Rolling Stone's Scores

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For 5,915 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: 3,630 out of 5915
  2. Mixed: 2,245 out of 5915
  3. Negative: 40 out of 5915
5915 music reviews
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    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Traditional Techniques
    Mostly acoustic folk set, indebted to faves like Fairport Convention and Bert Jansch, and full of fireside beauty. [Mar 2020, p.91]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Mar 6, 2020
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heart
    It all ends up sounding very expressive, in a blurry sort of way.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blue Boy
    Thanks to the hands of producers Steve Earle and Ray Kennedy, there's a bit more bounce in Sexsmith's rhythm section, and the less-burnished quality of their tracks tempers the formality of Sexsmith's Anglo musical roots.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kid A
    It is a kind of virtual rock in which the roots have been cut away, and the formal language -- hook, riff, bridge -- has been warped, liquefied and, in some songs, thrown out altogether. If you're looking for instant joy and easy definition, you are swimming in the wrong soup.... Kid A is a work of deliberately inky, often irritating obsession.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Music
    Unlike Ray of Light's pristine inner-ear landscapes, Music is dirty, casually urgent, as if Madonna walked into the studio, got on the mike and let the machines bump.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let Go
    Let Go is an excellent rainy-afternoon album, full of gentle and melancholic beauty, with echoes of Love and the Beach Boys.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart
    His latest packs it all in: grand ballads, punchy power pop, a smutty song about a girl who "likes hair bands."
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Have We Met
    His wry lyrics ("You're looking good in spite of the light") add an uncanny whimsy. [Feb 2020, p.85]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Feb 3, 2020
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mirror Traffic
    Malkmus shows you don't have to move to the woods and house squirrels in your beard to prove you're a sensitive male. Alterna-dad elegance will do.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cedars
    It's like reading an impressive primer of British post-punk with the chapters completely jumbled.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Humming By The Flowered Vine
    Humming by the Flowered Vine works up a mix of matter-of-fact and earnest confessionals that's rarely precious, usually gorgeous and worth returning to.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Band of Joy
    This is a record primarily about loss and time's march, and Plant sings with gravity, working his middle range.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Destroy Rock & Roll
    The only minus: The spoken bits that initially animate several tracks soon grow tedious.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    One True Vine
    One True Vine shows there isn't much the ex-Staple Singer can't make gorgeous and lived-in.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Retribution
    Retribution, is her strongest outing yet, shedding practically all of Animism's tethers to pop structure and mirroring her freer, convulsing, lung-busting, throat-flexing live shows.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In the Meantime
    A big throughline of this album is Cara wondering whether she can trust her own mind. But the melodicism and warmth of most of these songs, like “Fishbowl,” “Voice In My Head,” and “Somebody Else,” don’t betray any actual disillusionment. That’s not a bad thing considering the radio is teeming with sad songs right now. The world could use a little more light.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    April
    The pace can be a problem, but the music is long on understated beauty.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Emmaar
    With Tinariwen's members effectively refugees thanks to regional conflicts back home in North Africa, their blues are as deep as ever.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Panther: The Album
    There is lots of excellent rapping, but the most startling bars belong to Yugen Blakrok, a female MC from Johannesburg, who gets a feature alongside Vince Staples and outshines the headliner, no mean feat.


    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pleasure
    These songs build slow as they add instrumental muscle on a skeletal form, arriving at something at once scary and lovely. The musical palette is wide and subtle.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Slang
    American Slang can feel forced, as if Fallon is searching for meaning just beyond his fingertips. But when he attaches his howl to a first-class tune, he's unstoppable.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Little Deeper
    On A Little Deeper, Dynamite pretty much owns the thin line between love and hate.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Under Cold Blue Stars
    A surprisingly upbeat collection of inviting pop numbers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Whatever
    His tracks, particularly the opening numbers "Genedefekt" and "La La Land," are paradigms of juicy electro-house, motorvated by the sort of fat synth lines that are both buff and catchy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tasty
    Her best work--lighter and more cohesive than [Wanderland], more focused and mature than [Kaleidoscope]. [22 Jan 2004, p.68]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New York Noise
    It feels like one big loft party, even when it veers into psychotic, dissonant No Wave by DNA and Mars.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Perpetual Motion People
    Perpetual Motion People is an album that makes you root for him to pull through.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    7
    These are big songs, full of wonder, and Beach House know it. Seven albums in, they're at the start of something new.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dye It Blonde
    The second disc from this Chicago trio is what David Bowie might call a total blam-blam--an overpowering blast of glam-rocking gorgeousness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Le Noise
    Le Noise is also the most intimate and natural-sounding album Young has made in a long time: just a songwriter making his way through a vividly rendered chaos of memoir, affection and fear.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Year Of Meteors
    A folk-schooled reverie with a dark undercurrent.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dirt Farmer
    His victory over throat cancer cost him some of his old soulful weight. But in 'Poor Old Dirt Farmer,' a Cajun waltz about a man left with only stones for harvest, Helm's drawling howl is heavy with the outrage and sorrow of someone with a deep connection to the land and those who live by it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bottomless Pit
    Ultimately, for all the different genres it consumes and spits back, it sounds like no other band on earth.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heaven Knows
    If PinkPantheress often seems adrift in apprehension and loneliness, she inhabits the LP’s different purgatorial states with the same confidence that made her early releases so appealing
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From a Room, Vol. 2
    Again, the songs feel like unearthed classics.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tassili
    Gentler than Tinariwen's more electric output, the music draws power from the guests. And in light of the current violence in their Tuareg homeland, the hush only deepens the blues.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Outside Society: Looking Back 1975-2007
    It flows better than 2002's double-disc anthology, Land. It also does a better job contextualizing her later stuff as personal and pop-culture history
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Give My Love to London
    She draws excellence from star collaborators.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Power
    Vacillating between synthetic noise and vulnerable vocals, Lotic turns dance music textures into abstract expressionism--the results are sometimes protest, sometimes singer-songwriter statement, sometimes sheer dystopia, but usually fascinating.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Treasure
    "Amber Jean" is a lovely tribute to his newborn daughter, while "Grey Riders" is a lost epic that suggests Crazy Horse with a twang infusion. The oldies shine too: "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong" sounds as if it originated with the Flying Burrito Brothers instead of Buffalo Springfield.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Book of Souls
    While those topics might sound like old hat, the veteran Brits indulge their whims without ever getting tiresome.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    After Hours
    After Hours certainly has its share of pity-partying. But there’s also a vulnerability that goes beyond the usual too-beautiful-for-the-world sulking. ... After Hours is one of the smoothest cocoons he’s spun.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Everything & Nothing
    An illuminating two-CD compilation that collects highlights from the past twenty years of his career...
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Us
    A more confident, more stoutheartedly tuneful and just plain better successor to Loss. [3 Apr 2003, p.70]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    God Hates Us All
    God Hates Us All is Slayer's most brutal record since 1986's immortal (or undead) Reign in Blood.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    What I Do
    A solid disc that lacks some of the emotional punch of 2002's Drive.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One Day As A Lion [EP]
    Along with the recent string of Rage-reunion gigs, this set shows the rapper-activist stepping back into the arena, and dude's on fire.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Random Axe
    Axe was released in 2011, and it's a clinic in meticulously penned rappin' ass rap.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Signs & Signifiers
    McPherson may sound like a purist, but he's a sharp songwriter, and his punk spirit and wry wordplay make this more than just a time trip.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Still
    With the help of producer Jeff Tweedy, Thompson knows that bitterness goes down easiest when paired with autumnal Celtic-pub melodies (see "Josephine," which evokes his time in Fairport Convention).
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vanished Gardens
    As diverse as the material here is, there's no sense that Lloyd is putting on different hats. Like his career as a whole, Vanished Gardens shows how the many currents of American music all flow into a single stream.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mind Hive
    It still sounds off-kilter enough to register as an album by the same people who made Pink Flag. It’s music that makes you want to dig deeper to decipher its intention.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sideways to New Italy
    They’ve upped their game even further on Sideways to New Italy, and the result is a perfect summertime indie-rock record.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wild Loneliness
    The result is an engrossing album full of stock-taking warmth. [Mar 2022, p.71]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Mar 10, 2022
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Am the Moon: I. Crescent
    The songs dwell on general themes of loneliness, isolation, despair and connection—which not only avoids concept-album bloat but makes the lyrics more universal and timelier. ... Worth your while. They make Southern-rock and classic-rock history seem present in our time. [Jul - Aug 2022, p.120]
    • 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
    • 90 Critic Score
    Triplicate
    A song isn't a song without melody, harmony and voice. Time and again he proves the same thing on Triplicate.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The "W"
    The W is a sonic gestalt that exists somewhere between the Queensbridge projects and OutKast's Stankonia, down the block from Lee Perry's Black Ark studios, two floors below A Tribe Called Quest's Low End Theory.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rest
    Fans of spacey Nineties lounge-pop like Air or Broadcast will drift along happily to pillowy confections such as "Ring-a-Ring O'Roses" and "Rest," a collaboration with Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lady Killer
    How can you not love Cee Lo? He's a virtuoso rapper who has one of pop's most unique singing voices.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tell Me How You Really Feel
    Modest masterpiece of an album.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    You're Nothing
    Even on their raw 2011 debut, Iceage knew how to sculpt the noise into songs, but You're Nothing is a huge jump forward.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Transference
    Transference is Spoon's seventh album and, at times, sounds like their best.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flamagra
    There are lots of ideas here, and lots of notes--a plus or a minus depending on your mindset--distributed over 27 tracks, nearly half of which clock in under two minutes. Some of these short sketches provide the most delicious moments.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cupid's Head
    His fourth LP is darker, but, more important, it's rougher, working wrinkles and jagged edges into music that used to feel almost too smooth to grab on to.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Martha Wainwright
    She's not easy-listening: Martha hisses and purrs, fearlessly articulating anxiety with a lurid charisma.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rainford
    Some tracks feel like freestyles, with Biblical allusions that veer into babbling chants, snarls and shrieks. Sherwood’s signature sound is crisper and brighter than vintage Perry; the grooves here are mostly taut, whirlpooling gradually, with dub pyrotechnics largely reined in.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stay Gold
    Stay Gold was recorded in Omaha with Bright Eyes producer Mike Mogis, whose Big Sky echo and orchestrations complement sublime drifter poetry like "Waitress Song," where the harmonies tickle God.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pig Lib
    Pig Lib is Malkmus' loosest set of songs ever, an elegantly meandering head trip underpinned by the kind of tuneful, world-wise romanticism that's won him the hearts of English majors everywhere.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mama's Gun
    Mama's Gun finds Erykah disrobing emotionally, shedding the self-righteousness and goddess posture that marked Baduizm. The new Erykah isn't teaching, she's dealing with regular-person baggage.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Street's Disciple
    The well-worn beats ensure the album is good even as they prevent it from being great.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Begin To Hope
    Less miserable than Fiona Apple, less wacky than Nellie McKay and less hippieish than Tori Amos, Spektor shows off her gorgeous, fluttery voice, her burgeoning writer chops and her God-given quirks on [Begin to Hope].
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Out in the Storm
    Each song is as grueling as it is thrilling.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everything in Between
    Their third album is their most conventionally songful.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Reflektor
    Reflektor is closer to turning-point classics such as U2's Achtung Baby and Radiohead's Kid A--a thrilling act of risk and renewal by a band with established commercial appeal and a greater fear of the average, of merely being liked.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    IRM
    Actress Charlotte Gainsbourg may be the daughter of the ultimate Euro-glam couple, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, but her Beck collaboration, IRM, is a tough-minded trip through some serious adult trauma.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sun Coming Down
    These Montreal post-punks write harsh songs for harsh times on their excellent second album, building on last year's debut More Than Any Other Day.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Driver
    At 10 compact, differently beautiful songs, Driver is the work of an artist entering the springtime of their brilliance, as good as singer-songwriter indie-rock can get. It’s the kind of record you can’t but feel lucky to live in.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ancient Melodies Of The Future
    Martsch and his bandmates (bassist Brett Nelson and drummer Scott Plouf) continue to make dense, driving rock with good old-fashioned chords and melodies, and for this we should all be grateful.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Greatest
    What's remarkable about The Greatest is how much Marshall accomplishes without ever straining.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Chalk
    It's stronger and more assertive than 2004's "Uh Huh Her."
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. M
    Ethereal, melancholy, and just plain strange.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beast Epic
    On Beast Epic, Iron & Wine has rediscovered the power and beauty in scaling back when it serves the song, and the result is Beam's most dynamic and convincing record in years.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bestial Burden
    With her heavily processed voice floating through the feedback, it's the remarkably detailed cry of a soul on fire.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Call Me Sylvia
    The band's excellent second record comes off like a drunk's glove compartment of influences.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Running with the Hurricane
    Despite the triumphs on Running With the Hurricane, the band has a tendency to meander and linger on similar ideas over the span of several songs in a manner that feels unnecessarily repetitive. This lack of dynamism is most apparent in the record’s midsection. Yet the album’s high points reveal the full potential behind Camp Cope’s newly honed sound.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    No Home Record
    No Home Record finds Gordon stepping out in search of life after Sonic Youth, musically and perhaps lyrically, and the ride can be pretty mesmerizing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Rush Of Blood To The Head
    With A Rush of Blood, Coldplay do more than fulfill the promise of "Yellow" -- they surpass everything they've done up to this point, making first-rate guitar rock with some real emotional protein on its bones.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dark in Here
    On Dark in Here, the playing is finely wrought enough to more than live up to the storied recording space it was created in, understatedly textured, somber, and graceful (aided by session greats like organ player Spooner Oldham and guitarist Will McFarlane).
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