Variety's Scores

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For 386 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 93% higher than the average critic
  • 0% same as the average critic
  • 7% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 12.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 85
Highest review score: 100 The Beatles [White Album] [50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition]
Lowest review score: 40 Jesus Is King
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 375 out of 386
  2. Mixed: 11 out of 386
  3. Negative: 0 out of 386
386 music reviews
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    • 76 Metascore
    • 95 Critic Score
    Scarlet
    The album is loaded with singles, but it’s a real album, with most of the other songs branching out her sound and showing off her killer flow. With 17 tracks spanning almost an hour, it sags in a couple of spots, but “Scarlet” sets a new bar on multiple levels, and not just for female rappers.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Guts
    As clever as the album consistently is, it still maintains the aura she’s established of transmitting real-talk teen vérité right into the grooves. Wherever her 20s take her from here, may it turn out to be just as affectionate, cheeky and brash.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 [EP]
    Its arrival is a comfort, offering sounds that will ring familiar to longtime fans — and to everyone else serve as an atmospheric Rorschach test, alternately primitive and futuristic, beautiful and menacing, propulsive and ethereal.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    You're the One
    The common thread is that she sounds like she’s having fun, skipping through these eras and genres. It’s all still fit for a pledge drive, but Giddens is pledging her fealty to the spirit that made all these forms of music a kick in the pants in their heyday.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Joni Mitchell at Newport [Live]
    “Newport” is a record you might put on for a personal triumph-of-the-human-spirit lift as much as the musicality. Fortunately, the musicality is really something, too.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Austin
    It sounds like sobering stuff on paper. But on record, a lot of these songs play out as breezily as Styles’ “As It Was.” It’s a record that’s in constant conflict with itself, using candor and humor as a self-conscious form of denial, maybe; the easygoing infectiousness of the music always is reassuring us that there’s nothing to worry about amid all this conspicuous consumption.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Idol, Vol. 1 [Music From the HBO Original Series]
    A soundtrack that stands as a far more rewarding and cohesive document than its televised counterpart.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 95 Critic Score
    Utopia
    Where “Astroworld” brought spectacle, “Utopia” brings subtlety and innovation.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 92 Critic Score
    Speak Now (Taylor's Version)
    The duet with Williams, “Castles Crumbling,” is particularly pungent, as a lament that just about could have been an outtake from the more recent “Folklore” or “Evermore” instead of an album that came out a full decade before those. As for the FOB-aided track, it’s the farthest thing from a Swift classic. But — having been written, like the rest of these tracks, when the artist was 18 or 19 — the number does hark back to an era when girls (and Fall Out Boys) could just wanna have fun.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fountain Baby
    Some artists play by the rules, others revel in breaking them — and with “Fountain Baby,” Amaraae leaves no question to which category is hers, all while demonstrating how wide the umbrella of African pop can be.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    ÁTTA
    Like the group’s best work, its amorphous and vaguely defined nature makes it something you can explore again and again and still find something you hadn’t noticed.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 93 Critic Score
    Seven Psalms
    “Seven Psalms” is unlike any other Simon album in almost too many ways to list.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    - (Subtract)
    One of the strong points of “Subtract” is how little sugar-coating Sheeran tries to put on his rough 2022, even as he provides a few leavening songs, like “Colourblind,” that speak more generally to his love for his wife, and not just the prospect of her loss. Otherwise, it’s “Life Goes On,” as a seventh-stage-of-grief song title, and “Right now I feel I’m running from the light,” as an overriding sentiment.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fuse
    Like all of the group’s recordings, the songs transcend the sound, and “Fuse” finds this veteran group as vital as ever.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    the record
    It’s like summer arrived three months early. And like one of the best albums of 2023 arrived right on time.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Stoned Cold Country
    Sometimes the stars who are brought in sound like they’re about to get lost in Glimmer Twins glossolalia, but sometimes it sounds like they just stopped by for some Stones karaoke. ... Highlights abound, though, especially when you get singers with a strong Southern soul leaning to their voice, filling in some of the melodic licks that Jagger always kind of slurred his way through. ... You exit “Stone Cold Country” wanting to hear [Marcus] King cut a whole album of Stones covers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.
    This album is a rich feast. Even if, to get the full gist of things, it does call for research and multitasking. ... As for the writing itself, there’s not an unfascinating moment on the album, whether she’s making characteristically quotable, glaringly bold declarations or leading attentive superfans into obscure rabbit holes.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    10,000 Gecs
    100 Gecs pack more ideas into 23 minutes than most artists who release 70+-minute-long albums. With “10,000 Gecs,” the duo has reached a “South Park” level of brilliant absurdity.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Norm
    Upon first listen, “Norm” is a gorgeously produced collection of short folk-fiction. When given closer attention, the album unfurls into an anthology of dark, interconnected tales of loss, unrequited love and casual brushes with the divine.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Endless Summer Vacation
    Cyrus was and presumably still is a weed girl — and “Endless Summer Vacation” mixes the kind of peaceful, easy feeling you associate with that sensibility with some very pure pop instincts. It’s not the kind of album you want to oversell; more definitive statements or craftier strings of singles may lie in her future. For now, though, it’s nice to see her succeeding more by sweating less.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    Red Moon in Venus
    It’s a lush, lavish, luscious hot tub of an album, conjuring visions of plush feather beds, fluffy pillows and bubble baths, although the lyrics will occasionally jolt the listener out of their chill.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    This Is Why
    You get the feeling that Hayley Williams and the rest of Paramore are still looking more outwardly than inwardly — that the wisdom of age has left them wanting for more, and questioning all. And that’s a great look for Paramore.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    Desire, I Want To Turn into You
    “Desire” is clearly her vision all the way, a forceful and determined effort that vaults her to the front of adventurous pop music.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    This Stupid World
    Nearly 40 years into their career as a band, with “This Stupid World,” Yo La Tengo have reached another peak. Without overstating the case, that’s something not many artists who aren’t named Neil or Bob can say.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    Gloria
    With songs that are both sacred and profane, with R&B and pop and disco and chorales, “Gloria” is all of that and more.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 95 Critic Score
    Live and Dangerous [Super Deluxe Edition]
    Lizzy are in explosive form on each of the gigs presented here, bringing a vibrancy and fluidity that was sometimes missing from the studio versions of these songs. The band’s all-time best lineup is in top form. ... Yes, seven concerts by anyone is a lot, and not surprisingly for shows recorded across just 18 months, there’s a lot of repetition. But this is the best kind of boxed set: one you can keep coming back to. Nearly 50 years later, Lizzy has never sounded better.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 93 Critic Score
    Bubblegum [Mixtape]
    Her strongest effort to date with the new mixtape, “Bubblegum.” Her distinctively wispy voice and sinewy grooves have created a trademark sound — somewhere between Charli XCX and Pink Pantheress — that’s pop without being cheesy and dance-based without sacrificing melody or shunning melancholy.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Live at the Whisky 1977 [Box Set]
    “Cheap Trick Live at the Whisky 1977” actually is one of those astonishing releases.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Every Loser
    “Every Loser” is just Iggy Pop to the max — lewder, cruder and louder than love, but filled with his usual lust for life.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    S.O.S.
    Although there are hummable potential singles that stick out, such as “Shirt,” and singularly contagious tracks such as “Conceited,” “SOS” is a record meant to be heard in its entirety. It would have been entrancing, surely, at double the length.
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