier, more productive.- Rolling Stone
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It's a Saturday- night version of Foxtrot: laid-back, poignant and comic.- Rolling Stone
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Long stretches of #1 sound like the synth-pop soundtrack to a vintage video game: thin and static.- Rolling Stone
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He's supported by the most accomplished set of beats in recent hip-hop memory.- Rolling Stone
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What keeps it from being a crackling mess is Markus Acher's sweet, plaintive voice pushing these selected ambient works toward song structure and melody.- Rolling Stone
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Ashcroft's mastery of balladry makes "Buy It in Bottles" his best since the Verve's "Lucky Man."- Rolling Stone
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The songwriting needs a personality infusion and more gray cells, but numbers such as "The Dance" have the enthusiasm of a puppy powered by a nuclear reactor, making the Music an apt opening act for the likes of New Order and Coldplay.- Rolling Stone
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When Stacy Jones moans, "I've been getting by on nothing" halfway through The Art of Losing, he achieves the album's one honest moment.- Rolling Stone
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A unified set of shadows, isolated hurt laid out in fine rainy-day garage-demo psychedelia.- Rolling Stone
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Robert Forster's and Grant McLennan's distinctly different songwriting styles mesh brilliantly here.- Rolling Stone
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Watching this museum piece come to life in a sweaty dive might make for an amusing night out. But on disc, why settle for a third-generation Xerox when the original documents still exist?- Rolling Stone
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Free may be her most beautiful album, as well as her cagiest: There are gaunt rock songs and ramshackle ballads, all painted with bold, sure strokes that belie her ambivalence.- Rolling Stone
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Songs such as "Unsung" showcase a reapplied talent for twisting archetypal metal riffs into new shapes.- Rolling Stone
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Massive Attack fans won't be startled by anything on 100th Window, but at nine tracks, this may be the most accessible, freaky, futuristic electronic head-food album on the market.- Rolling Stone
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Their songbook bravado and grip of extreme dynamics are vividly caught in the poleaxed cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit."- Rolling Stone
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Supergrass' lack of commitment can get wearisome, and Life suffers without a guiding sense of personality, a point of view.- Rolling Stone
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Most people this pretentious or literary don't rock so hard or write tunes so good.- Rolling Stone
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Leo's racial politics are serious and confused in that familiar white-guy-in-D.C. way, but word-heavy, wound-up gems such as "Hearts of Oak," "The Anointed One" and "The Ballad of the Sin Eater" prove he knows how to turn political conviction into punk energy.- Rolling Stone
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Van Dyks's segues are so effortless it's easy to take them for granted, but the precision with which he moves between styles and tempos is a thing of beauty.- Rolling Stone
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If this combination of big-name backers, undeniable skills, radio-ready tracks and a marketable thug persona make Get Rich or Die Tryin' a sure-shot smash hit, it also makes it a great record.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone
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Let Go is an excellent rainy-afternoon album, full of gentle and melancholic beauty, with echoes of Love and the Beach Boys.- Rolling Stone
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Televise is a seductive piece of work and a solid step forward for Calla's songcraft.- Rolling Stone
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Erasure do the Ronettes' "Walking in the Rain" almost as well as Cheryl Ladd, they do Buddy Holly's "Everyday" better than James Taylor, they prove that one man and one man only was meant to sing "Can't Help Falling in Love," and they tart up Peter Gabriel something fierce.- Rolling Stone
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Zwan are more straightforward (and much less histrionic) than the Smashing Pumpkins, so a few of the songs in the middle are pretty but not very dramatic.- Rolling Stone
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Reed has once again stretched the boundaries of popular music and, in doing so, has honored Edgar Allan Poe's illustrious legacy, along with his own.- Rolling Stone
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It's Malin's personal reflections, such as growing up a child of divorce in the Seventies in "Almost Grown," that give Fine Art its soul.- Rolling Stone
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A mellow concoction of atmospheric textures, electronic samples and funk-lite beats.- Rolling Stone
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Some of Knives' tunes suffer from [vocalist Caithlin] De Marrais' oversold sentiments.- Rolling Stone
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Red Devil Dawn is as intricate and bewitching as the work of Tom Waits or the Tindersticks.- Rolling Stone
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These four Scots sound like the depressed cousins of the Flaming Lips. [6 Feb 2003, p.62]- Rolling Stone
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Like the best of the Sea and Cake's work, the sixth album from the Chicago indie outfit is a tempest of pastels: It's full of burbling electronic experimentation but still manages to always carry a tune.- Rolling Stone
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The album's wanton schizophonia results in such a switched-on pileup of styles that Groove Armada have earned their own rubric -- call it electrocrash, and consider it great.- Rolling Stone
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The ex-Jam frontman careens from folky piffle to respectable bar-band stomp.- Rolling Stone
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Electric Circus is a wild, vibrant trip billowing with purple-haze guitars, ethereal choruses and warped scratching.- Rolling Stone
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At once fly, fierce and skilled, he's a purebred off the leash.- Rolling Stone
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With their fifth studio record, Phrenology, they finally become what we've always hoped they would be: a hip-hop band that strikes a very funky balance between righteousness and humor, between headbanging grooves and truth-telling.- Rolling Stone
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A gust of spiritual pop, a record that openly worships without sinking into heavy-handedness.- Rolling Stone
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Does This Look Infected? squeezes a dozen energetic songs into a half-hour, and each one is over before you can figure out why that chorus sounds familiar or where you've heard that riff before.- Rolling Stone
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Few bands are better equipped to release an odds-and-sods record such as Steal This Album!, because SOAD songs already seem like bits and pieces of different songs welded and held together through sheer force of will.- Rolling Stone
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Brainwashed is a warm, frank goodbye, a remarkably poised record about the reality of dying, by a man on the verge.- Rolling Stone
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The arrangements treat Mitchell's tunes as precious artifacts, making little attempt to seduce the listener.- Rolling Stone
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[Out Hud] uses guitars like proper rhythm instruments, meshed best with penetrating drums, space synths and a dash of sticky dub. [23 Jan 2003, p.67]- Rolling Stone
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This is one of the most subtle male R&B records in a good while.- Rolling Stone
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Most of the songs are pitched too high for her register, the production sounds cheap, and love has dulled whatever street edge she might have had.- Rolling Stone
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Machine Says Yes throbs like vintage acid house, but they've given it a cosmetic makeover for the millennium.- Rolling Stone
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In their past lives, the members of this band were enraged. Now, fierce as they might sound, Audioslave just seem sorta engorged.- Rolling Stone
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Up! would be a knockout even if it were limited to its one disc of country music.... But the second, relentlessly kinetic pop disc is a revelation.- Rolling Stone
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Matchbox Twenty now seem almost dignified, a fact that is as much a tribute to their advancing abilities as it is to how shamelessly their sellout successors suck.- Rolling Stone
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Everything here is all programmed refinement, stylish melodies and vocal fireworks.- Rolling Stone
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The familiarity of this straightforward tumble sounds tired -- the musicians struggle to put their backs and hearts into the Mudhoney-ish rocker "Save You." But like Neil Young at his most deliberately despondent, Pearl Jam sound purposefully tired.- Rolling Stone
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Testify is full of laid-back, better-than-average adult-contempo fare, and the subtle, atmospheric production sure beats the slickness of his Eighties records.- Rolling Stone
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One more strong record from hip-hop's most dependable voice.- Rolling Stone
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The album isn't the romp it might have been had Lopes survived, but 3D solidly embodies black pop in a year in which it has lacked a center.- Rolling Stone
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Phoenix is a loose concept album about overindulging in chemicals, love and guitars, and it mainlines feedback.- Rolling Stone
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His beautiful detachment makes these nondescript hooks -- so plain they'd be forgettable if sung by anyone else -- into something special.- Rolling Stone
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What's left of his sound is an oddly squirrelly strain of drum-and-bass. [12 Dec 2002, p.98]- Rolling Stone
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When these songs keep the pretense to a minimum, her melancholy mood can be affecting. But much of the rest is dreadfully muddy, lacking in both substance and texture.- Rolling Stone
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Cover versions that once seemed inspired now feel somewhat obligatory.- Rolling Stone
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There is a flow and coherence to these fifteen tracks that make the narrative whole much larger than the sum of its occasionally goofy parts.- Rolling Stone
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The Neptunes' brilliant, impertinent, full-body funk is, for the most part, what stays with you from Justified; their songs, spacious and shot through with ecstatic aaahs, outshine their neighbors on the album.- Rolling Stone
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This impressive follow-up sounds remarkably similar -- it's just packaged more pretentiously.- Rolling Stone
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An unapologetically eccentric album that explores the boundaries of psychedelic pop sounds in the same way Autechre does in the electronic world.- Rolling Stone
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Eminem contributes three new songs, all self-produced, which happen to be three of the most ferocious hip-hop songs ever recorded.- Rolling Stone
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There's an army of voices inside Tori Amos, and the girl knows how to use them.- Rolling Stone
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With its lack of gimmickry and a surplus of sweet Seventies soul, Stripped is almost an album for grown-ups.- Rolling Stone
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On Shaman, too many visitors sound as if they're climbing on a gravy train, handing over standard-issue love songs for Santana overdubs. It makes you wonder whether Santana ever met some of his collaborators.- Rolling Stone
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- Rolling Stone