The Telegraph (UK)'s Scores

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For 1,234 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 63% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 33% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 77
Highest review score: 100 All Born Screaming
Lowest review score: 20 Killer Sounds
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 880 out of 1234
  2. Mixed: 352 out of 1234
  3. Negative: 2 out of 1234
1234 music reviews
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    • 100 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Revolver Special Edition (Super Deluxe) [Box Set]
    The new version certainly sounds fuller, brighter and deeper, but unless you are a committed audiophile with studio standard hi-fi, most listeners could achieve a similar experience by turning up the volume, or perhaps investing in a pair of decent headphones. All interest therefore lies in extra tracks, which are not so much outtakes as works in progress – as the Beatles settled on arrangements, they would continually build on their chosen version. ... The truth is that the Beatles released everything they considered worthy whilst they were together, leaving nothing of outstanding quality in the vault.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [50th Anniversary Edition Deluxe Version]
    [Giles] Martin and co-engineer Sam Okell have done a loving job, getting away from some of the oddities of the familiar stereo mix done by Abbey Road engineers. ... It is like seeing a favourite movie again in high definition. It doesn't replace the original, it enhances it.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Abbey Road [50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition]
    Giles Martin (son of George) has created an immaculate remix but all it really does is separate and boost sounds so that they can punch their weight alongside modern recordings on digital streaming platforms. It sounds good, but then it always did. ... What this painstakingly assembled 50th anniversary release demonstrates is that you can’t improve on perfection.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966
    The Cutting Edge allows fans to bear witness to perhaps the most astonishing explosion of language and sound in rock history, a new approach to song being forged before our very ears.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fetch the Bolt Cutters
    Apple’s lyric writing is of the highest standard, even as it moves into the abstractions of her depression incantation Heavy Balloon (“I spread like strawberries/ I climb like peas and beans/ I’ve been sucking it in so long/ That I’m busting at the seams”). Her melodiousness holds together these strangely structured songs, whilst the boldness of her unusual arrangements forces you to adjust your ears and delve deeper into what she is trying to convey. ... This is an album that conveys one woman’s rage, vulnerability, confusion and wisdom in ways that we haven’t quite heard before.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sound System [Box Set]
    The content is lovingly packaged in a box neatly dressed-up as one of those giant beat boxes hipsters used to lug around before the advent of the Sony Walkman and the digital revolution that followed.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Pimp A Butterfly
    [A] bravura masterpiece. There is no sugar rush of digital synthetic beats and radio-friendly hooks. This is a dense, intricate mesh of free-flowing jazz, deep Seventies funk and cut-up hip hop with a verbose, hyper-articulate rapper switching up styles and tempos to address contemporary racial politics in a poetic narrative built around a long dark night of the soul.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ghosteen
    A long, sad, brooding mediation on grief, the 17th album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is simultaneously their loveliest and most terrible.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fountain Baby
    Amaarae – real name Ama Serwah Genfi – has crafted and compiled 14 captivating and refreshing tunes, touching on topics from sensuality to spirituality.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Smithsonian Folkways Collection [Box Set]
    A brilliant tribute album, showcasing properly Lead Belly's cultural legacy.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    From DNA’s punchy electro mantra about identity to LOVE’s tender sing-song reggae pop meditation on fickle emotions, DAMN is an album of surface sheen and hidden depths, where words and music operate in beautiful synchronicity, a constantly unfolding dance that lends each new approach a sense of investigation and revelation. It is dazzling.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rough and Rowdy Ways
    At its heart, this is a serious work, with an underlying somberness. ... Almost 60 years since we first heard from him, the old protest singer is still composing extraordinary anthems for our changing times.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 1984-2014 [Box Set]
    If you were enchanted by Skeleton Tree’s other-worldly sadness, Lovely Creatures offers an extraordinary illustration of Cave’s restless creativity. It leaves you relishing the possibility that the best is still to come.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Skeleton Tree
    The album is a melancholic masterpiece not for the fainthearted.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    It's certainly good to have West's unique talent back in music, but this ambitious behemoth may be easier to admire than to listen to.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Motomami
    The pure beauty and emotion of Rosalia’s vocals and the sensational grooviness of her rhythms all speak for themselves, offering a fantastically fresh take on Latin flavours and modern urban pop.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Desire, I Want To Turn into You
    She has drawn comparison with Kate Bush and Bjork, not because she sounds like them, but because she has a similar blend of extraordinary vocal ability, florid imagination, and genre-bending boldness. Desire is the album where it all comes together for this late blooming art-pop siren.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Golden Xplosion
    This isn't mere cleverness, it's instinctive musicality, buoyed up by three other fine players.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blur 21
    The five and a half hours of unreleased demos/live recordings do give a warmly inclusive insider's feel but there's nothing I'd listen to more than a couple of times.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Supernova
    In lesser hands, an album that at times sounds like R2D2 breakdancing in an industrial spin-dryer might make for trying company. Yet, for all their Day-Glo stridency, Nova Twins not only know how to write songs, but how to arrange them too.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    Lemonade is Beyoncé’s finest hour.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976) [Box Set]
    The Gouster [is] raised from the archives as the centre piece of a handsome new 12-CD box set, Who Can I Be Now? (1974-76). ... Finally given its moment in the light, The Gouster is unlikely to become a belated part of the canon, but it is nevertheless a welcome testament to the real heart beating at the centre of Bowie’s pop genius.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
    The sound of the album is deliberately vibrant and varied.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All Things Must Pass [50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition] [Box Set]
    There’s a directness, freshness and intimacy to these performances that puts the late, great Beatle George right in your ear, untarnished by time. Not all things must pass, it seems.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    You Want It Darker
    Leonard Cohen’s 14th studio album is a bleak masterpiece for hard times from pop’s longest-serving poet.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Channel Orange
    Channel Orange is as dazzling as it is baffling, rarely staying still long enough to get a grip on.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle
    The movement back and forth between the chiselled simplicity of the core Suite itself and the freedom of the improvisations that spin out from them creates a sense of epic scale. It’s a more than worthy addition to the Coltrane recorded legacy.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Palo Alto: Live at Palo Alto High School
    On this album he is in especially playful and inventive form, perhaps because at a high school gig with no critics around he could afford to take risks. The numbers are nearly all those Monk standards familiar from numerous well-known recordings and endlessly replayed by later pianists, but they are reimagined in ways that make them seem utterly fresh.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Divine Symmetry: The Journey to Hunky Dory [Box Set]
    Divine Symmetry shows that this metamorphosis didn’t happen without a good deal of huffing and puffing. Therein lies its intrigue, as the groundwork is revealed. ... It’s a fascinating journey.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Carnage
    Carnage is infused with profound and almost inescapable grief. But as this particularly audacious singer-songwriter grapples with isolation, loneliness, loss and the hard emotional graft of endurance, all set against a backdrop of apocalyptic threat, the personal becomes universal. Carnage may just be the greatest lockdown album yet.
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