Pitchfork's Scores

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For 12,767 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: 10,500 out of 12767
  2. Mixed: 1,953 out of 12767
  3. Negative: 314 out of 12767
12767 music reviews
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    • 63 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Guitars and Microphones
    Pierson hasn’t lost any of the force or heat that’s characterized her vocal work for 40 years; if anything, she’s acquired the ability to enrich otherwise pedestrian line readings with a resonance that feels born of a life well lived.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 47 Critic Score
    Fly Yellow Moon
    Fly Yellow Moon just can't quite solve that old problem: how to be mushy but not mundane.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Selected Studies, Vol. 1
    It leaves Selected Studies in an odd place, one that doesn't feel like any kind of stretch for one of its participants, but is quite the opposite for the other.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Sun, Sun, Sun
    Sun, Sun, Sun is a modern pop simulacrum of traditional country, devoid of the electro accents that pocked the last Elected record, pretty delectable as long as you've a strong taste for ham.
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 28 Critic Score
    Recovery
    Out of all the depressing aspects of Recovery, the worst is the realization that for listeners the album takes the opposite arc-- the more he motors on about having reclaimed his passion for hip-hop and finally figured out who he is, the more draining the album becomes.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Document & Eyewitness 1979-1980
    Wire never wanted to be a satisfying band, yet they somehow became one--which leaves the otherwise bold impulse behind Document and Eyewitness curiously inconclusive.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    TLC
    TLC's letting-go is bittersweet and good, a sometimes somber, sometimes playful requiem for their time together (and with us).
    • 63 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Dip
    There are building blocks for something fantastic in most of these pieces, but only in two of them have they been used to make more than the sum of their parts.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Donkey
    The joycore bricolage of CSS is all but missing on Donkey.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Beautiful
    That the archaic should sound this fresh is at least a mini-miracle.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 21 Critic Score
    R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece
    R&G has a unified sound, rare in hip-hop albums, but it's a sound based on tinkly pianos and noodly guitars and windchimes. It sounds something like The Black Eyed Peas if they tried to make a Barry White album, but with more falsetto warbling.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Season Dreaming
    Season Dreaming is the sort of record that could, in the wrong hands, easily drift off into formless bedlam, but the group's employment of simple melodies and tunefulness when needed keeps that from happening.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 53 Critic Score
    A Very She & Him Christmas
    A Very She & Him stands guilty not of being oppressively adorkable, but of being not nearly adorkable enough.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Fated
    Fated is an overwhelmingly pleasant listen. It is decidedly un-dazzling.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Lism
    It's a wayward journey, which appears to be the intention of the piece, although at times it produces the kind of mixed results you get from opening a novel at a random page and trying to make sense of it.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    The Plain Where the Palace Stood
    The album shows that Grubbs’ music and his relationship to pop convention remains as distanced, fitfully frustrating, and stubbornly idiosyncratic as ever.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Keep Your Dreams
    When they go for manic instead of mellow, Canyons do bring something new, even if it's just intensity, to the 80s retro party.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Peter Gabriel Tribute Album: And I'll Scratch Yours
    As a double album, Scratch might have produced something like an elaborate mixtape with originals on one side of the Maxell and covers on the other. In execution, however, I’ll Scratch Yours plays like another artifact of the 90s, this one less fondly remembered.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    (I Can't Get No) Stevie Jackson
    These 12 songs feel like whimsical larks, and Jackson's considerable charm should be able to put them over just fine in a live setting. But the record can also be too whimsical for its own good, and for most listeners, Jackson's Belle and Sebastian songs will be enough.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Enemy/Lover
    When you're operating on such a grand scale, and the exultant, openhearted Enemy/Lover is rarely outpaced by its lofty ambitions.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    The Mother Stone
    Caleb Landry Jones’ music inspires a reaction somewhere in the middle: It’s interesting, even fun while it lasts, but you probably won’t return.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Nobody Is Listening
    The album’s most tolerable songs fixate on the physical, a pulsating goo of slow drums and reverbed descriptions of skin mashed against skin.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    The Nextwave Sessions [EP]
    By default, Nextwave is less scattered and more consistent: It’s only five songs. But “Ratchet” indicates that Bloc Party could’ve gone way further off the grid if they gave themselves enough time.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    A Few Steps More
    Sounds a hell of a lot like Stereolab.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    Alice And Friends
    Alice and Friends doesn't produce often in that department [solid hooks], relying instead on the kind of raw energy that fuels a good house party.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Kaleidoscope EP
    Kaleidoscope isn’t going to kickstart Coldplay’s critical reappraisal, nor does it deserve to. But it rewards those of us who’ve stuck around with a few songs that capture the band at its best.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 45 Critic Score
    He Was King
    Unfortunately a whole album of similarly DJ-pitched material, all the quote-unquote pop frills shaved off, wouldn't have allowed blog readers to devote the few days their attenuated attentions can muster for He Was King's singles, before the next this-is-kind-of-okay-I-guess electro-pop album arrives to distract them.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 47 Critic Score
    Heartbreak Weather
    After all the sentimental rigamarole, it’s tough to come away from Heartbreak Weather feeling any closer to Horan. He spends too much of the record bouncing between sounds and songwriting concepts to feel distinct.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Poem
    When Delerium forego the listless Gregorics and stale beats employed by their more renowned contemporaries, they truly shine. The beat-heavy "Aria," for instance, and the salsa-esque "Fallen Icons" are arguably Poem's strongest tracks. But these moments occur only now and then, and are often sandwiched between songs that, while helping you survive the subway's rush-hour crunch, won't meet your needs at any other time-- unless you're about to have a mid-life crisis.
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