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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    • 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.
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