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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    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hymns
    The good news is that "The Love Within," Bloc Party’s comeback track, an indie disco-pop hybrid that is somehow both garish and bland, is comfortably the worst song on Hymns. A little better is "So Real," which trails a Silent Alarm throwback riff over low-key soul and hangover-soothing deep house; on "The Good News," a similarly midtempo Blur pastiche, a down-and-out narrator trudges from "the Gospels of St. John" to the "bottom of a shot glass."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Can I Keep This Pen?
    Calling them wack MCs isn't saying much though--they're the only MCs of their kind, competing only against themselves. No wonder they make music that sounds like it was made in a void: heart in the right place, perforated with off-key singing and C-grade rapping.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    About A Boy [Soundtrack]
    Every card Gough plays is painfully transparent from the first time you play the disc. It's elementary stuff. It sounds manufactured, refined, cosmetic and sterile; in a word, silicone, like a pair of Badly Sculpted Breast Implants.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Everything I Thought It Was
    Everything I Thought It Was brims with a misplaced confidence that can only be described as Timberlakean, laboring for such a long, long runtime under the misapprehension that a risk-averse mop bucket of last decade’s trending sounds is gonna hit through the sheer force of its performer’s waning charisma.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Yes
    Tennant slaps his heart on his sleeve and gets on with things. The result isn't awful, although none of it is as spooky and playful as the cover of the Passions 'I'm In Love With a German Film Star' that the Boys produced for Sam Taylor-Wood last year.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Shelter From The Ash
    Given the exploratory transience of Six Organs' catalogue, Shelter from the Ash feels too much like work, too much like what had to happen.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Complete Strangers
    After six albums, Cabic has yet to build a discernible and discrete identity for this band. It remains the ongoing also-ran from a loose freak-folk confederation that’s splintered in a dozen surprising ways.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Outer South
    Perhaps it's partly a factor of Oberst's essential attention-grabbing nature, but none of these gentlemen offers up a composition that snags the ear better than the most mundane effort from their fearless leader.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Take Back The Universe (And Give Me Yesterday)
    Really, if your parents don't dig this, there's something wrong with them. This is music for the drive to pick up the kids from soccer practice, or to the doctor for dad's yearly prostate exam.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Boys and Diamonds
    Boys and Diamonds bustles with African, Indian, and Caribbean rhythms, and boasts some genuinely interesting production in places. But the songwriting is ultimately too blocky and dull and slapped together for it to succeed as the thing it most wants to be-- a pop record.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    All I Need
    All I Need had the potential to be so much more than mediocre and forgettable.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    The Gathering
    On The Gathering, though, the sonic vista is flattened out, resulting in a dreary, grayscale trudge of an album.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    LotusFlow3r
    But when I say "neutral," unfortunately I mean pretty much exactly what you probably think I mean. The only track with an immediately memorable hook is his cover of 'Crimson and Clover.'
    • 70 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    The Infamous Mobb Deep
    Taken as a whole, the album is exactly the sort of hastily tossed-off, forgettable project that legacy acts will sometimes tack onto can't-miss releases such as this. It's a shame they did.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Zeitgeist
    Far more aggressive than any other record in their catalog - perhaps a preemptive response to charges of getting old and mellow. Unfortunately, that leaves the record rather homogenous.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Passerby
    The result is a strictly passerby album: one that is heard and then quickly forgotten.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    BAYTL
    It's a record that marks the time when the "Gucci Gucci" rapper's homegirl became notorious enough to do an album with Gucci Mane, and when Gucci Mane had fallen far enough to decide to go along with it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Tales From Terra Firma
    On their second album, Tales from Terra Firma, they continue to be almost crushingly dull, making well-appointed and cheerfully empty music that successfully communicates next to nothing.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Silence Is Easy
    Defiantly sappy, Silence Is Easy survives mostly on Walsh's oddly graceful singing. Unfortunately, the music on the whole is prosaic, even boring at times.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Konk
    Konk feels like a mere cowardly act, a TPS report from a band that strives to be nothing more than British pop's ultimate company men.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Until The Earth Begins To Part
    Much of Until the Earth comes off like the narrator from "Windowsill" still telling these damn kids to get off his lawn.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    The Fool
    Weaver’s benefitted greatly from the rising tide of artists who are challenging pop’s sonic and structural rules, but on The Fool she sounds like she’s lost at sea.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Sleepwalking
    Sleepwalking doesn't have a startling track like Northern Sulphuric's "Spellbound" to lift it out from the polite sludge of trip-hop mush.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Eat the Elephant
    But where their previous three albums translated that dynamic into emotionally-charged metal, Eat the Elephant assumes the form of a gloomy adult-alternative record flush with grand pianos, classical strings, and slackened tempos.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Matricidal Sons Of Bitches
    What puts listeners in a difficult spot is that, no matter how infuriating it gets, Matricidal Sons of Bitches is clearly the product of serious compositional intention; it's not an accidental mess.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Dig Out Your Soul
    for now we're stuck with Dig Out Your Soul, which like every Oasis album from 1997's "Be Here Now" onward, makes cursory gestures toward making the band's mod-rock more modernist, before reverting back to the same ol', same ol'.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    The Search for Everything
    It’s progress, probably, that Mayer keeps the condescension to a dull sneer, but this also makes everything sound that much more anodyne.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    A Hundred Million Suns
    A Hundred Million Suns is rife with the sense of a band striving to be taken more seriously, whether through rocking more manfully, displaying a more sophisticated subtlety, or simply stringing together three ponderous, already-overlong songs and calling the impenetrable result a 16-minute stand-alone epic.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Switzerland
    Unfortunately, the frontman's crazed growl dashes any nuanced developments the band has reached in their songwriting, maintaining a grating tone consistently throughout.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Disco and The Half Way To Discontent
    Most everything you'd expect from Cornershop pops up somewhere on Disco and the Halfway to Discontent. You get your guitars, sitars, and Singh's tasty subcontinental breakfast of a voice. But you also get slapped with a dosage of bad opium.... For the majority of its duration, Disco merely simmers when it should be sizzling.
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