Pitchfork's Scores

  • Music
Select another publication »
For 12,704 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: 10,441 out of 12704
  2. Mixed: 1,949 out of 12704
  3. Negative: 314 out of 12704
12704 music reviews
view
per page
    • 78 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Emperor of Sand
    Without fail, whenever a song on Emperor of Sand feels like it’s about to go overboard on the polish, the band takes it in a more jagged direction. Conversely, whenever a song runs close to rehashing Mastodon’s familiar bag of tricks, the band steps up its tastefulness and songcraft. The timing is so uncanny that you might not even notice.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    In the Same Room
    In the Same Room is spacious and restrained, at times offering concentrates of the songs’ emotive fundamentals. It’s also further occasion for Holter to sharpen material or else mine it for new meaning.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    Let the Dancers Inherit the Party
    As if to stabilize its weighty subject matter, Let the Dancers Inherit the Party is a remarkably steady album, at times to a fault.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Build Music
    The album straddles a line between being thin and casual, at times pulling back the curtain on the finished product to show Nabay chatting, humming, and tapping out the building blocks of the songs to his bandmates.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Sorcerer
    For the most part, Sorcerer succeeds, moving their sound forward while maintaining their penchant for detours.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    You Only Live 2wice
    Throughout the album, he’s haunted by both the things that have and haven’t happened to him, what he has and hasn’t done, ruminating over a tight 32 minutes across eight tracks that feel haunted even at their hardest.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    A Hairshirt Of Purpose
    Pile could have remained in their amorphous realm of rock, but they needed to grow up. Here, as musicians, they did.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    Undertow
    Undertow finds Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, shoehorning their concrète-tinged racket to more conventional melodic paradigms. They’ve mostly done away with the bluesy flirtations this time around, instead applying a wrecking ball to the spacious, lush frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    All the Way
    Galás’ sense of dynamics is all the more moving when you sort of know how the song’s supposed to go.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Strike a Match
    Sacred Paws have arrived, on the back of a troubled groove: a little preoccupied, maybe, but ready to dance.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    The Ride
    She tears into every song with indomitable energy, and usually has production to match. Though it doesn’t quite mesh with the ballad, the twitchy percussion of “Carnival Games” at least livens things up.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Contact
    The music hammers with industrial heft, vibrates with nervous pulse, and envelops with tactile atmosphere. Even when her songs achieve moments of transcendence, they still strike you directly in the gut.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Silver Eye
    If nothing here quite reaches knockout-blow strength, fine--it doesn’t really need to. Goldfrapp have found their platonic ideal, and that’s ideal indeed.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Star Stuff
    Even in its most indulgent turns, Star Stuff serves its purpose: After making an overly disciplined live album for zero spectators, it’s refreshing to hear Bundick really jam like no one’s looking.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Number 1 Angel [Mixtape]
    Number 1 Angel is best at its most vulnerable. ... The other novelty of Number 1 Angel and Charli’s past work is that it showcases, and is largely stolen by, a lot of guests.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kelly Lee Owens
    Whatever actual healing powers she may be channeling probably depends upon the patient; nevertheless, Kelly Lee Owens presents an artist with an unusually focused vision of what music is capable of.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Feel Infinite
    Feel Infinite is warm and inviting, a taut mix of R&B love songs to finding your true self on the floor.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Courtneys II
    The songs are viscerally anguished, but they don’t wallow. There’s an essential, breezy levity to the music; the parts require one another. The whole of II moves forward and on.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams
    He runs into trouble when he loses the self-awareness of it all. ... Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams finds its true comfort zone when it is simply sweet.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Room 29
    A few tracks are infectious enough to merit standalone listens.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Heartless
    Bringing it live is still crucial to metal success, and on that front they are ready to ascend to the next level. That doesn’t translate on Heartless, where too much space is squandered.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Crow Looked at Me
    So simple, so tactile, so deceptively real are these songs. Their cumulative effect is that they become wobbly with metaphor, forcing the listener into the kind of magical thinking that transforms everything in the living world into a sign of the dead, only to snap back into a reality that for better and worse means nothing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Concrete Desert
    It’s neo-neo-noir music that draws you into its discomfort. If its vast expanses leave listeners vulnerable, at least there’s more space to let yourself roam.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    Watercolor
    While the productions are animated and spacious, creating openings for his jam-packed phrases, the sound doesn’t take the full step forward that would help spotlight and redefine Seattle rap.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You're Not As _____ As You Think
    It’s the kind of record that would be called “triumphant” if Boucher was in a position to enjoy any of it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    We All Want the Same Things
    While the best moments of his previous two solo albums felt like little more than stripped-back versions of solid Hold Steady songs, We All Want the Same Things is more subtle and strange.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    The Night Land
    On “Loser’s Hymn” and the closing “Dins El Llit,” they keep the pace brisk but downplay the drums, and the results, a kind of dance music with its head in the clouds, are both invigorating and meditative--like the album itself.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    More Life [Mixtape]
    The more voices he lets into the frame, the fuller and richer the results, and More Life bursts with energy and lush sounds--more guests, more genres, more producers, more life. It is as confident, relaxed, and appealing as he’s sounded in a couple of years.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Find Me Finding You
    Amid Find Me’s otherwise downcast worldview, “Love Captive” lets in some light.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    In Mind
    Unlike the effortless Atlas, In Mind exposes a trace of tension between form and content. For all Courtney’s synchronicity with his home environment, he sometimes sounds like he’s spinning his wheels rather than exploring the new contours of the recalibrated band.
Page: