The Guardian's Scores

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For 5,507 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 49% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 All Born Screaming
Lowest review score: 10 Unpredictable
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,966 out of 5507
  2. Mixed: 2,464 out of 5507
  3. Negative: 77 out of 5507
5507 music reviews
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    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow
    This set’s beautiful opener Defiant, Tender Warrior builds a bewitching trance from soft piano wavelets, growling bass accents and snare-pattern whispers before Lloyd’s breathy tenor long-tones and enraptured top-end warbles even begin.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Skeleton Tree
    The same voice sings the final lines of an album that is no less brilliant, but perhaps less straightforward, than initial reactions suggested: not so much an exploration of grief as an example of how grief overwhelms or seeps into everything--a subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Start Together [Box Set]
    As Start Together proves, that was never a question anyone would need to ask Sleater-Kinney [“Where’s the ‘fuck you’?”].
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Promise
    [The Promise's] elegiac tone would have fitted Darkness perfectly, but most of the other 20 previously unreleased tracks demonstrate that Springsteen never actually stopped writing the hook-laden, audience-rousing crackers with which he made his name.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Savane
    This is an African classic.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    This album offers beats that retread past glories, and an emotional palette narrowed to a range roughly as wide as West's navel.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Icky Mettle [Deluxe Edition]
    Brimming with character and endlessly relistenable, Icky Mettle is something of a touchstone for one of US indie's purplest patches.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Livelong Day
    Nothing less than a thorough exploration and devastation of folk’s most conventional tropes is Lankum’s impressive game.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Untitled (Rise)
    It manages to be as lyrically unflinching as the music is compelling – not the easiest balance to achieve, as acres of terrible protest songs historically attest. You’d call it the album of the year if its predecessor wasn’t just as good.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Life's Rich Pageant
    There's a theory that REM were never the same after their lyrics became audible, but Lifes Rich Pageant is packed with songs on which the new clarity of Stipe's vocals bears dividends.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Some Girls [Deluxe Edition]
    The tracks themselves--tidied up from demos with the help of producers Chris Kimsey and Don Was--are no disgrace.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Renewal
    Bold, beautiful album.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution In Sound
    And whereas the dark era that began with a military coup in 1964 is now relegated to Brazil's history, the music it inspired sounds fresher and more provocative than ever.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Dusty Road
    This is a remarkable and historic set of recordings with an equally remarkable history.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Golden Xplosion
    Marius Neset, the 25-year-old Norwegian saxophonist who surfaced in the UK last year with Django Bates (his teacher and mentor at Copenhagen's Rhythmic Music Conservatory), not only combines Brecker's power and Jan Garbarek's tonal delicacy, but has a vision that makes all 11 originals on this sensational album feel indispensable, and indispensably connected to each other.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flight
    It could have been trimmed a shade, but it's another leap forward for a fast-developing European jazz original.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Soul Mining (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) [Box Set]
    A patchwork of catholic musical influences stitched tightly together by one man's peculiar, expansive vision of pop: Soul Mining is a brilliant and very idiosyncratic album.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blur 21
    Still, if 21 represents all there is or is ever going to be, it's hard not to be hugely impressed. As sarcophagi go, it's a spectacularly well-appointed one.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Miles at the Fillmore - Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 3
    It's a chapter in the story of 20th-century music as a whole, not just the minutiae of jazz.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Supernova
    An album that’s inventive, angry, witty, original and pretty irresistible. Supernova is a riot of its own.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Prioritise Pleasure
    It’s a powerfully intense record that some may recoil from; confrontational and liable to catch you off-guard as Taylor crisply extracts gutting truths from the general murk of self-loathing, never sugarcoating grimness nor over-egging her attempts at self-affirmation. ... It’s remarkable.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    The difference is that those albums [Anti and The Life Of Pablo] were at best a bold and intriguing mess: the sense that the artists behind them were having trouble marshalling their ideas was hard to escape. Lemonade, however, feels like a success, made by someone very much in control.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Miles Davis at Newport: 1955-1975 The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4
    There are four hours of previously unreleased music here, and the production and liner notes are typically classy.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976) [Box Set]
    Young Americans and Station to Station are albums that make you wonder how Bowie did it, given the state he was in, by all accounts, when he made them. ... The Gouster feels like eavesdropping on a moment when he wasn’t so sure. It makes for fascinating listening.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
    Magnificent.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
    [The three albums] together make up one very powerful entity.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At Carnegie Hall [Live]
    Even if you are one of the eight million who bought their first album, Buena Vista's long-awaited follow-up is well worth checking out.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Boy In Da Corner
    The most original and exciting artist to emerge from dance music in a decade.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    You Want It Darker
    You could never describe You Want It Darker as merely more of the same. As striking as the sense that its themes are of a piece with the rest of Cohen’s oeuvre is the sense of an artist willing to move forward.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Archives Vol. 1 1963-1972
    This critic is prepared to believe that the fact he found the menus slightly counterintuitive points to deficiencies on his own part, but suffice to say that at least one Neil Young fan--temporarily unable to navigate away from one of the on-stage "raps" provided as "audio bonuses" and gripped by the fear that he was going to spend the rest of his life listening to Neil Young saying "ummm...ahhhhhh ... wrote this sahwng...ummmm...my house"--found himself howling for the luddite comforts of a CD box set with a nicely illustrated booklet.
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