Variety's Scores

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For 420 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 94% higher than the average critic
  • 0% same as the average critic
  • 6% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 12.3 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: 407 out of 420
  2. Mixed: 13 out of 420
  3. Negative: 0 out of 420
420 music reviews
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Medicine at Midnight
    Grohl promised a record you can groove to, and he delivered, while still maintaining a quintessential crunch that’s fitting for a Foo.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    OK Human
    Luckily, the added instrumentation is rarely overpowering and the Rob Mathes-penned arrangements are consistently interesting. ... Indeed, if there’s one thing we’ve learned since “The Blue Album” dropped back in ’94, it will take more than ruthless dictators — or even an orchestra — to extinguish Weezer’s way with a hook.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 95 Critic Score
    Collapsed in Sunbeams
    Far more fleshed-out than the EPs (none of the songs from which are repeated here), it seems all but inevitable that Parks will be one of the breakthrough artists of 2021. So what makes her and this album so special? In a word, intimacy. ... None of the above would work without the album’s brilliantly restrained production and arrangements, nearly all by her longtime collaborator Luca Buccellati: The music flawlessly frames her voice and lyrics and never intrudes.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 92 Critic Score
    Home
    “Home” is bookended with a musical tactic that is both perfect and obvious: cantos sung by the Danish National Girls’ Choir. ... But as with everything Rhye, it’s all in service of Milosh’s crystalline voice.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Nobody Is Listening
    “Nobody Is Listening” is concise and to the point, breezing through 11 songs in 35 minutes. While each of his albums has been a reboot, this one is the most dramatic of all — and clears the table for whatever might be coming next.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers Songbook, Vol. 1
    The overall results of the “Greenfields” experiment are pretty magnificent, actually. And organically.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Music to Be Murdered By - Side B (Deluxe Edition)
    The album gets off to an inauspicious start with “Black Magic,” a dreary murder ballad with the requisite Skylar Grey hook and the same tired splatter-movie shock lines. Things perk up with “Alfred’s Theme,” which nods to the album’s Hitchcockian premise by sampling “Funeral March of a Marionette” and making a painfully predictable play on the name “Hitchcock,” and from there on out, the record seesaws between rapid-fire dirty puns and show-offy rhyme displays.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    McCartney III
    Though the album has its share of pleasingly ramshackle numbers, there are a good number of “real” songs here, ones you can imagine fitting in on “Flaming Pie” (which had a deluxe reissue this year) or “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.” But it’s some of the goofier or slightly more experimental tracks that, for a certain breed of fan anyway, make the ramshackle “III” even easier to love than the more formal “Egypt Station.”
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Man on the Moon, Vol. 3: The Chosen
    The album generally finds his deep-breathing, sing-song-y baritone nestled almost exclusively in ambient synth-hop. Ultimately, this nearly single-sourced sound is more consistent, and easier on the ears. ... But it’s when Cudi is by himself — lonely and punching through the darkness — that his somnolent, bittersweet reveries are at their tastiest.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 96 Critic Score
    We Will Always Love You
    Their melodic sensibilities have translated remarkably well to more traditional songwriting. ... Most importantly, despite the complexity of the production, like its predecessors this album flows with a remarkable sense of fluidity and fun — it doesn’t sound labored-over, even though it obviously was. ... Twenty-plus years and three albums into their career, “We Will Always Love You” opens up a whole new chapter for the Avalanches.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wonder
    While “Wonder” is at times overambitious and overwrought, it does feel like the last stop on a particular journey. Mendes can’t sound much bigger than this without going full Adele, so what might come next is wide open.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 93 Critic Score
    evermore
    What “Evermore” is full of is narratives that, like the music that accompanies them, really come into focus on second or third listen, usually because of a detail or two that turns her sometimes impressionistic modes completely vivid. ... It’s an embarrassment of stunning albums-ending-in-“ore” that she’s mined out of a locked-down muse.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Plastic Hearts
    “Plastic Hearts” just makes sense of the hard and the soft, the pop and the country, the gruff and the sweet in a way that no other Cyrus album has before in its entirety.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Good News
    On “Outside” and other uncluttered tracks, Megan pulls off something tart, true and real, while maintaining all that is best about her hard exterior. One wishes there was more of that sound on her debut album, but overall, “Good News” finds Megan moving confidently to the next level.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Starting Over
    At Stapleton’s best, sometimes you imagine you’re listening to a mythical “Gregg Allman Sings the Willie Nelson Songbook” album. There are plenty of these moments in his fourth release, “Starting Over.” He has Nelson’s tender touch, but his bluesy side is much louder; his is a part-acoustic, part-stinging approach in which Nelson’s Trigger meets B.B. King’s Lucille.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Power Up
    Through the unholy mess of its last decade, AC/DC has come out on the other end smelling like a black rose, and with a damned fine album in “Power Up,” which keeps the band’s inimitable form of metal magic intact with a few new wrinkles added to a familiar but still-thrilling bag of tricks.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    DISCO
    You can’t say it doesn’t deliver exactly what it promises. While Minogue has rarely ventured too far from her dance-pop comfort zone, “Disco” displays a particularly glorious single-mindedness, exploring the genre’s past, present and future with nary a ballad or a twangy guitar lick in sight. Minogue’s most consistent and cohesive album since her oughts-era heyday.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez
    In an era that’s become too reliant on guest features and scene-stealing cameos, here the delicately-honed collaborative approach seems to bypass any kowtowing to ego. There’s an at-ease alchemy at work. That all stems from Albarn, who doesn’t crop up when he isn’t needed.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Letter to You
    You can say he’s written more consistently great albums this century, but the crispness of the recording as well as the performances ensures that “Letter to You” is the best-sounding album he’s made since the 1980s.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Existential Reckoning
    This Puscifer is something of a frowny-faced look at one man’s insistent need to keep score — with other men, with nature or with himself — while fist-pumping the air with ’80s-vintage new wave pop tones. And it all works out brilliantly, and Maynard-ly, even when you think it won’t. ... For all the majesty and mirth, the best songs on “Existential Reckoning” are its sparest, and those where Keenan drops an octave and maybe even some of the pretense.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Positions
    When it comes to music these days, Grande is all about the quickies. And “Positions” benefits from that economy and repeatability. It’s full of expertly conceived songs you wish would at least try to overstay their welcome, though there’s never any real regret when she hits the “Thank u, next” button to move on to a successor.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 96 Critic Score
    Untitled (Rise)
    The fact that Sault seduces listeners, drawing them in with beautiful sounds, and then hits them with uncompromisingly direct lyrics and messages that startle them into thinking about things they might not normally think about, especially when grooving to music, is perhaps the greatest triumph. Sault’s music is definitively 2020, by, for and about these times.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 92 Critic Score
    Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Rendition Was In)
    To say that Sharon and the group make each song their own is almost an oxymoron because some of them, particularly the ‘60s soul sides, are simply part of the group’s DNA. ... And while it’s bittersweet to hear the dearly missed Ms. Jones’ voice again in all its glory, it’s a joy to hear her and the band pouring so much love into these songs.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 95 Critic Score
    Wildflowers & All The Rest
    With fascinating oral-history annotation for all 70 tracks in the “super-deluxe” edition, the augmented “Wildflowers” is the best and most justified boxed set of this kind since the Beatles’ White Album compendium. It’s one of the ones you’d load under your arm in a fire. Petty was on fire during this period, as the presence of 32 distinct compositions in the big box attests.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Rarities
    Even though this is a collection of tracks that, for whatever reason, didn’t make the final cut of her studio albums, she never lets us see her sweat and she’s not about to start now, so don’t expect to find any stains here.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Good Luck with Whatever
    Wonderful. ... If the new album is short on the breakup songs that once were Dawes’ rueful bread-and-butter, this album’s two quietest songs are among the best Goldsmith’s written.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 98 Critic Score
    Sign O' the Times [Deluxe Edition]
    In short, it’s a die-hard fan’s fantasy come to life — and like the deluxe edition of “1999” released last year, goes a long way toward satiating appetites only made stronger by decades of bootlegs. (And, remarkably, the compilers left out a lot.)
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Alicia
    The spaciousness allows Keys to let her nuanced, versatile voice do the talking like never before. All this makes Keys’ seventh studio album her best, and finds her easing up on the obvious hooks and pushing the limits of her voice and imagination.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Detroit 2
    Big Sean makes “Detroit 2” a real and righteous place, even if he has to use a handful of holy clichés to prove it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Spell My Name
    This is a not an R&B record made on a bedroom laptop: It’s expensive sounding, with a stellar cast of collaborators and dramatic orchestrations. And by the time the country-soul closing track rolls up — fittingly, a Babyface number, with a put-your-hands-in-the-air chorus’ — fans will be ready to start the whole thing over.
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