Pitchfork's Scores

  • Music
Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Dangerous Dreams
    Dangerous Dreams is plagued by a pervasive feeling of been there/done that, and the album ultimately sounds like the same two or three tracks on repeat.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 57 Critic Score
    Weezer [Black Album]
    There’s no emotional throughline on The Black Album, no grand statement that continues from one track to the next. The songs never blur together, but they also don’t tell a story as the sum of their parts. A sense of tonal whiplash ensues, and the album’s highlights are best enjoyed in isolation.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 16 Critic Score
    Anthem of the Peaceful Army
    What they lack in self-awareness they more than make up for in rigid self-consciousness, failing to make any fun or campy choices to lift these songs out of a morass of the worst impulses of Rush and Cream. The back half of the album alternates between the ignorable and unforgivable.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 48 Critic Score
    Witness
    With Witness’ confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness, broad strokes are the really the best Perry can hope for these days.
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Reincarnated
    Too much of it is an ill-advised cultural safari that’s too weird to fly but too monied to fail. But where it succeeds, Reincarnated forces you to forget the principal ridiculousness of the enterprise, and that is no small feat.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Business Casual
    Business Casual is fierce and competent, and evinces the rippling of powerful musical muscles. But its affectations are so grating that it's tough to make it through it all in a single listen.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Faith
    Beyond stripping Pop of his personality, the most offensively bad [tracks] on Faith are the ones that have no shame in hiding their financial intentions.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 46 Critic Score
    Palookaville
    Slim still loves blabbing repetition and dropping yapping vocal samples into the gobs of the dull, and this helps make Palookaville less a reformation than merely his latest and quite bland big beat manifesto.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Super Animal Brothers III
    Where Deacon infuses his day-glo riots with brainy intent, EAR PWR recycle the worst tendencies of electroclash: the lackluster rapping and willful inanity. It's frustrating because there's ample evidence that EAR PWR aren't compensating for being shitty at music, they're just dumbing down.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Japanese Motors
    The debut's boring, not awful, but until the band stops sounding like they have a hundred cooler things to do than be in a studio, it's hard to imagine them as anything more than surf muzak.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Donda
    Kanye’s tenth album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    For All The Dogs
    For All the Dogs caps off a recent persona that sounds like none of it’s fun to him—and he’s dragging us along to be the company of his misery.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 48 Critic Score
    Walls
    Try as he may, Tomlinson has not quite progressed from featured voice to solo artist. For all the major changes in his life, his music seems to be stuck in place. You can take the boy out of the boyband, but not the boyband out of the boy.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Matinee
    Listening to Matinée straight through is exhausting, like being trapped in the kitchen at a college party while someone with curiously wide eyes Explains It All to you.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 39 Critic Score
    Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned
    Outgunned is a mess of unfocused energy and uncomfortably irrelevant sonics, an odd mix of cartoonish immediacy and tired youth-cult ideas that would be the perfect soundtrack to Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie: The Movie.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    120 Days, Vol. 2
    The machines on 120 Days II are so holographically vivid that the human element can't help but seem wan.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 49 Critic Score
    Animal Ambition: An Untamed Desire to Win
    It’s pointedly brief--11 songs, 39 minutes and with a scope every bit as limited.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Battle Lines
    For all that the band straddles the worlds of dance and guitars, the arrangements on Battle Lines are incredibly tame, as if the duo mistakenly joined the blandest of electronics with the politest of indie rock.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 46 Critic Score
    Bring on the Comets
    It was a mistake for VHS or Beta to subjugate their dance beat into a perfunctory structure for the guitars to smash against; the riffs sound like they're there for their own sake, biding their time and waiting for a moment of catchiness that never really arrives.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 28 Critic Score
    Universal Mind Control
    Universal Mind Control is a painful misstep from a talented rapper who's decided to be as nasty as he wants to be--which turns out to be much, much nastier than we'd like.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 37 Critic Score
    Boomslang
    Positively pillaging Oasis and The Stone Roses (whom Oasis pillaged in the first place), Johnny Marr + The Healers' mediocre debut is a defeated regurgitation of danceable Britpop and Madchester traditions that, in its best moments, recalls a second-rate... Soup Dragons.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 15 Critic Score
    Codename: Rondo
    Codename: Rondo sounds like two people doing the least amount of work possible before something can be considered a "song."
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    POP ETC
    Is the band's self-titled album under the new moniker a brave change-up? Sure. Is it any good? Not even a little.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wake Up!
    Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. It’s like you drank a bunch of cough syrup and went to Live Aid: The Vatican.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 46 Critic Score
    Bad Habits
    At its best, its songs are serviceable bangers to nod off in the club to; at its worst, it’s a collection of strange admissions that, thanks to Nav’s affinity for taking himself too seriously, come off cringe-worthy.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 61 Critic Score
    Nuthin' 2 Prove
    [“Everything Good, Everything Right” is] a high point on an otherwise confused album that knows what it’s good at and what it’s not, and yet still chugs on anyway.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 4 Critic Score
    Make Believe
    Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 52 Critic Score
    Mother Of Curses
    Crafting art-house meanderings that rock turns out to be the easy part. It's sticking the landing that's hard, and no matter how much D. Rider twists, turns and tumbles in midair, they're just not there yet.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Keys To The World
    Swept up in maudlin strings and chintzy brass, Ashcroft blurs his anguished syllables like Tom Petty doing Bob Dylan, embraces U2-jerkoff bombast, and follows his idiosyncratically generic muse into uncharted depths. Keys to the World is as hilariously indulgent as "Trapped in the Closet", if vastly less self-aware; it's also a more laughable satire of contemporary music than Bang Bang Rock 'n' Roll, though less durable and totally accidental.
Page: