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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    • 62 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Earth Sound System
    Greenwood and co.'s impulses have grown disappointingly easy to dissect. The result is music that, by any definition, remains experimental and difficult, but the invigorating internal tension between the ordained simplicity of American musics and the free-will noise jams has evaporated.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    Born to Die
    For all of its coos about love and devotion, it's the album equivalent of a faked orgasm-- a collection of torch songs with no fire.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 22 Critic Score
    Ersatz G.B.
    Ersatz G.B.'s abrasiveness, inscrutability, and tedium are increasingly tough to take with repeated close listening... a shabby, grueling album.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Glowing Mouth
    While Milagres may sound like a lot of music fans' favorite bands, it's hard to imagine anyone preferring this record to the real deal.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Sugar
    Sugar is notable as much for what's missing as for what's been honed and emphasized. Morris no longer howls like Kurt Cobain, nor does he drawl so studiously. There are no 12- or seven-minute stoner epics either; instead, the songs are shorter, more compact, punchier. Almost missing: personality.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let's Bottle Bohemia
    Their forlorn, polished California pop is like the sprawling Valley suburbs: nice enough, if that's your sort of thing.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    The Looks
    Keeler succeeds in meticulously reconstructing the electronic music he clearly has a taste for, but without stirring in any of his own personality the songs do little more than run in place, joylessly hitting the marks without changing the rules in any meaningful or attention-grabbing way.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Christmas In The Heart
    It's his unhinged vocals that make Christmas in the Heart interesting, and, in some ways, appropriate to its subject.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Three's Co.
    Like its predecessors, Three's Co. mixes the sun-soaked power pop proclivities of Teenage Fanclub with the sylvan jangle of Felt, though the Tyde too often seem afraid to really make waves.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 35 Critic Score
    TA
    It's Loverboy-style lite-metal meets new wave, without the riffs, melodies or red leather pants. In other words, it's Survivor.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    All Is Illusory
    For all of their upgraded production, instrumental technique, and influences, All Is Illusory sounds like a record that primes the Velvet Teen to succeed around the time Cum Laude! was released—but making the best "2006 indie rock" record of 2015 makes them stand out in a way that they hadn’t managed yet.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Baby
    After spending 15 minutes sounding like preordained headliners, Tribes trudge through half an hour of perfunctorily composed and performed verses and choruses that are all too deniable.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 48 Critic Score
    The Portrait Is Finished & I Have Failed To Capture Your Beauty...
    Fuzztone guitar and the occasional woodwinds dress up the many slow-paced songs, but repetitive, fragmentary compositions such as 'Paquita Reads by Candlelight,' Vancouver-repping 'Skeleton Aim,' and the typically moribund 'Come Darkness' sound more concerned with melisma than memorable melodies or vibrant production.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ...And Star Power
    In its most fully realized moments, ...And Star Power is the album Todd Rundgren could’ve released between Something/Anything? and A Wizard, a True Star, its best songs striking an uncanny balance between the exquisite balladry of the former and the progged-out fantasias of the latter.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    There Are Rules
    There Are Rules isn't a return to form sonically [...] but a return to results, a just-all-right record from a band that always felt a step behind even in their own genre.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 28 Critic Score
    Mumps, Etc.
    An often unlistenable album from WHY?, a group whose music is often excellent.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Mr. Impossible
    On the evidence of Mr. Impossible, they still sound like no one else and they're still thinking hard about music and texture. When you're craving something trashy and tripped-out in this very particular way, they still deliver the properly damaged goods.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Selling My Soul
    ["All Natural" is] the one song on the spotty, often comatose Selling My Soul that sounds like it needed to be made.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Blitzkrieg Pop
    Haas has a problem: Let that cartoon tech-metal ramp up (or camp up) just a step too far, and it turns into something kind of, well, uncool-- crossing the line from lovably brutal Germanic electronics into something sub-Rammstein, a kind of mallrat military-industrial metal that doesn't really square with the guy's skill set.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Stranger Things
    Where that album [Glow & Behold] felt like an expansion, albeit a minor one, Stranger Things feels like a retreat.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Giving Up The Ghost
    May stand as the band's most focused disc to date.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    More!
    For the most part, the beats and the synths are the stars of the show here. They're not as compelling as in the past--maybe only four albums into their career, the duo is preferring to color inside the lines.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 45 Critic Score
    The Less You Know, The Better
    Its only commitment is to a subtle antagonism, and it ignores pretty much any worthwhile development in pop, rock, electronic, or hip-hop music since the turn of the century.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 31 Critic Score
    Birth Of A Prince
    A career low.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    This Is What the Truth Feels Like
    Stefani’s focus on the good times alternates with songs where she expresses cartoonish anger by awkwardly rapping and shouting non-sequiturs (“Naughty,” “Red Flag”), and neither mode plays to her strengths as a songwriter and signature vocalist. Her best songs are the ones in which she is audibly upset.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 62 Critic Score
    Sexor
    Too much of Sexor feels suspiciously like the middle of the road.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kratitude
    It's less catchy than 2001's "Y", yet more immediate and hyperactive.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 61 Critic Score
    Too Much Information
    As a literary exercise, it’s convincing; as a listening one, it’s mixed.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    If Songs Could Be Held
    There's the potential for something here; as of If Songs Could Be Held, it's yet unrealized.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Justice
    His voice has a palatable smoothness; he’s mastered push-and-pull dynamics, and he swings effortlessly from a placid chest voice to a zephyr of a falsetto. That litheness and control are on full display across Justice. Even when the songwriting is spiritless and the production rote—and it occasionally is, as on the confessional “Unstable” and the saccharine “Deserve You”—he still sings the hell out of it.
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