Pitchfork's Scores

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For 12,720 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: 10,456 out of 12720
  2. Mixed: 1,950 out of 12720
  3. Negative: 314 out of 12720
12720 music reviews
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Abendrot
    Abendrot never feels dishonest, just occasionally overwrought in its desire to achieve the stakes and transcendence of similarly inspired records like Holy Ghost or Goodness. Fortunately, You Blew It! just as often let their guitars speak for their behalf and Abendrot can be heard as the completion of a directive started by their last two albums: grow up, dude and keep doing what you’re doing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Ooz
    The OOZ drops at our feet like a piece of poisoned fruit, a masterpiece of jaundiced vision from one of the most compelling artists alive.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Agora
    For the most part, Gilberto’s voice finds the pocket, and when she’s front and center, the arrangements expertly draped around her, Agora is a rapturous listen. It’s not the star’s finest work—for newcomers, 2000’s Tanto Tempo remains her most engaging set—but in a time of personal distress, Gilberto embraces the familiar comforts of her graceful sound.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Invisible Cities
    A baseline of reliability can double as a cap on transcendent potential, and it’s those cap-rattling moments that make what’s otherwise simply another fine album from this duo worthwhile.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    sentiment
    Channeling avant-garde techniques into melancholic folk-pop produces an album of tremendous psychological and emotional complexity, where the interior world is—even at its most desolate—full of vibrant, complicated life.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    One Million Love Songs
    Sometimes, the lyrics on One Million Love Songs unhelpfully pull you from your seat just when it’s just starting to get good. .... But the album masters melancholy anyway, using careful guitar and vocal flourishes to make the music’s embryonic self-consciousness feel urgent, like it’s yours.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    Wu Hen
    Williams’ music emphasizes the malleability and evolution of sound across styles and eras, even drifting into an R&B track voiced by the up-and-coming Lauren Faith stashed away near the album’s end. But the continual stylistic shifts make stretches of Wu Hen feel fidgety, hurriedly racing off to somewhere different rather than lingering and deepening its focus.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    The Mars Volta
    The previous iteration of the band thrived at the border of brilliant and unhinged, and The Mars Volta is too conventional to be called their best work. But it is certainly their most honest: a sober tale written by survivors, the first uneasy step into unfamiliar territory.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Atlas
    Atlas derives its power from the tension between broad expanses of formlessness and sudden eruptions of destabilizing beauty. To me, this tender, elegiac album sounds like deathbed music—a flash of rapture while everything fades to black.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Another Splash of Colour: New Psychedelia in Britain 1980-1985 [Box Set]
    Not only does the record’s scrappy, lived-in ambiance reflect the DIY necessities of that scene--it creates an intimate, densely packed time-capsule, in which strange aromas have mingled until even the minor curios are a source of wonder.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    Build a Problem
    Sometimes, you don’t want to think too hard. You want to put on a big sweater and complain. You want to listen to something soft and sad, look out the window and remember how embarrassing you have been. Clark knows that feeling well—her music is made for it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    A Jackal's Wedding
    His most distinctive release to date. While he initially garnered attention for his pastiches of ’80s art-rock, he’s channeled his influences into a record that’s both more expansive and more intimate.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Perpetual Motion People
    While he's deeply indebted to traditional sounds and familiar structures, he comes alive most when he's sewing fissures into the forms he knows so well.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Silence
    Batoh's new act, the Silence, is at once a continuation of the past and a break from it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Always Foreign
    While Always Foreign is by no means a happy record, it’s still a joy to listen to, driven by the same belief in community, evolution, and possibility that earned their debut EP the title of Formlessness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 89 Critic Score
    7
    On 7, all the contrasts that mark their music are dialed up to blinding; you are plunged into darkness and then showered in light. The experience is so enveloping that you find yourself contending, once again, with that familiar itch to locate meaning.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    Billboard Heart
    Deep Sea Diver deftly modulates their energy over the course of Billboard Heart, whose front half zigzags through cinematic scene-setting and jittery accelerations, and whose back half mellows into a more pensive slow burn.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    The Sunlandic Twins
    Missing Satanic Panic's multidimensionality, the album feels like the hollowed-out shell of something great.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Left by Soft
    Like most of Kilgour's solo work, it has a relaxed and quietly accomplished air.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Precious Art
    The gifts of Precious Art are more apparent when comedy shades the melody instead of overshadowing it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Fever
    His new one, a solo rap record called FEVER, confirms he’s still a serviceable emcee prospering as a session leader with a sense of purpose.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    End of Everything
    This album is far more challenging than the lush, sprightly Life, and Another; although a good deal shorter, it’s more dense, and it can feel overwhelming. For that reason, it can sometimes feel more rewarding, too.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Hey Hey My My Yo Yo
    Skeptics be damned that's just what Hey Hey My My Yo Yo is, an improvement and distillation of the duo's sound.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Lily-O
    There is nothing on Lily-O to break the spell these musicians have too carefully cast. In other words, there is nothing to get Amidon out of his own head or out of our collective past.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Communion
    Communion plays out like a kind of fever dream, a delirium of cold sweat and disturbing visions in which there are only brief moments of daylight before you're plunged back into the maelstrom once more.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    SAVED!
    Hayter continues to traverse a biblical, deeply American landscape, surveying both its fire and brimstone and its transformative music. Saved! understands both of these qualities—consequently, rage, wonder, and beauty all churn just under its surface.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Cartwheel
    No matter how far into the red Cartwheel pushes, there’s one sound that stands out: Anderson’s humble, everydude voice, somehow rising above the clouds of dirt and grime even at a mumble.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Dye It Blonde
    Though the leap is audibly huge, Dye It Blonde's many successes aren't wholly the result of its gilded production values and ambition. This band was able to furnish first-class melodies from the beginning. Now they've grown along with their resources.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    After the Party
    After the Party might actually be too well-designed for jukeboxes, as the relentless, face-to-the-glass production results in the sad cowpoke shuffle of “Black Mass” and the Meatloaf-inspired “The Bars” clocking in at about the same volume as everything else, denying a dynamic range that’s needed on a record that lives up to its title by sticking around one or two songs longer than it probably should.
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