The Independent (UK)'s Scores

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For 2,193 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 47% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Radical Optimism
Lowest review score: 0 Donda
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,176 out of 2193
  2. Mixed: 988 out of 2193
  3. Negative: 29 out of 2193
2193 music reviews
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Intoxicated Women
    The creepier explorations of infantile eroticism--the lollipop metaphor of “All Day Suckers”, the fairytale allusion of “Baby Teeth, Wolfy Teeth”--are voiced by Harvey himself, allowing guest singers like Jess Ribeiro and Sophia Brous to indulge the sweeter romanticism of songs such as “The Eyes To Cry” and “Prevert’s Song”, where Gainsbourg’s musing on the poet’s work prompts a moving reflection on transitory love.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lighting Matches
    Lighting Matches is polished soul and swing with a sharper edge than some of his contemporaries have managed.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Hope Six Demolition Project
    The tableaux of refugee camps, warzones and dereliction--an abandoned building littered with syringes and shit, a drug-riddled neighbourhood, a polluted river, “a displaced family eating a cold horse’s hoof”--builds grimly throughout, albeit to uncertain ends.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Unseen In Between
    Gunn has created a work of quiet, understated charm. But as far as helping him break out as a distinctive artist, it’s less likely to make its listener sit up and pay attention than lean back and close their eyes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Coexist
    Deceptively uneasy listening at times, but worth the effort.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Every Country's Sun
    Though rooted in familiar influences--“Crossing The Road Material” is like a more anchored Neu!, while “Old Poisons” is old-school psychedelia, with squealing organ and guitar swathed in drums--Mogwai apply subtle details that are unmistakably their own.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Child Ballads
    It's a deeply satisfying album, steeped in mystery and enchantment.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pressure Machine
    A little more campfire crackle to his delivery would have helped lift these good short stories from the prettily glowing embers of forgettable and occasionally recycled melodies.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dirty Pictures, Pt. 1
    At their best, on the barroom piano rocker “Dirty Water”, there’s a brazen, Stones-y charm to the tart, offbeat guitar twitch and raunchy slide guitar; while societal decline is dealt a simple slap in the punchy rocker “Death & Destruction”.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Astronaut Meets Appleman
    Throughout, he creates an absorbing sound-bed from folk-rock grooves embellished with unexpected tones and texture.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Post Pop Depression
    An album by turns terse, sinuous and playful, streaked with disgust and delight in roughly equal measure.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Man vs. Sofa
    It’s an odd alliance of elements that seem at odds, but work beautifully together.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Schmilco
    Schmilco seems diffident and restrained, mostly built around the folk-rock strummings of Jeff Tweedy’s acoustic guitar, with minimal embellishments. But it’s exactly the right approach for the bitter, painfully personal songs he has written here, which address the living and the dead, the loving and the lost, and most of all Tweedy’s own furies and frustrations.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    D
    Is there nothing they can't do?
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Walking Like We Do
    Certain songs work better than others: “Dog Eat Dog” tries to tackle social injustice but lacks real bite; “Don’t Think”, though, has all the swagger and defiance of vintage Blondie. Most impressive is how much more confident The Big Moon sound as a band.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Consummation
    Each track makes unpredictable bedfellows of certain sounds; even the deceptively simple guitar ballad, “Gross”, drops a synth that sends ripples through Von Schleicher’s lilting top register. It’s a disruption that echoes the most prominent theme, the struggle to translate her deepest thoughts to a lover, and consequently find her own power.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son
    It’s pleasant enough, but let down by Jurado’s unengaging vocals.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ultra Vivid Lament
    It’s an album that sounds very little like their last, and in that sense – despite its myriad reference points – The Ultra Vivid Lament is a Manic Street Preachers record, through and through.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Friends That Break Your Heart
    Few artists can make such heartbreak sound so pretty, while still reflecting on all its weirdness and complexity.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love Letter for Fire
    There’s a curious congruence to the duo’s harmonies that brings their songs to unique life, nowhere more so than when their voices take perfectly divergent paths over the melodic lilt of “The Lamb You Lost”.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Love the New Sky
    I Love the New Sky, might just be his best. Compared to earlier collaborative projects, this new record was composed solo in the Norfolk countryside, perhaps explaining why it has such a wonderfully expansive feel. It’s big and brash.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grim Town
    The pace drifts towards the second half, where the five-minute-long “Missed Calls” drags. But there’s no doubt this stop on Soak’s journey is one worth spending time at.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wanderer
    Understated, beautifully crafted and always emotionally involving, Wanderer shows an artist who has found strength in her convictions, and a new pace of life.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hollow Meadows
    There’s an openness about Hawley’s writing here that cuts straight to the quick--as if he’s digging through the ruins of his own Hollow Meadows, to try and shine a light on his soul.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blessed
    Blessed improves upon 2008's lacklustre Little Honey simply because it boasts a better set of songs, most of which are treated to Williams's signature style of soul-tinged country-blues, using organ and pedal-steel guitar to light her sandpaper vocal rasp.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Psychedelic Pill
    Young's best album in some while.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Be Strong
    With feelgood lyrics of fellowship allied to pulsing electro twitches, Sister Bliss-style piano vamps, sample fragments and sunrise synthscapes, there's a flavour of The Beloved to "Warm & Easy" and "Bear Hug."
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mars
    [Title track "Mars" is] a rare misstep on an album that looks to both East and West, and reaches simultaneously into the past and the future.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tenology [Boxset]
    Stockport quartet 10cc were, in this regard, the British equivalent of Steely Dan, applying advanced musical and lyrical skills initially to the humble task of sardonic pop pastiches like "Donna" and, as they developed, to the socio-political satires ("The Wall Street Shuffle", "Clockwork Creep") that made up their second album, Sheet Music.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Silver Tears
    Endlessly entertaining.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Garden of Ashes
    Garwood forces the listener to adopt his pace--a sort of aural equivalent of the “slow food” movement. But it works.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Livin' in Elizabethan Times
    Great fun, from first to last.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Twerp Verse
    Their latest effort is a much-welcomed return to form.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Songs of the Plains
    There’s no fuss in the instrumentation, either, mostly just gentle picking or brisk, deep thrums on Wall’s acoustic guitar, which are bolstered by icy laps of pedal steel and the occasional harmonica. It’s effective in the simplest of ways--and allows the listener’s imagination to do the rest
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Colorado
    Colorado shows that Young, at 73, has lost none of his outrage and passion. ... Saying so much, so beautifully, Colorado was worth the wait.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Slow Rush
    This fourth LP polishes that dancier sound into his slickest dancefloor-ready music yet.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Are You in Love?
    Are You in Love? is a magical marriage of joyful pop with heart and depth.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Miss Anthropocene
    There’s brilliance here, but it’s when the album slows down that it becomes transcendent.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Power Up
    The continuing appeal of AC/DC lies in the fact that this self-proclaimed bunch of “noisy little guys” consistently sound like they’re having good-hearted, OTT fun.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    May Your Kindness Remain
    Though hobbled by the occasional cliche, it’s an album with its heart in the right place.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Velociraptor!
    As on the splendid West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, Kasabian talk a good fight with Velociraptor--and if the results don't quite bear out the bluster, that's probably more a reflection of the excellence of its predecessor than a measure of its own shortcomings.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Prisoner
    Prisoner sticks to the well-trodden highways, whether it’s the echoes of U2 in the grand guitar stabs and earnest vocal tone of opener “Do You Still Love Me”, or the spangly, flanged guitars and relaxed sense of space that lend “Anything I Say To You Now” the laidback stadium sound of The Police.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Here
    Six years on from the last Teenage Fanclub album, not much seems to have changed.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    First Two Pages of Frankenstein
    It’s realistic, reassuring, and rather soporific.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lifted
    Nash is a maestro and, although less experimental than previous efforts, his cosmic almost dreampop Americana featured here provides proof that music comes in many sounds as well as names.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Crossing
    The Menahan Street Band have proven a fertile sampling source for such as Jay-Z, Kid Cudi and 50 Cent, and it's not hard to tell why listening to the grooves on this latest album.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Head of Roses
    Though it encompasses a whole galaxy of observations and sonic structures, ultimately Head of Roses is worth getting lost in.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables
    Set to a messy blend of waspish blues guitar and wild fiddle, it's a typically barbed, angry set.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Republique Amazone
    It’s a proud, forceful demonstration of the strength and variety of modern African music, brilliantly combined by producer Liam Farrell into arrangements where funk, afrobeat, desert-blues, dub and congotronics swirl infectiously around the women’s voices.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Stand-In
    This follow-up builds on the feisty freshness of Caitlin Rose's Own Side Now, her debut from 2010.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dedicated
    An album of polished pop. Perhaps this will put her at the top where she belongs.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Endless Summer Vacation
    A lovely long bask in Cyrus’s maturing talent.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dedication
    There's a pervasive haunted sense of loss and melancholy that links these 16 tracks together, giving Dedication a depth and elegance not often found in more dance-focused dubstep.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let It All In
    Let It All In is stylishly rendered in simple instrumental colours, but it's not the cheeriest of experiences.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lindsey Buckingham
    Drum machine led “Swan Song” is the album’s most inventive and surprising song, proving that the creator of “Tusk” has still got his knack for innovation and creating a daring pop hook. While the weakest tracks here tend to veer into self-pity.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Dream
    The Dream sees the band moving briskly through sensations, their heads stuck out the window of a speeding car, tongues wagging, sticking to whatever comes their way.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    WHO
    On the surface, Who sounds like a classic Who album. ... There are moments when Townshend stops questioning his own relevancy, but to dubious effect: “Beads on a String” is a limp metaphor for human connection, while “Hero Ground Zero” is just as clumsy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Traveling Alone
    Traveling Alone sounds like her best album yet.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Good Times!
    All told, probably The Monkees’ best album, after their hits compilation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Crash
    Crash is a terrifically structured album, designed to get you up and shimmying off the lockdown pounds as tracks slot sleekly together. ... Crash is a top-down, foot-down trip.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Early Takes, Vol. 1
    There's a simplicity about these previously unreleased demos that's utterly beguiling, the spare settings allowing the sweeter side of George Harrison's character to shine unencumbered by studio blandishments.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Days Are Gone
    Okay, but not much more.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This Is What I Mean
    The older he gets, the better the conversational-confessional flow of his rapping, which allows him to stroll through a 10-minute bragathon like “Mel Made Me Do It” without breaking a sweat or losing the listener’s attention. He raps about trips to Dubai and giving up weed like he’s sitting beside you at a London bus stop.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New Ways
    Fame may be fickle, but Vollebekk’s dedication to improving his craft is anything but.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gloss Drop
    Clearly, these New York math-rockers have yet to learn the values of de- cluttering, with most of these dozen pieces involving furious industry to no great advantage.
    • The Independent (UK)
      • Posted Jun 3, 2011
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Grow Tired But Dare Not Fall Asleep
    Gone is much of the external noise – typewriter clatters, vinyl crackles and the whir of bicycle spokes – replaced by ambitiously ornate compositions. As on Dark Days, I Grow Tired feels spookily prescient.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Commontime
    Commontime is full of engaging ideas and genial character, by some distance the most assured and complete of Field Music’s releases.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams
    It's the communal sentiment underlying such ostensibly personal heartache that gives Williams's songs much of their power, that draws the listener in as an emotional fellow-traveller.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Natives
    An engagingly outre delight.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In Our Heads
    This is such an improvement on 2010's enervated One Life Stand that one can only conclude their various sabbatical projects have rejuvenated their creative juices.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Things Take Time, Take Time
    On “Write a List of Things to Look Forward To”, backed by beautifully textured Americana instrumentation, she wonders why we keep trying: “We did our best, but what does that really mean?” This album is Barnett navigating her way out of her own head, reminding herself – and her listeners – that it’s good to care about things.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Boots No 1: The Official Revival Bootleg
    It’s a stark but stunning collection, with Rawlings’ exquisite acoustic lead lines dancing around the melodies, and the duo’s harmonies imbuing their songs with poignant shades of emotion.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lover
    There is a brilliant album among the 18 songs, if only it had been pruned it a little.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pure Heroine
    It's impressive, slick alienation for the Y Generation, but as with Del Rey, it's a one-trick-pony sort of act.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cerulean Salt
    It's confessional solipsism, lacking the musical compulsion to make one care.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ignorance Is Bliss
    The result is a quintessentially London record, as dark and moody as it is brash and innovative.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Most Lamentable Tragedy
    The problem with albums about depression is that they are the most literal exposition of the principle that an artist has suffered for their work, and now it’s our turn--and doubly so when it’s a 90-minute punk-opera wrenched screaming from their very soul, as here.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Electric
    Electric finds Richard Thompson at his most stripped-down and potent.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Skulk
    Jim Moray's filtering of traditional folk music through a mesh of modern sensibilities continues on Skulk.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Vulnicura Live
    It’s hard not to become overly aware of how the similarity of both the musical settings--basically, strings allied to rhythm programmes of skittish or explosive beats--and especially Bjork’s delivery tends to leach the individual songs into one another.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Noise Reduction System: Formative European Electronica 1974-1984 [Box Set]
    It’s a fascinating journey, presaged by Cluster’s 1974 shift from avant-garde to pop with “Caramel”, taking in the pulsing minimalism of Monoton’s “Tanzen & Singen”, the simplistic electropop of Die Gesunden’s “Die Gesunden Kommen” and the more sophisticated soundscapes of Yello, Vangelis and Klaus Schulze.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Invariable Heartache
    Wagner's hesitant delivery is poignantly underscored by Tidwell's more emotive phrasing, while the arrangements of neat picking and weeping fiddle are applied with customary understatement.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mount Wittenberg Orca [EP]
    With Björk and Longstreth sharing lead vocals, and instrumental contributions pared back to just a few drones and pulses, the result is a fascinating evocation of Orcan existence, implicitly acknowledging the entire planet as a home.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Glowing in the Dark
    An ambitious reach for new heights.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tell the Devil I'm Gettin' There as Fast as I Can
    Grizzled Americana veteran Ray Wylie Hubbard cooks up a steamy stew of voodoo magick and rock’n’roll mythos on Tell The Devil I’m Gettin’ There As Fast As I Can, a title whose droll self-deprecation is reflected in the weary sprechstimme style with which Hubbard delivers his narratives, homages and sermons.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cat's Eyes
    Zeffira's facility with reeds, keys and strings ensures constantly interesting textural shifts, while the combination of Badwan's imperious, Scott Walker-esque baritone and Zeffira's varied vocal stylings recalls not just Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra but even the effervescent charm of The B-52s.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Caustic Love
    Caustic Love may be the best UK R&B album since the 1970s blue-eyed-soul heyday of Rod Stewart and Joe Cocker.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Witness
    The title track draws on gospel traditions to confront police killings--“Not everybody that’s brown can get the fuck on the ground”--while in “Overtime” and “Believe”, Booker expresses the desire for faith and direction in a rootless world.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wintres Woma
    His songs are clusters of dark, foreboding images--“Spray your days with coffin nails”; “Entrails made into garlands to welcome my way”--reaching an apogee in “Greatness Yet To Come”, a mystic vision akin to the Crossroads Myth. But the darkness is spiked with sweetness in songs such as “The Hermit Census.”
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Guy Walks into a Bar...
    With tracks that frequently dart from sprawling, psychedelic pop to scuzzy post-punk and rock references, the record has a superb dynamic that holds the listener’s attention, while the band navigate through a single, tumultuous relationship. By the end of all that, you feel like they deserve a pint.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Love Is Magic
    His brilliant fourth album Love Is Magic takes listeners on a similar thrill ride [as his 50th birthday], dominated by swirling loops of grand, romantic melody, sly twists of sardonic wit and heart-stopping drops of sheer honesty.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I, Gemini
    Working with a lo-fi palette of mostly acoustic instruments, they’ve conjured a weird wonderland in which Angela Carter meets Bjork round at Robert Wyatt’s.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Acoustic Classics II
    Despite most of his well-known songs being crammed onto this album’s 2014 predecessor, there’s no dip in quality here as Richard Thompson revisits material ranging from Fairport Convention classics like “Genesis Hall” and “Meet On The Ledge” through to 2007’s “Guns Are The Tongues”.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take Care
    For a while on this overlong album, he brings something new to the usual hip-hop parade of brandy and bitches, lasciviousness and loyalty.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wasting Light
    The three-year gap between albums will ensure this tops next week's album chart, but it's a drab, unrewarding experience.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rock N Roll Consciousness
    Working with avant-rock guitarist James Sedwards, My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe and his old Sonic Youth colleague Steve Shelley, Thurston Moore has created one of the cornerstone works of his entire career with Rock N Roll Consciousness.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Haunted Man
    Sometimes the recurrent mood of ecstatic affirmation of life that's evident in her singing can be short-changed by arrangements that fuss to no great purpose, dissipating their impact in brittle beats and pointless detail.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Spade
    It's mainly brusque and strident raunch-rock, with an unappealing cajoling tone that virtually dares you not to find the songs clever and the hooks contagious.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Away
    After bandmates quit and more heavy blows rained down, he retreated to a cabin, where these wonderful songs poured out. “Frontman In Heaven” is one of several which both mourn and resurrect the idiocies and potent faith of the rock’n’roll age.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chapter and Verse
    The most revelatory song of the now mature songwriter is, though, “My Father’s House”, from Nebraska (1982). There’s a sluggish, nightmare feel as Springsteen dreams of a bramble-tangled house in a haunted field, a home where he’s no longer known; a past he can’t return to. The merits of this rough, questionable compilation lie in such small revelations.
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