Rolling Stone's Scores

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For 5,910 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: 3,628 out of 5910
  2. Mixed: 2,242 out of 5910
  3. Negative: 40 out of 5910
5910 music reviews
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    • 92 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sunbather
    The mood stays ominous, even as sonic details thrill headphone-equipped headbangers.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
    Each of these albums is as noteworthy for what's missing as for what's there.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Songs For The Deaf
    Whether the ace metal is speedy or onerous (or both, as in the case of "Six Shooter," with its shrieking insanity), it is always deployed in the service of the eccentric song structures, and every track becomes a splendid, mysterious thing.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    69 Love Songs
    Merritt's compositions have a tossed-off, barely produced quality and are held together by sturdily constructed melodies that hark back to Eighties synth poppers like Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kill The Moonlight
    With Kill the moonlight, Spoon complete their transformation from ragtag rockers into beat-driven post-punks.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    World Without Tears
    Musically, it's as superb as anything she's ever done.... But underneath the sublime sounds, something crucial is missing.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let England Shake
    Always an underrated guitarist, Harvey makes use of the jaunty rhythms of British folk music, but takes no comfort in the past. And you don't have to care about English history--or England in general--to fall under Harvey's spell.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Heaven & Earth
    A sprawling, eclectic set that ranges from the slightly tepid to the truly transcendent.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cosmogramma
    There's some info overload, but Ellison is an ace with pacing, and a distracted soulfulness guides the frantic laptop science.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All Hands On The Bad One
    Despite the thematic monotony, Tucker and her band mates think louder and rock smarter than anyone in their class; a modest effort like All Hands would be another band's masterpiece.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lost In the Dream
    As usual with T.W.O.D., these songs are only as good as their grooves.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    OST
    It works well as a very basic introduction to Factory's better-known groups: Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
    From her luscious, aching croon, and her ensemble's solemn high-mesa twang and groove..., you'd never guess she wasn't covering Patsy Cline standards.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Malibu
    The music isn't always as dynamic as his thoughts, opting for a mostly mellow mood that matches the LP's carefree samples of surfing documentaries, but doesn't always capture their freewheeling individuality.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bitte Orca
    It's at once attention-deficient and micromanaged, exhilarating and aggravating.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Soft Bulletin
    Another baffling, winning, neopsychedelic recording.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ys
    Hard to stomach. [19 Oct 2006, p.134]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    New Bermuda
    New Bermuda's few epiphanies are surrounded by waters too rough for most listeners.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    This Right Here Is Buck 65
    As an introduction to Buck's weird world of lovable losers, hugely endowed centaurs and insomniacs, Right Here is right on.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Last Broadcast
    They make tremendously consoling music, in an autumnal sort of way.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Geogaddi
    Geogaddi is marvelously vague, as unconcerned with the real world as gangsta rap is obsessed with it. It's also a lovely, strangely comforting collection of electronic introspection, mood and shadow.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bow Down To The Exit Sign
    Like Death in Vegas, Holmes is a techno boffin whose work builds upon that of the Velvet Underground rather than Kraftwerk; too bad his grooves, like the bass-line chug of "Living Room," often go nowhere fast.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kids See Ghosts
    Though nowhere near as incisive, infectious or rewarding as their best work, Kids See Ghosts is still an important step forward into an era of big moods and short attention spans.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The World Has Made Me The Man Of My Dreams
    Though her deep voice is mixed down a little, most of Meshell Ndegeocello's seventh album--five of its tracks reprised from last year's "Article 3 EP" recalls 2002's "Cookie."
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fall Be Kind [EP]
    At their best, Animal Collective combine shapely pop hooks with mind-broadening sonic freakery. At their worst, the sonic freakery is mind-numbing. Like most of their work, this five-song EP contains all of the above.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts [2006 Version]
    Bush of Ghosts seems half-baked, putatively cerebral yet underthought, interesting only because somebody famous did it.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burn Your Fire for No Witness
    It's a balanced album by a spirit who seems anything but.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    We Love Life
    Both messy and marvelous.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everything Was Beautiful
    Most of Spiritualized's ninth LP comes off intricate, elastic, and soulful. [Mar 2022, p.71]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Mar 10, 2022
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh
    Badu seems so taken by hazy texture--and so determined to play the weirdo--that she's neglected to write many actual songs.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Us
    Us sounds great, with Ali's sensitive, stentorian voice plowing through sleek jazz and blues loops from producer Ant. But the album ends up blandly heavy, weighed down with dark street dramas and lessons about how "the same color blood just pass through our veins."
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dose Your Dreams
    It ultimately sounds like a radio stuck between two stations, a bit like the Hold Steady with laryngitis. Luckily there are enough musical diversions to keep it interesting.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Faith in Strangers
    Andy Stott cooks down the abstract beauty of his 2012 LP Luxury Problems to a new minimalism.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lisbon
    Sometimes the Walkmen's anthemic naturalism wanders without much direction.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
    Some of the music is gripping--the modal-sounding chorus and blippy groove of 'My People' suggests an R&B version of Radiohead--but other tunes feel like absent-minded doodles, and Badu's social consciousness nets middling returns.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip
    Can be madcap and zany, darkly hilarious, and just plain weird. [May 2020, p.89]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted May 12, 2020
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blacklisted
    Case continues to refine her mix of alternative-country music and film-noir sensibility on Blacklisted.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Internal Wrangler
    By twisting the features of various stylistic forefathers - the Velvet Underground, early Pink Floyd, Can, Wire - they've created a new hybrid of bratty garage rock and whimsical sonic experimentation that delights in its own mutant energy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Demon Days
    Surprisingly, Albarn's vocals, phoned-in and incredibly flat, weigh the record down.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    America
    The most enjoyable bits here are the least grandiose.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burn Piano Island, Burn
    It all seems spazzy, but it's actually meticulous and crisply rendered: order through chaos.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gaslighter
    The 12 tracks on Gaslighter fall into easy, radio-friendly categories: empowerment anthem, cheeky ukulele kiss-off, minimalist protest song. Coupled with a long-overdue drop of the “Dixie” from their name, the arrangement dissolves most of the group’s lingering connections to their street-corner bluegrass origins.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Unfollow the Rules
    As with Wainwright’s best works, it’s musical theater without the theater (remember, he once interpolated the theme from Phantom of the Opera on Release the Stars’ “Between My Legs”) and it comes with all of the good and bad that comes with stage drama.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Ride
    The Ride doesn't rank with the classic Los Lobos of How Will the Wolf Survive? or the experimental Kiko; instead, it contains aspects of both and is a tribute to the group's influences. [13 May 2004, p.74]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Alligator
    Depressed guitar poetry that's both elegantly wasted and kinda murky.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wakin on a Pretty Daze
    Kurt Vile's sweetly slack fifth LP kicks in with a nine-and-a-half-minute song about taking a walk, hits peak stoner wonder in a song called "Air Bud" and fills in the spaces with trank-darted Dinosaur Jr. licks.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love Me Back
    The 23-year-old diva plays a little nicer, adhering to the Mary J. Blige school of gritty, nuanced hip-hop soul.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Way There from Here
    Cantrell brings bell-like vocal clarity to her stories, which illuminate more than explain--just enough to make you want to hear 'em again.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Album Of The Year
    Kasher... wrenches sad-eyed beauty out of slow indie-folk arrangements while eulogizing several affairs. [30 Sep 2004, p.188]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    New Multitudes
    Four singer-songwriters tag-team in a folk-rock vein, and the high points are when voices unite.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Weightlifting
    Chock-full of well-textured pop reveries. [16 Sep 2004, p.80]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Push the Sky Away
    The first Seeds LP without co-founder Mick Harvey, Sky is full of tiny sounds--plinking guitars, pulsing bass, lazy subtle drums.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Speak Because I Can
    At her best, she takes PJ Harvey and Nick Drake back to their primordial folk roots, evoking mean sex in overgrown glens and casual farmhand violence.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lost Horizons
    Feels like a widescreen Technicolor dream.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Turn On The Bright Lights
    Interpol's sleek, melancholy sound is a thing of glacial beauty.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Learned The Hard Way
    Sharon Jones sings with force and feeling, but there's only so much she can do to breathe life into music so in thrall to the past. Call the Dap-Kings a band if you want--they're really connoisseurs.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Ecstatic
    With shadowy beats from Madlib and the late J Dilla, plus dense rhymes about Darwin and a rough Brooklyn upbringing, Mos Def's fourth solo album is both mildly strange and a clear step up from his dismally undercooked 2007 record, True Magic.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Manipulator
    Does Segall's songwriting break new ground? Not really--but Manipulator is rarely boring even so, and always exceedingly likable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Back To Black
    The tunes don't always hold up. But the best ones are impossible to dislike. [22 Feb 2007, p.76]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Melody A.M.
    Royksopp show a debt to art rock, but they replace Pink Floyd's paranoia with a mood of late-night sorrow.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jay Stay Paid
    This collection of unreleased material is uneven, tossing in undercooked instrumentals alongside tracks with MCs like Black Thought.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Misadventures of Doomscroller
    If only the lyrics were as articulate as the melodies and playing. [Jul - Aug 22, p.120]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Jul 22, 2022
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lullaby and... The Ceaseless Roar
    It lacks the focused grace of his country experiments, but this much is true: It's Plant's hardest-rocking set in a decade.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rubber Factory
    High-impact scuzz-blues that aims for prime Hendrix and almost gets there. [30 Sep 2004, p.186]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    God's Son
    A welcome return to form.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Major Arcana
    The band's dynamic stales over the course of an LP, but Speedy still manage a feat most peers in the recycling business don't: Make an old style a new concern.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Covers Record
    While we await her next album of new material, due next winter, The Covers Record provides a stopgap fix of her unnerving, coldblooded voice and shaky acoustic guitar.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Embryonic
    The Lips have always been able to subvert pie-eyed whimsy with a sense of homespun beauty, and there's plenty of that here too.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Name Is My Name
    Set in the more commercial contexts of Kelly Rowland features and the-Dream's fluorescent R&B, he can sound like a fish out of some pretty expensive water.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Glowing Man
    While their long, drawn-out, circling dark clouds remain potent, ultimately The Glowing Man is the weakest of the three powerful epics they've released since 2012. It can be muted and jammy, the build-ups are not as dramatic and it brings little in new ideas for Gira's dead-eyed yowl.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Scissor Sisters
    What makes these multilevel pastiches more than cheeky cutups is a genuine musicality.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bad Debt [Reissue]
    It’s lean music for lean times.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Congotronics 2: Buzz'N'Rumble From The Urb'N'Jungle
    Check the track by Sobanza Mimanisa, who add guitar and more melody to the mix, as well as the accompanying DVD, which beautifully documents the recording of the CD.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lamb of God
    Much of Lamb of God contains the sort of piledriving guitar riffs and Olympic-medal-worthy drumming the band has perfected over the last 20 years, making it easy for their less political fans to get in on the fun. That said, the group sounds best when they take musical risks.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Phantom
    A narrative-driven, graceful debut album.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Penance Soiree
    Memorable tunes seldom emerge from the murk.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Coral
    Their selling point is an eclecticism that evades Oasis-style overkill with compact songs that hop all over the place.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
    An intermittently pleasurable record from a talented songwriter with an overstuffed brain. [8 Feb 2007, p.70]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Down to My Last Bad Habit
    "Sad One Comin' On (Song for George Jones)"--a note-perfect honky-tonk weeper about the king of honky-tonk weepers. That’s the odd-card highlight of a set that focuses on smooth Eighties-style country-pop and ballad schmaltz.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sorry To Bother You
    It's an admirably ambitious mix, often a bit too unruly.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Crying Light
    Antony Hegarty's tremulous warble is a strange and marvelous instrument--and for many, an acquired taste. The Crying Light, this diva-dude's third album, spotlights his haunting vocals with few distractions, using piano and low-key orchestral arrangements as foils for him to swoop and shiver over.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ratchet
    He isn't operating in the same romantic vein as, say, Sylvester, one obvious predecessor--just delivering a healthy dose of real talk, set to clean cuts of vintage Chicago house grooves.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The New OK
    Deliver typically gray tales of Trump-era American demise. [Dec 2020, p.70]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Dec 17, 2020
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    April
    The pace can be a problem, but the music is long on understated beauty.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thursday
    While it's refreshing to hear an R&B singer emphasizing the psychic toll of libertinism, his angst sex grows tiresome. Once in a while, can't this dude just get laid, and have fun doing it?
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hey Hey My My Yo Yo
    Junior Senior's track-building smarts and way with a hook add up to non-annoying bliss on a handful of tracks.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Power Of Negative Thinking: B-Sides & Rarities
    Four discs of this kind of horseplay might be too much for casual fans, but feedback freaks will savor the nuclear noise pop.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    What I Do
    A solid disc that lacks some of the emotional punch of 2002's Drive.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Storyline
    The optimism and harmonies found on tracks such as "Wild Card" sound like they could someday turn the 22-year-old artist into a genuine pop star – but only if he outgrows his belief that in order to be serious, you have to be humorless, too.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Flying Club Cup
    Committed to romantic lyricism above all, Condon isn’t quite the tunesmith to fully justify this passion, compensating with melismatic slurs and a Gallic disdain for consonants. These tics don’t do much for lyrics he’s clearly been working on
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    X: The Godless Void and Other Stories
    Their 10th album sounds as though they had been sitting on it since [1994]. [Jan 2020, p.84]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Jan 14, 2020
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nothing Is Wrong
    Taylor's current side project, Middle Brother, shows his wilder, less studied side; this tuneful but sometimes bland set could use more of that.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Utopian Ashes
    The more upbeat, jazzy “Stones of Silence” on which Beth shows off the full Patti Smithiness of her voice is a welcome moment of invigoration on an otherwise sleepy album.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everything in Between
    Their third album is their most conventionally songful.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Keep It Hid
    It Hid lacks the brutish force of the Keys' stuff, but it makes up for it with variety.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hate
    These four Scots sound like the depressed cousins of the Flaming Lips. [6 Feb 2003, p.62]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tetsuo & Youth
    Lupe Fiasco's fifth album is a swirl of double meanings, extended metaphors about yoga and math, and increasingly labyrinthine ways to say "I'm dope."
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    American III: Solitary Man
    The onus here lies on the production... Rick Rubin's work is too timid; mostly, the shy combos of guitar, fiddle and accordion, or Benmont Tench's subliminal contributions on keyboards, make up the kind of severe meal that one is forced to think of as "tasteful."
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
    Dandies can still harmonize you into a trance, but they've replaced the dreamy drone of 1997's . . . The Dandy Warhols Come Down with more diverse atmospherics.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pawn Shoppe Heart
    Offers all the kicks of a souped-up kit car roaring down the open road.
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