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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    • 81 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Someone To Drive You Home
    Most so-called "cinematic" records earn that distinction due to some quirk of reverb or their use of space, but the Long Blondes only have modern England's typically confined, 17-year-old-from-Doncaster guitar-dudish sound. Instead, it's the songs themselves, their narratives, and their characters that speak to the band's widescreen ambitions.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Memory Almost Full
    An album that turns out to be a lot more idiosyncratic than its coffee-chain marketing plan suggests.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tromatic Reflexxions
    Tromatic Reflexxions sometimes seems to work like a Fall album, wearing you down with its relentless energy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Ma Fleur
    Slow, sugary, and perhaps a little too safe, this is not quite the return that Cinematic fans will want it to be.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Maths + English
    His post-genre American-mythos statement.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Good Girl Gone Bad
    An unexpectedly varied and satisfying listen.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Asa Breed
    As producer, songwriter and persona, Dear has come into his own with Asa Breed, a bootstrapping album that not only reveals the miles walked, but an ambitious road map ahead.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Can't Wait Another Day
    Can't Wait Another Day would be easier to love if it didn't keep accidentally signposting a shortage of fresh songwriting ideas.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Excellent Italian Greyhound
    Even at their silliest, even when they're treading water, no one else sounds quite like Shellac, and anyone who professes to be a serious music fan without having spent quality time with the band's albums should be forced to familiarize themselves. This just wouldn't be the first record I'd force on them.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Double Up
    In a sense, it seems more apropos to judge Double Up as a comedy record than as a pop record.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    Boxer
    Like those on their last album, these songs reveal themselves gradually but surely, building to the inevitable moment when they hit you in the gut. It's the rare album that gives back whatever you put into it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Mirrored
    Mirrored is a breathtaking aesthetic left-turn that sounds less like rock circa 2007 than rock circa 2097, a world where Marshall stacks and micro-processing go hand in hand.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Voxtrot
    The majority of the record's new tracks need to either be more focused or show more dynamic range.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Everyday I Said A Prayer For Kathy And Made A One Inch Square
    Toying with sound and rhythm, noise and melody, Square is less minimalist than Hope, more fractured than Second.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 18 Critic Score
    The Sun And The Moon
    As annoying as Endicott's mascara-tainted bellyaching was on the Bravery's debut, his histrionics-for-the-masses commandeer the group's stylistic direction on The Sun and the Moon, cheapening already trite regurgitations of Robert Smith confessionals by bloating them to anthemic proportions.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Plague Park
    Boeckner most excels when he works alongside someone who provides a stronger contrast. In Wolf Parade, Spencer Krug helps provide that balance; without Boeckner's typical foil, the results remain impressive, if not quite as compelling.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Fort Nightly
    It's a great debut for a band with an impressive, distinctive sound.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Five Roses
    Five Roses reveals Van Pelt as a talented producer who knows his way around summery pop songs.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Release The Stars
    Such frequent attempts to elevate the banal into the meaningful ultimately keep Release the Stars from achieving any significant momentum and only add weight to the notion that Wainwright's shaky aim-- rather than his lack of talent-- might be his biggest downfall.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Sky Blue Sky
    An album of unapologetic straightforwardness, Sky Blue Sky nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tio Bitar
    Its few missteps are well balanced by a handful of blissful, seismic bright pockets.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    The Beatific Visions
    Gone are the gimmicky fragments and Mcluskyesque scene-jabs. The Beatific Visions is dominated by direly catchy and fully fleshed-out songs that pop like punk, lilt like country, mutter politics, and reek of the garage.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Our Earthly Pleasures
    With their new album, Maxïmo Park avoid both utter disaster and absolute success by playing it safe. Nice and safe.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Volta
    Where even her most divisive albums have managed to push her artistic boundaries, Volta feels limp and strangely empty-- almost unfinished.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    God Save The Clientele
    God Save the Clientele sounds like the work of the same band, but it shows them in a new, brighter light, broadened in both sound and outlook. In terms of sonics and tunes, these changes are welcome and logical, expanding upon the sound with which they made their name without sacrificing intimacy or risking coming across overcooked.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    No Shouts, No Calls
    On No Shouts, No Calls, the Krautrock-esque sonics of the band's last album have been fused with The Power Out's flair for continental pop, but it's the guitars that sing loudest.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Everybody
    That it still sounds mischievous and human through the band's studious chops and omnivorous listening habits is no small feat, as these qualities have eluded them for quite a while.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Mice Parade
    Mice Parade still finds Pierce working in a distinctive space, less jazzy than fellow post-rock vets the Sea & Cake but more atmospherically nuanced than typical acoustic singer/songwriters, but it's hardly the most appropriate release to bear the Mice Parade name.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    New Moon
    Phrases like "rare talent" are thrown around all the time these days, but this compilation makes painfully clear just how unique and valuable this music is.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    The Boy With No Name
    While the first half of the record is promising, however, the band loses steam toward the end.
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