Pitchfork's Scores

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For 12,713 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 53% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Sign O' the Times [Deluxe Edition]
Lowest review score: 0 nyc ghosts & flowers
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 10,450 out of 12713
  2. Mixed: 1,949 out of 12713
  3. Negative: 314 out of 12713
12713 music reviews
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    • 59 Metascore
    • 51 Critic Score
    The Beautiful & Damned
    There are no insights to be found here about prestige, depression, or dependency. The whole thing is unbelievably dour and boring.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    No Mercy
    On No Mercy, he sounds absolutely sapped of energy. And that's rough; nobody plays the ferocious livewire better.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Counterfeit 2
    Counterfeit 2 correctly presents itself as a box of hobbyish bric-a-brac for friends and completists.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Storytelling OST
    A disorienting hodgepodge of new songs and instrumental score padded with annoying segments of dialogue from the movie.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    America's Sweetheart
    While it's unfair to directly compare Courtney's solo work with Hole's shifty discography, America's Sweetheart demonstrates a fairly monstrous decline in both quality and conviction.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Early 21st Century Blues
    Although there will always be certain comfort in Margo Timmins' voice, her limitations are frustrating.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Young Adults Against Suicide
    An album with a sharp ear and a positive, inclusive atmosphere.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Someday This Could All Be Yours, Vol. 1
    Yet like last time, there are plenty of sturdy, major-key melodies that go straight for the jugular. But whatever sing-along quality they have, their effectiveness is almost always determined by context.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    200 Years
    The most impressive aspect of 200 Years, especially considering it as the debut of a new collaboration, is its overall aura of cool confidence.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    On My One
    On My One is precisely the kind of mistake that pop stars make when they think they’re smarter than the system.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Meth Lab
    The Meth Lab is a posse record in practice, very much in the lineage of Theodore Unit's 718, Polluted Water, or the ultimate in Wu-Tang marginalia, Ugodz-illa Presents the Hillside Scramblers.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Beta Love
    Ra Ra Riot are best when they stick with what they wanted to get away from.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    First of the Microbe Hunters
    Stereolab engage in the funkiest, heaviest music of their career. While monotony still remains a passion, subtle psychedelic flourishes and thick percussion pumps add much needed verve.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 53 Critic Score
    The Spine
    Not a bad album, yet contains too many mediocre tracks to be comforting.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 34 Critic Score
    The Mirror Explodes
    Druggy records are never all that good when they don't convey anything about the experience other than the blur. That's not to say you couldn't get swept up in The Mirror Explodes' churn under the right influence, but it's not something to inspire the formation of many new memories.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Laugh Now, Cry Later
    Everything about Laugh Now, Cry Later feels utterly tapped of inspiration and vitality, and Cube's former greatness only makes this exhausting slog that much more depressing.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 53 Critic Score
    Origins
    Reynolds has a story to tell, but the music fails to be the ideal delivery system.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Earth Grid
    The best songs on Earth Grid have that quality, burrowing notes far enough into your psyche that you start to crave them.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 23 Critic Score
    Riot City Blues
    It's as if Primal Scream have run completely out of ideas and so they've reverted to the detestable fallbacks of honking harmonicas and bar-band choogles, acting like college freshmen who just discovered blues.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 48 Critic Score
    Relapse
    Relapse can be an intermittently thrilling sonic experience until you realize everything sounds like a variation of 'What's the Difference,' 'If I Can't,' or even fucking '30 Something.'
    • 59 Metascore
    • 61 Critic Score
    Writers Without Homes
    For all the album's lovely sounds, the bulk of the actual songs on Writers Without Homes are not particularly memorable.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 46 Critic Score
    ...it falls apart
    What For Stars lack in originality they overcompensate for in emotionality.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 47 Critic Score
    Trapped Animal
    Trapped Animal is nothing more than an odds-and-sods record being passed off as "business as usual" by a band that doesn't seem to know what that business is anymore.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hoyas [EP]
    Hoyas, sounds like a soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive. Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, lead-off track "Two Angles" sounds like the Postal Service might have if Jimmy Tamborello's tapes had gotten lost in the mail and accidentally ended up on Phil Elverum's doorstep.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    !
    The most enjoyable moments feel like controlled chaos. Redd’s songs used to be looser and more free-flowing. He does at least sound more composed. That’s to his credit as a person but it’s not to his advantage as an artist.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    The Seventh Seal
    This album still falls way short of what it could be, and I have to wonder how this even happened.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Yeah Ghost
    Okay, it's not really very good at all.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    TheFutureEmbrace
    So, forgive Corgan his infinite lyrical badness, but know that infinity's a lot to forgive.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    La Liberacion
    Their experiments don't always yield useful results-- the downcast, acoustic-guitar-powered "Partners in Crime" comes awkwardly decorated with free-form piano rolls that trip up rather than propel the song's momentum. But there are moments when CSS find a way to successfully evolve without alienating their base.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 61 Critic Score
    Make-up Is A Lie
    Make-Up is a Lie shows signs of progress and signs of regression; artful touches and clunking gaffs; soaring tunes and leaden lyrics.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 36 Critic Score
    Equals
    He’s settled into the comfort zone of songs that will haunt weddings for years to come, like “2step,” in which he raps about “Two-steppin’ with the woman I love.” Even at his most passionate, Sheeran sounds as threatening as a meringue peak. ... Sheeran’s reliance on clichés is especially unfortunate during the album’s back half, which is where he placed a majority of the songs about death and fatherhood.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Tenterhooks
    Vig’s masterly production gives the album a seasoned gleam and punch, but his period-specific details only exacerbate the weary undercurrent on Tenterhooks; it makes the album feel stagnant.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Night Train [EP]
    No matter what their exteriors, Keane still seem incapable of anything other than the most heavy-handed gestures, peddling the same populist mock uplift that leaves you feeling pushed when it's meant to move.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    In This Light & On This Evening
    It's sort of a catch-22 that Editors can write songs sticky enough to be memorable in unfortunate ways.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City
    The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City is too harmless to hate, but it’s hard to feel much of anything about it—which is a fatal flaw for a band that leverages an uncanny ability to rid people of inhibitions against their better judgment.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    A Fine Mess [EP]
    Interpol might still be an exceptional act, but it’s a chore to have to squint this hard to see it.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    I Love You
    A few good hooks, in fact, would go a considerable way toward redeeming Blank's largely forgettable debut, I Love You.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    BE
    If Liam seems hamstrung as a rocker on BE, at least he’s showing more promise as a balladeer.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    Unfamiliar Faces
    Certainly there's more to Costa than a one-man acoustical jam, even if his pleasure zone isn't far from the AM Gold dial.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Remind Me Where The Light Is
    The band's music is spot-on for soundtrack work precisely because it's moody yet unobtrusive, evocative of something, yet noncommittal enough to conceivably fit any emotional tableaux.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Fast Man Raider Man
    There is a very good album here-- you just have to work for it.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Never Gonna Touch The Ground
    If Never Gonna Touch the Ground is less a party album and more an album as party--self-contained, relentlessly upbeat, rowdy, self-celebratory--too many of these songs come across as kegs of near beer.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Again and Again
    While they're still a talented band, you can't help but wonder how much more memorable they'd be if they applied as broad a sense of dynamics to their albums as their labelmates.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Island Universe
    Feeding People's energy is abundant and undeniable, but all over the place on Island Universe.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    DRILLMATIC Heart vs. Mind
    Drillmatic is plagued by the tracklist bloat typical of the streaming era. Neither fun nor profound, the album is almost impressive in the sense of collecting so much talent to create something so mediocre.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    I Created Disco
    Harris reduces pop's limitless possibilities to one-joke self-parody, his youth his most distinguishing characteristic, an unremembered yesterday always more vibrant than today.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Form & Control
    Form & Control immediately shows the band's strengths and their weakness: It's a smooth, utterly precise study of the formal elements that make disco and electro-pop tick, but with far too little of the body heat that actually gets that stuff going.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 43 Critic Score
    Time
    Though Time is never less than competent, its biggest problem is an unfortunate lack of personality.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 46 Critic Score
    Mondo
    A cautionary tale of what happens when a "hit record" forgets to actually include hits.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Dead Media
    Dead Media works on occasion, but primarily when Hefner revert to the traditional pop trio format of bass, guitar, drums.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 34 Critic Score
    Let's Just Be
    There are a few quality tracks among these 16-- enough for a pretty good EP-- but this is an 80-minute album with at least an hour of stuff on it that sounds at best like studio outtakes.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 23 Critic Score
    You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into
    So this record's creative and artistic value is pretty much nil--in fact it only just hits competent.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Zeitgeist
    Far more aggressive than any other record in their catalog - perhaps a preemptive response to charges of getting old and mellow. Unfortunately, that leaves the record rather homogenous.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    With a Little Help from My Fwends
    The Lips’ Fwends are so intent on tripping up the songs’ rhythmic momentum and weirding up the basic melodies with hammy vocals that they ultimately reinforce their sturdiness. They’re trashing all the furniture in the house, but not bulldozing any walls to open up new vantages.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Beat 'Em Up
    It's all third-rate bar band stuff.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 47 Critic Score
    The Music
    Sounds overproduced and underdeveloped.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 48 Critic Score
    Red Pill Blues
    Levine’s voice murmurs and glints in the corners of the arrangement, and the total effect is exactly as pleasingly immaculate and numbing as all soft rock should be.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 47 Critic Score
    Trágame Tierra
    On Trágame Tierra, Bates is both audacious and original, two qualities that are hard to fault. But in the absence of focus, listening to Trágame Tierra can feel like looking for dinner in a candy store: there's a lot of brightly-colored packaging to take in but not much you can really sink your teeth into.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Lateness of the Hour
    Lateness never does much to prove Clare and his producers were on the same page (let alone reading from the same book).
    • 58 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Blue Slide Park
    His art is 144,487 times less remarkable than his first week sales numbers would have you believe.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Dope Don't Sell Itself
    The songs here are serviceable, thanks to 2 Chainz’s ear and charisma. But they’re more like templates than novel creations, far from his days of sampling Hall & Oates or trading verses with Kendrick Lamar over a Pharrell beat seemingly constructed from cutlery and trash cans.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    Anywhere I Lay My Head
    On several songs, Johansson gets lost in Sitek's swelling production, which may suggest a weak interpreter or a dearth of vocal personality but adds to the album's pervading dreaminess.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 41 Critic Score
    Euphoric Heartbreak
    Despite good intentions, the wincing lyrics border on pandering and even exploitative, revealing little in the way of insight or palpable compassion
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fist Of God
    In a way, this is representative of the album--it's got all the right moves in place, but MSTRKRFT's handle on content is still slightly lagging behind their facility for tone and form.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 48 Critic Score
    KHALED KHALED
    He gathers the biggest names in rap, then has them make the same music they’d record on their own anyway. Sometimes staying out of the way works—the album’s first two singles were just Drake solo tracks with Khaled’s name on them. But the returns are never more than the sum of the talent involved.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Electronica, Vol. 2: The Heart of Noise
    One senses a massively missed opportunity, a chance for exploration blown by Jarre's insatiable need to make everything bigger, more impressive.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    Now
    These are pleasant songs, but Twain and Lange’s perfectionism meant even the weakest cuts on The Woman in Me and Come on Over were weapons-grade pop.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Glitterbug
    There’s a very palatable poppy sheen on all of these tracks: Glitterbug is packed with anthemic hooks and synth pulses that sound like they were composed solely to lure Lexus.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    The Endless River
    There's something bold in the smaller scope of The Endless River, but it proves to be one of the few Pink Floyd releases that sounds like a step backwards, with nothing new to say and no new frontiers to explore.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 43 Critic Score
    We Global
    The overall stylistic consistency that made Listennn unusual now makes for an exhausting hour.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    One of Wun
    He’s making songs that sound like catchy Gunna songs of the past—he’s still able to float on these laid-back, skittering ATL trap variants while reading straight off his SSENSE receipt—but they don’t feel like them.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 61 Critic Score
    Nasir
    The writing is so meandering and mechanical that little here feels intentional, even the gaps. And strangely, that’s the bittersweet takeaway: Nas the meticulous observer has been supplanted by Nas the nervous rambler. It doesn’t feel like an accident.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Solo Electric Bass 1 [Live]
    It creates an album weighed toward showcasing masterful execution that leaves a pretty muted general impression. Unless you're predisposed toward technical prowess and solo bass recordings, it's probably going to come off as more of a clinic than a collection of great songs.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    For Years
    Despite its clever syntheses, there are times when it's not much more than pretty. But the good is not only good, it's promising.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 51 Critic Score
    Love Frequency
    Love Frequency isn’t a complete disaster, if only because the new, chastised, and chaste Klaxons aren’t really capable of doing anything that could inspire that sort of animus. At their best, Klaxons dredge up the kind of sounds that keep the Coachella Sahara Tent bumping all weekend, composed to be aggressive and participatory, yet strangely ambient and easy to ignore.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Vision
    The Vision seems to be exactly what Joker wants: UK pop R&B of the vainest and most vacuous possible variety.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bundles
    Fans of Lewis or Dawson aren't gonna care much that this isn't holy grail stuff; if you've been following either, you're used to a little unevenness. But the true superfans have likely heard the best of these tunes before, on the AFNY comp.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 47 Critic Score
    Younger Now
    Younger Now blends pop-rock and pablum country fare that is so restrained, so thinly produced, it seems like her lovably goofy personality was hobbled throughout the recording process.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 61 Critic Score
    The Fountain
    Ultimately, The Fountain is an echo of an echo, inessential to all but the band's most devoted followers.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Tight Connection
    The detached, semi-ironic delivery doesn't play well with the perky club beats.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 62 Critic Score
    Kpt.Michi.Gan
    He contorts both his simplistic pop urges and his more obtuse soundscaping, and makes good on neither.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 22 Critic Score
    Charmed & Strange
    Yoav goes about his expecting some sort of kneejerk praise for rolling dolo, but thanks to a total lack of depth, sonic or otherwise, all I see is the gimmicks, the wack lyrics.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Autumn, Again
    It is more concise (conveniently, coincidentally, half as long as Ashes Grammar) and less wily than its predecessor, often relying on comparatively sturdy and rock band-y arrangements.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Let the People Speak
    Let the People Speak feels utterly passionless and perfunctory.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cinematic Orchestra presents In Motion #1
    The seven songs on In Motion #1 were commissioned as alternate scores to seven short avant-garde films, and without those inspirations unspooling in front of the listener, there's a strange incompleteness to most of them.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    For Professional Use Only [Mixtape]
    Araab's willingness to stretch keeps For Professional Use Only engaging throughout, which is no easy task; it's 67 minutes long, about 15 minutes longer than a typical festival set and probably 15 minutes more AraabMuzik than anyone needs in one sitting.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Drowners
    Drowners can’t inspire too much ill will or really any kind of strong reaction and that’s fair enough: it doesn’t deal in hot, dirty sex or catastrophic breakups, mostly drunken hookups and easy letdowns.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Smile
    Smile asks less of us. The confessions on this album feel like calculated dodges, every tepid disclosure immediately followed by triumph. ... Despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing proven chart-topping formulas.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Scenic Drive (The Tape)
    Scenic Drive feels like a detour because it is: Khalid announced his next studio album, Everything Is Changing, last summer. For now, though, he seems content to take a step back, sounding like he’s singing and shrugging at the same time.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The World is Yours
    It sounds good--Brown's detached, wispy/gritty voice is pleasing as ever, and I like a pop string arrangement as much as the next guy--but it doesn't add up to much in the end.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Moon Music
    That unpredictable quality control makes Coldplay frustrating to defend or dismiss—for every questionable choice, there’s a 6-minute nu-jazz vamp or classical prog-pop opus waiting around the corner.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 35 Critic Score
    Scab Dates
    Given which songs are chosen and when this is being released, Scab Dates is a neither a concession nor a step forward, revealing inclinations that feel half as indulgent as they should when following a record like Frances the Mute, and about half as interesting to listen to.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Harmonies For The Haunted
    Harmonies for the Haunted seems as familiar as Stellastarr*'s 2003 debut, and that's at once its chief cincher and problem.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Alter Ego
    If Alter Ego presents LISA as the most generic embodiment of a pop star, then it is no surprise that its best songs rely on tried-and-true formulas.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    Altogether
    Even when Turnover try spicing things up with congas, a violin, and a couple of ill-fitting saxophone features, Altogether tastes incredibly vanilla, like a playlist of department store slow jams.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 51 Critic Score
    I've Tortured You Long Enough
    I’ve Tortured You never lets up on its fist-in-the-air rock eruptions. No small acoustic numbers punctuate the record; there is no time to regroup. Even within songs, Heroux and Zambri follow safe, predictable progressions.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Indicud
    Indicud has the sheen of a cinematic blockbuster.... Unfortunately, it also has no substance.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 48 Critic Score
    Fallen Empires
    You get the sense they're shooting for something epic, something that would sound just as big as the pop bangers on radio, but the results are goofy.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 46 Critic Score
    Live: Uurop VIII-XII/Places in Sun & Winter, Son
    It’s got the feel of a bootleg--the recording is at times horribly thin, and the occasional snatches of audience chatter make it sound like the work of someone staggering drunkenly through the crowd with a barely concealed mic.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    You and I
    A good 80% of You and I, the latest album of the lot, consists of covers, many already released in some format.... The new material includes a version of "Grace" that is basically a fully formed demo, while "Dream of You and I" is barely even that; the title is literal, Buckley thinking aloud about a dream he had about a band’s "space jam," which inspired him to write what’d eventually become "You and I."
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