The Independent (UK)'s Scores

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For 2,189 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 THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT
Lowest review score: 0 Donda
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,172 out of 2189
  2. Mixed: 988 out of 2189
  3. Negative: 29 out of 2189
2189 music reviews
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    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [50th Anniversary Edition Deluxe Version]
    Overall, the album offers a surprisingly successful transformation that somehow enables one to hear this most familiar of material as if through new ears, a remarkable achievement in itself.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What's Going On [40th Anniversary Edition]
    His symphonic-soul innovations here would map out the course of much 1970s soul music, while his use of multi-layered vocals – the happy result of an engineer accidentally running two vocal takes in the same mix – added an extra element to Gaye's vocal armoury which he would use extensively throughout the rest of his career.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11
    Though spoilt in places by distortion and too-prominent electric piano, the hitherto unheard material is notable for the innovative exploration of yet another roots blend, through the impassioned country-soul of songs such as “That’s the Breaks”. Clearly, in this most congenial of creative cauldrons, virtually anything was possible.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Queen Is Dead [Deluxe Edition)
    The piquant combination of Morrissey’s blithe aloofness and double-edged, acidly humorous lyrics with Johnny Marr’s endlessly inventive, precociously African-influenced guitar parts was rarely more effective than here.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rumours [35th Anniversary Deluxe Edition]
    It remains one of pop's most impervious generational touchstones.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Graceland [25th Anniversary Edition]
    The character of the base music here is overwhelming: complex, ebullient and life-affirming, and in yoking this intricate dance music to his sophisticated New Yorker sensibility, Simon created a transatlantic bridge that neither pandered to nor patronised either culture.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fetch the Bolt Cutters
    Manic descants, discordant pianos and abrupt changes in time signature at once complement and compete with each other in a carefully crafted clatter. The melodies are wonderful. The lyrics, too – conversational yet precise.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ghosteen
    An astonishing record.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Automatic for the People [25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition]
    REM’s brooding masterwork. ... It’s an album of shadows and contrasts: “Drive”, for instance, opens proceedings on the cusp of adulthood, imparting youthful rebel spirit with a warning sense of duty for the future, before “Try Not To Breathe” offers an extraordinary image of an old person eager to leave the world to the young.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The SMiLE Sessions
    Proving that it is possible to have too much of a good thing, the five discs of this outtakes-and-all edition take the (let's be honest) rather meager delights of Brian Wilson's unfinished "masterwork" and wring the life out of them.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    American Radical Patriot [Box Set]
    It's an extraordinary collection, which demonstrates exactly why Guthrie was perhaps the only performer who could square the circle pointedly implied by the title American Radical Patriot.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    This album isn't a 'Holy shit I need to text my friend imploring them to listen immediately' mind blower, but it is a valuable addition to his oeuvre.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rough and Rowdy Ways
    His richly soporific new album – his first new material since 2012’s Tempest – plays like an extension of that [2016 Nobel Prize acceptance] speech: a folksy recitation of literary and pop references sprawling over long, ramshackle songs with minimal (mostly acoustic) melodies that sway back and forth behind him like curtains in a light breeze.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Messiah
    Notwithstanding the occasional foray into jazz and blues, Black Messiah is much the same blend of miasmic boudoir soul, bare-bones funk and liberation songs that characterised his 2000 milestone, Voodoo.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 1984-2014 [Box Set]
    So although Cave’s adept grasp of vocal expression, from aching melancholy to erupting hysteria, guides the narratives of these songs, this is not simply a singer backed by a band, it’s a unit striving for collective expression, by whatever means possible.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Singles: The Definitive 45's Collection
    They pushed the single envelope in various directions – processional chants, electric-organ improvisations, big-band “space bop”, and at the furthest extreme of his sonic galaxy, the furious free-jazz of “Cosmo-Extensions”, guaranteed to clear the floor at any party.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Skeleton Tree
    The result is beautiful, visceral and, predictably, emotionally devastating.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    Like Picasso, he acknowledges that the chief enemy of creativity is good taste--which is just as well, since it's not a quality with which he seems over-burdened on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. For which we should all be thankful.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Motomami
    This is a spectacular record.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Life's Rich Pageant
    Twenty-five years ago, Lifes Rich Pageant found R.E.M. metamorphosing from what was effectively a turbo-charged folk-rock cult indie outfit into a proper rock band capable of filling stadia.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Some Girls [Deluxe Edition]
    It all adds up to probably the best Stones album since... well, since Some Girls, actually.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Loveless [Reissue]
    This 1991 album is the best of three reissues of their work – also available are their debut, Isn't Anything, and a 2CD compilation of outtakes and EPs.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    L.A. Woman
    [It is] possibly the band's best album.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Miles at the Fillmore - Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 3
    Macero’s edits on the original double-album collaged four nights’ shows into a single, 20-minute track apiece; but this 4CD set presents each night’s ebullient flow in full.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prioritise Pleasure
    Across the album’s 13 tracks, she flits easily between pop’s peripherals and its core, dispensing emotional catharsis all the way.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    Lemonade is fiery, insurgent, fiercely proud, sprawling and sharply focused in its dissatisfaction.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ants From Up There
    The sheer grace and ambition of Ants… will prove tough for 2022 to top. A huge leap forward, headfirst into the unknown.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
    It's a relief to report that Pull Up Some Dust And Sit Down is his best effort by far since Chavez Ravine.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Could Be Texas
    Even if you don’t love This Could Be Texas, it’s a hard album not to respect. English Teacher have well and truly arrived: the class had better pay attention.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You Want It Darker
    Gently marching strings furnish an aptly martial underscoring for the conflict imagery of “Treaty”, the latest of Cohen’s romantic mea culpas, which reveals how, for a Great Seducer, love is an essentially narcissistic, even solipsistic, pastime, its protagonist apologising “for that ghost I made you be”. It’s just one of several sharp, stinging twists casting new and unusual shadows on old themes in You Want It Darker, culminating in the mordant, bitter advice of “Steer Your Way.”
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