Rolling Stone's Scores

Select another publication »
For 5,909 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 34% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 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: 100 Magic
Lowest review score: 0 Know Your Enemy
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,627 out of 5909
  2. Mixed: 2,242 out of 5909
  3. Negative: 40 out of 5909
5909 music reviews
view
per page
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Neil Young Archives Vol. II (1972-1976) [Box Set]
    For casual listeners, the inclusion of already-released material and repeated songs may feel bloated and unnecessary. But hardcore fans have craved this for years, and they’ll be more than happy to indulge in any and all versions of these tracks (ahem, “The Losing End” at the Roxy!). ... Some of the unreleased tracks are unfathomably great.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Life's Rich Pageant
    R.E.M. were already college-radio heroes by the time they made Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986. They could've kept making mumbly, jangly tunes for their core audience, but they went bigger and bolder, stepping toward radio-friendliness while retaining their iconoclastic spirit.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Best Of The Black President [Reissue]
    While the song selection (including classics like the brass-balled superfunker "Zombie") is killer, recording info would help. The music speaks for itself, but presidential history deserves better.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Some Girls [Deluxe Edition]
    This edition has 12 outtakes, most of which have been hoarded on bootlegs by Stones fanatics for years. Some of the bonus tracks are nearly as hot as the originals.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Love And Theft
    The remarkable achievement of Love and Theft is that Dylan makes the past sound as strange, haunted and alluring as the future...
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads [2004 Version]
    In the 1977-79 half of Name, nearly every song beats the studio version. But the 1980-81 disc is the prize, as the Heads take their lofty concepts to the stage with a ten-piece band. [2 Sep 2004, p.147]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Achtung Baby [Super Deluxe]
    The bonus material is not essential listening, but since U2 rarely pull back the curtain on their creative process, it's fascinating to hear this rough draft of history.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Imagine: The Ultimate Collection [Box Set]
    Imagine: The Ultimate Collection is a lavish celebration of John’s masterwork.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    L.A. Woman
    The alternate takes are all lesser versions interspersed with studio chatter and other audio vérité--the sound of a band enjoying its work, unaware its time was nearly up.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Dusty Road
    The sound quality is astonishing.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    ...And Justice for All [30th Anniversary Expanded Edition]
    The deluxe edition is an overwhelming portrait of one of the most pivotal moments in the lives of Metallica but also the metal genre as a whole, because the band would take the Justice template and streamline it to become megastars within just a few years.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Pylon Box [Box Set]
    From the very first moment they started playing, this was a band that was eons ahead of its time. Pylon Box is exactly the deep dive their incredible legacy deserves.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    Lemonade is her most emotionally extreme music, but also her most sonically adventurous.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Miles Davis at Newport: 1955-1975 The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4
    A four-CD, 20-year cornucopia of live performances that show that evolution in real time, drawing on his appearances at the globe-roving Newport Jazz Festival with diverse collaborators.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sunbather
    The mood stays ominous, even as sonic details thrill headphone-equipped headbangers.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Things Must Pass [50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition] [Box Set]
    The original All Things has aged brilliantly (the fresh remix doesn’t hurt). ... The two CDs of early demos (day one made with Voormann and Starr, day two acoustic versions) could easily stand on their own; these are spare, campfire-ish takes on which Spector would soon add Wall of Sound bricks.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Brighten The Corners: Nicene Creedence Edition
    This reissue bonanza shows the Nineties' premier indie band turning reflective and joyfully screwing around at the same time.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bouquets from a Cloudy Sky: The Complete Pretty Things Collection [Box Set]
    The Pretties were impatient modernists, carrying that blues zeal to psychedelia (1967's "Defecting Grey"), rock opera (ahead of the Who, on 1968's S.F. Sorrow) and progressive rock (1970's Parachute) with spectacular if commercially dire results. This grand box takes that tale, across 11 studio albums and a feast of extras, up to the present day.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
    A definitive album.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial
    This sumptuous birthday celebration of America's greatest folk singer is really a present to us: two CDs of his greatest songs and recordings, mostly from the mid-1940s, and a disc of illuminating rarities, including what is thought to be Guthrie's first studio session in 1939.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    At Carnegie Hall [Live]
    Just as exuberant is the part of Disc Two dominated by the jazz-infused playing of pianist Rubén González, whose spiraling solos bring roars from the crowd.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Boy In Da Corner
    If you want a vision of the future of hip-hop and techno, get this record.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bang Years: 1966-1968
    The Bang Years is the anthology his fans have always craved--the first definitive collection of his Sixties nuggets, when he was just another Brooklyn punk hustling his way into the business with a guitar, groovy sideburns and a solitary-man glare.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You Want It Darker
    Following a string of records that have each felt like a swan song, You Want It Darker may be Cohen's most haunting LP.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Archives Vol. 1 1963-1972
    It's built for fanatics, yet the goods could make a fanatic out of anyone.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Channel Orange
    When Ocean reins himself in, tucking his words and melodies into tighter verse-chorus structures, the songs have startling force.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Live at the Academy of Music 1971
    All totaled: a trunkload of what at this point are barroom folk standards, played so vividly you'll be bellowing along.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle
    This latest one, which lasts more than double the length of the studio Love Supreme, shows additionally how for Coltrane, his weightiest statement to date wasn’t a fixed masterpiece but a perpetual work in progress, a launchpad to the next phase of his quest.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Elephant
    It is a glorious thing to hear. It will be one of the best things you hear all year.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Raw Power [Reissue]
    Finally, the third and most brutal album from these Detroit legends gets both the rawness and the power it deserves.
Page: