Pitchfork's Scores

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For 12,715 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: 10,452 out of 12715
  2. Mixed: 1,949 out of 12715
  3. Negative: 314 out of 12715
12715 music reviews
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Alone For the First Time
    Alone for the First Time is the furthest he's pushed himself, and the growing pains on the album can be chalked up to the strain of trying new things, a kind of adolescent awkwardness that shows signs of maturing into something sophisticated and unique.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 44 Critic Score
    Anything but Words
    Anything But Words is the rare side project that might have been better off if both parties had cared a little less.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Cosmetic
    Cosmetic’s stewing textural undercurrent intensifies the band’s outer antagonism by highlighting the trembling, deep-seated dread within. It’s riveting and ruining in equal measure.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    High Bias
    If you’re happy to ride some riffs into the sunset, High Bias is a worthwhile trip.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    A Brief History Of Love
    A Brief History of Love is a study in the enormity of sound doing just that, each reverbed kick drum, phasers-on-stun guitar, and wastrel vocal refuting the idea that you need to talk about the passion to express it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 53 Critic Score
    Born On Flag Day
    Deer Tick's primary shortcoming is that the band evokes authentically gutty music from the past without noticeably inserting much of themselves into the equation, achieving superficial mimesis and comforting recognition while failing to put their own stamp on their creations.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Law Of Large Numbers
    The Law of Large Numbers is a smartly sequenced record.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Miike Snow
    The debut album by these producers-turned-trio comes after blog-bait remixes galore, including a nice enough Postal Service-ish Vampire Weekend makeover, but there's little of those fine young Columbians' infectious exuberance here.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Worth [EP]
    Mas Ysa was definitely the biggest suprise about Deerhunter's surprise show, and the strong follow-through of Worth should land his prospective first LP high on most-anticipated shortlists.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Palaces
    With little penchant for bedlam, it’s an album that lacks the exact thing that makes Flume’s music exciting.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    Phrazes For The Young
    The irony is that Phrazes for the Young is so smoothed over--nearly all of Casablancas' trademark vocal roughness is airbrushed into oblivion--it instantly sounds like a plexiglass-covered museum piece.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Jim
    This is an album by an artist getting comfortable with his softer side. It's another welcome surprise.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Life Of A DON
    As expected, Don Toliver’s latest album Life of a DON is hollow. ... But miraculously, the emptiness of it all is an afterthought—it sounds so damn good that who even cares if Don Toliver is an emotionless robot or not (he is). The hooks are catchy and slick. The beats are lush and radiant. And he has this distinctly piercing voice, with a wide range of melodies that could make an extremely basic line jotted down on a dinner napkin sound heartfelt.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Mother
    If it’s a bid for dance-pop stardom, then the big singles—finely crafted though they are—are too few, too timid. If it’s meant as a deep-house long-player, it’s paddling in the shallow end.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Luminous Night
    Luminous Night doesn't challenge "School of the Flower" or "The Sun Awakens" for Six Organs' best albums, but it is a solid addition to a big catalog that gets more interesting all the time.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    I'm Having Fun Now
    The album is also a much more modern-sounding pop project, though it similarly owes its success to the chemistry of its creators.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    We Know About The Need
    A slippery, engrossingly genreless take on the old theme of desolation in the city.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 62 Critic Score
    Bigger. Messier.
    Adding more voices to the mix turns the monolithic Big Mess inside out. What was once a foreboding haunted mansion is now a carnivalesque fun house; not a place to linger or live but rather a wild ride that’s worth one spin—but maybe not a second.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Yours To Keep
    Hammond's solo outing is a spry if unexceptional pop charmer, less supercilious than Is This It or Room on Fire but almost as cool.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Heligoland
    The undercurrent of menace and sadness that defined Massive Attack's best music is largely absent, replaced with a drowsy, half-formed gloom that, if anything, suggests resignation instead of dread.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    The Carpenter
    Too many of the other songs feel starved of that love, though.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Belly Of The Lion
    Wingo recorded Belly of the Lion in his apartment, playing all the instruments himself (although he did hire a drummer for four songs), so the range of sounds is limited. Their range of use, however, is not.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Swimming
    Trading layers of mood and melody and meaning for layers of Pro Tooled artifice, French Kicks have razored off the bullshit, leaving a core of beguilingly honest tunes.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Sport
    Throughout, Sport is crude, queasy, sometimes shockingly ugly, and often quite funny, in a madcap, slightly threatening way. It thrills and it mystifies in equal measure.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade
    The Libertines may be running low on originality, but they can still produce a strong tune when the muse strikes.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 47 Critic Score
    Burn The Maps
    Burn the Maps often sounds like simplicity transformed into bloat in an attempt to sound interesting.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Backlash
    Lewis gives the briefest glimpse of a supremely raucous affair, then shunts you out of a side door, all dressed up with nowhere to go.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    Thalassa
    Because she never fully commits to one mood or genre, it is difficult to feel fully immersed. Gika’s songwriting is sometimes too vague to resonate emotionally, and her delivery, though gorgeous, never feels fully unencumbered.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Normal Happiness
    Normal Happiness is a slightly-above-mediocre release from an artist who never dared to be mediocre; just inconsistent.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    All That Must Be
    All That Must Be doesn’t quite live up to its own heartstring-tugging goals; too often, it’s just kind of comfortably glum.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Jukebox
    A covers album like Jukebox should reveal new facets of a performer in its selection and interpretation of favorite songs. That's how (and why) "The Covers Record" worked. But eight years later, only 'Song for Bobby' tells us anything new about Chan Marshall. The rest of Jukebox doesn't even say much about Cat Power.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    Duskland
    Squint into the haze, however, and you'll discern moving parts in these simple and rootsy songs that help them resonate.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Spells
    Their inability to come up with truly novel material leaves them stuck at indie's Triple AAA level both artistically and commercially.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    In Our Nature
    Like its predecessor, In Our Nature is a collection of sparse acoustic recordings. But it's a more thoughtful and atmospheric work than either "Veneer" or last year's "Stay in the Shade" EP.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    James Pants
    James Pants is his third album, less goofy and party-focused than 2008's Welcome, and a little less brooding and funky than 2009's Seven Seals.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Inventions
    There are times when you know exactly where you want to go and this is the music to take you there.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Colors
    Beck has been working on Colors since 2013, and by the sounds of a recent interview, spent a lot of time trying to get the balance of “not retro and not modern” just so. He more or less nailed that bit, but what’s lacking from his Big Happy Pop Record is some kind of strong emotion that could elevate these songs above the “well crafted but innocuous” camp--something more than an idea.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Valley Tangents
    An album that gleans from prog, noise, baroque, hip-hop and more at will.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is Eggland
    It’s as good an introduction as you’ll get to the group and its charmingly skewed perspective on the world.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Island Intervals
    This is passionate music, delivered with searing honesty by a man who didn’t mind disappearing from the conversation if that’s what it took to articulate what he was trying to say.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
    Consistently excellent and deserves to be heard by fans of 70's glam and shoegazer alike.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    My Dark Places
    My Dark Places doesn't just uncover shadowy corners in its subject matter-- it's also musically unkempt, stumbling along and veering off in directions most bands wouldn't even be comfortable using as B-sides or jokes.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Warp Riders
    The Sword's songs seem to follow the same basic blueprint: Opening-riff trudge, part where Cronise sings about magic, solo, more crunching, more magic, another solo.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    So Much For The City
    The Thrills' external, sometime vaccuous pinching is clearly self-conscious, a carefully premeditated breach of expectation that causes more of a wince than a flash of pleasant surprise.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Several Arrows Later
    So maybe Pond really is just another ordinary-guy exemplar of the ongoing post-Coldplay adult contemporarization of indie, as his ordinary arrangements and ordinarier songs would attest.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    Travellers In Space And Time
    There's certainly no shortage of well-crafted, playful, memorable tunes here, and that-- matched with Schneider's willingness to try on a few new sounds for size-- adds up to the best Apples in Stereo record in more than a decade.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 61 Critic Score
    Fornever
    Most of the songs are toss-offs, but it's plenty of fun to be along for the ride as long as some restraint is issued. Without it, ForNever alternately struggles to keep its head above water with washed-out cautionary tales ("The Problem Is...") or slums it in the shallows with mildly tawdry goofs ("Asian Girl").
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Dagdrom
    The key to Dagdrøm's daunting mystique: You're never really sure if what you're hearing is the calm before the storm or the storm before the calm.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Home
    Home is an ace of a second album, one which maintains the most important elements of Chung's painstakingly crafted sound while progressing nicely into a friendlier arena.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Cyclops Reap
    These songs don't ever feel overstuffed. Everything is faithful to White Fence's well-established aesthetic, but simplified.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tally All the Things That You Broke [EP]
    Savage sends each line out to the back of the club every time, all underneath sugary post-punk revival guitar lines courtesy of Savage and his longtime associate Austin Brown.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Dizzy Heights
    Finn sounds best when Dizzy Heights is at its dizziest, when he has to completely rethink how his voice fits a song. On the other hand, he sounds slightly less engaged on the more straightforward tunes, which perhaps don’t offer the same heady challenges.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    Dark Sky Paradise
    Dark Sky Paradise is a big leap in the direction of the ideal Big Sean full-length.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Pissing Stars
    Pissing Stars feels purposefully small, a personal retreat from full-band compromise by someone who is trying to understand the world and his role in it. The result is indulgent, neurotic, and harrowing, a reminder of the complete mess we’ve made. But it’s oddly reassuring, too.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Book of Travelers
    Book of Travelers seems stuck in limbo about what it values most, about what it should accept or abhor. Both album and country teeter on a precipice above that inhospitable canyon, even as they keep chugging like trains along its edge.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Darker Days
    The stylistic left-turns taken on Darker Days are more hit-or-miss than the songs that explicitly recall the band’s native origins. ... But it’s also surprising, and indicative of the fact that even Darker Days’ most glaring missteps go a long way towards renewing interest in what Peter Bjorn and John are up to these days.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Saints & Sebastian Stories
    Konradsen’s approach skips the groundwork to go for experimentation. It’s folk music untethered from tradition, prioritizing well-crafted production over well-crafted songwriting.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Petrichor
    Trost sings evenly and with an appealing clarity but little emotion, letting her voice tangle with the various layers of sound until it’s just another signal on the switchboard.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Song Of The Earth
    Borrowing Mahler’s vivid contrasts while jettisoning the soothing unity, Song of the Earth feels more like something coming apart than coming together, which may relate to Longstreth’s ideas about the earth and how we live now. But if you can’t get on its chaotic wavelength, it can wear you out.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 36 Critic Score
    The Courage Of Others
    With precious little exception, these songs are just so wispy, and the band's treatment of them so delicate, it turns Courage into a museum piece, stuffy, bloodless
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Zeros
    Vasquez's knack for atmosphere was there from the beginning, but he's becoming a better, more defined songwriter.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Coconut
    Coconut seems to be a "transition album": A sometimes-exhilarating, sometimes-WTF layover between a possibly played-out formula and exciting new sounds on the horizon.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    Attention Please
    Attention Please at least offers something fresh for Boris.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Euphoric
    Georgia’s willingness to experiment is promising, but it’s unfortunate that Euphoric takes such a predominantly safe journey. As on Seeking Thrills, some songs also succumb to vague lyrics that resemble placeholders.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Old, Familiar Friend
    Benson emphasizes the raw power of his riffs instead of polishing them into a smooth sheen. It's not as DIY charming as his earlier works, but it's pretty darned effective.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    We're On Your Side
    It's experimental music, to be sure, but it doesn't conflate experimentation with alienation.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Greatest Hits, Vol. 1
    Rather than build off each other's styles and arrive at a cumulative, comprehensive sound, Teenage Time Killers' revolving cast have conflated quantity with quality, resulting in a pedestrian product that, at best, offers a decent soundtrack to throwing back beers at Punk Rock Bowling.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Oceania
    His new band might not question him very much, and they may play better or more professionally, than his old crew. But Oceania suffers a kind of rock-star-dictator airlessness.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    Poster Girl
    “Poster Girl” is so enraptured with this idealized vision of a pop star that it leaves no room to learn about the woman behind the mic.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Music for Animals
    At more than three hours long, Music for Animals is difficult to digest in its entirety; there’s a fine line between patient and dull. Frahm’s extended track lengths are presumably meant to foster immersion, but after a while, they come to seem indulgent.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Seefeel
    Seefeel is a thorny album, a thicket of crackling guitars and faltering rhythms.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Astrological Straits
    At its best, Astrological Straits is a mashup of Liars tribalism, Boredoms bombast, Smell-scene art-punk, Lightning Bolt repeti-grooves, and Frank Zappa prog-overload. All this sonic hyperactivity can be exhausting, and Hill's fondness for effects, especially in his Vocoder-ish vocals, makes some tracks robotic, more like exercises than songs.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 61 Critic Score
    2042
    It’s hard to say whether 2042 would be a more compelling record with more appropriate sequencing, or if this sprawling sixteen-track album would have made, perhaps, for a better set of separate EPs. What’s all too clear, unfortunately, is that 2042 stumbles precisely where Okereke has proven himself so capable of soaring.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Here We Go Magic
    Only swatches of the lyrics are intelligible ("Look at me," "Feast your eyes," "All is yours") but that's part of the enchantment of magic: A fleeting glimpse of something that might have been transcendent, leaving our minds to fill in what we didn't quite see.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Other People's Problems
    Whatever Other People's Problems is trying to say is lost beneath the fact that it's so sonically muddled and abrasive, and lyrically imprecise.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    In Heaven
    In the end, what's really impressive is that the mousey quality of their music doesn't work against these nimble, cosmopolitan arrangements. If anything, it makes the songs richer, gives them more of a backstory.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Musicology
    Music that, while often pleasant, lacks the power of not only his best work, but also most of his successors' stuff.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    X&Y
    Like Coldplay's two previous albums, only more so, X&Y is bland but never offensive, listenable but not memorable.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Ghettoville
    Cunningham's perplexing persona has always been overshadowed by his ability to confound us with his records; Ghettoville, disappointingly, shifts that balance.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Ahead Of The Lions
    Fans of handclaps, who don't mind that Berlin sings as many lines about doing lines as he does protest lines, marching lines and battle lines, will have fun pretending to be epic along with these Velvet Ramones.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    I Can't Go On, I'll Go On
    Their influences are all immediately recognizable and their songs all hummably predictable, and yet their Merge debut, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On, reveals the band to be confidently inventive and assured in their collective identity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Song Of The Pearl
    Perhaps praising Heumann's improved writing plays like faint praise, but it's as significant a step in the right direction as tightening the instrumental belt is in the wrong direction.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Alela Diane & Wild Divine
    This self-titled album gives the impression that they're constantly aware of holding back. Such restraint is ultimately unwarranted: Diane is a strong enough presence as a singer and as a songwriter that she can more than hold her own.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 62 Critic Score
    Rainbow Mirror
    For all its imposing scale, though, it lacks some of the dramatic finesse of classic Prurient. Fernow’s poetic lyrics, spoken or shrieked, have been a key hallmark of the project, and without them, these abstracted noisescapes lack the narrative character of his best work.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    August Greene
    Just as the album looks like it’s about to settle and prosper in this zone, in comes “Piano Interlude,” and the tone of August Greene shifts messily.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Truth or Consequences
    Even when an experiment comes up short, mistakes and failed attempts allow us to see others as the messy, raw, difficult humans we know ourselves to be. Truth or Consequences is more like a Valentine’s Day card—pleasantly sentimental, at times gratifying, and all too easy to forget.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Exit Wounds
    On Exit Wounds, the Wallflowers finally turn into the classic rock band they always ached to be.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Turn It On!
    Turn It On! plays to their strengths.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Idlewild
    Initially, it’s thrilling in the way that any spectacle is. You admire the creative largesse, and there’s no doubt a strong 12-song album here. But at 79 minutes, exhaustion sets in by the midway mark, and the whole of the album takes on the feeling of someone trying to cap a broken water main.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    The Errant Charm
    The Errant Charm doesn't entirely succeed in that regard, but it remains a pleasant listen, perhaps just a bit too subliminally so for its own good.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Good Girl Gone Bad
    An unexpectedly varied and satisfying listen.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Small Craft On A Milk Sea
    With few exceptions, Small Craft on a Milk Sea's 15 songs fall roughly into one of two categories: ambient and active.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Born Under Saturn
    The busy arrangements and serious frontloading make Born Under Saturn’s 54 minutes a demanding investment, and the effort it takes to simply get any sort of visceral pleasure out of it makes it feel twice as long.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    The Resistance
    For the wary or outright dismissive, however, The Resistance is also a very smartly sequenced album.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Beak>
    Beak> is as full of odd, compulsive energy as you'd expect from something cranked out in two weeks, made by a guy who probably had creative fuel to burn, considering that his day job took 11 years between their second and third albums.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Black Cherry
    From the title on down, the new CD tries hard to conjure an ambiance of languid sin-- opium, absinthe, vintage porn-- but that aesthetic is just a few steps from your average bachelor pad with a zebra throw and ceiling mirrors. In fact, that's where copies of this album will inevitably spin, a soundtrack to excruciatingly banal seduction.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    These Four Walls
    They don't have the lyrical complexity of the bands that they will be compared to (from a young U2 to the aforementioned Frightened Rabbit), but they do have the energy and that's a promising place to start.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Metallic Spheres
    it's still not quite as successful as the Orb's classic material, and a little too subdued, lacking both the goofy sampleadelic grandeur and the ear-grabbing pop pulse of the Ultraworld era. But it's still the most focused and listenable Orb album in years.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Young Death/Nightmarket [EP]
    Both tracks feel like small pieces of a larger piece we don’t get to hear; there’s a wispy, vaporous, interlude quality to each, like we’re in a place where something just happened or something is about to happen but the present moment is all suggestion.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 53 Critic Score
    Lupercalia
    During Lupercalia's first half, he continues to prove himself a fine craftsman of major-key melodies, and this is his most confident and convicted vocal performance yet. But like most of Wolf's records, he eventually gives into sad songs and waltzes as Lupercalia progresses, and studded with the same overproduction tricks of cluttered strings and processed samples, "The Days" and "Slow Motion" don't offer much in the way of contrast outside of tempo.
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