Pitchfork's Scores

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For 12,703 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: 10,440 out of 12703
  2. Mixed: 1,949 out of 12703
  3. Negative: 314 out of 12703
12703 music reviews
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    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rocket Power
    Listening to him navigate those raw emotions while staying the diamond-encrusted course makes for some of his messiest and most mature music yet.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Echo the Diamond
    For anyone who enjoys a thoughtful singer-songwriter record with adept, minimalist instrumental backing and a powerhouse vocalist, Echo the Diamond is a worthy listen.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Haunted Mountain
    Haunted Mountain is his fullest and most structured album. He and his band amble through these songs with… well, not more purpose or focus, which are anathema to getting lost. But listen to the coda of “Didn’t Know You Then,” which stretches out before losing its way.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    World Music Radio
    Barring a few notable exceptions, World Music Radio is so beholden to its premise—so enfeebled by Batiste’s insistence on universality—that it offers up few opportunities to get to know Batiste himself: his stories, his struggles, his euphoric victories and devastating losses. That absence leaves the record feeling hollow, like a pretty house where no one lives.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Live in Brooklyn 2011
    Where career-spanning setlists from most veteran bands will inevitably succumb to wild variances in tone if not quality, Live in Brooklyn 2011 dissolves three decades into a holistic 17-track noise opera that enshrines Sonic Youth’s greatest attributes and contradictions.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    You're the One
    She’s often ventured from the shores of American folk to touch the waters of blues, soul, and gospel, but this time the shifting itself seems to be the point as Giddens stretches her reach further. Even so, You’re the One never coalesces with the clear vision or poignancy of her previous work.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Chrome Dreams
    Chrome Dreams carries a dream logic that's bewitching in a way the individual moments simply aren’t, a testament to how a good album sequence can almost be a magic trick.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Deliverance
    Deliverance might work best as something else entirely, perhaps as a beat tape filled with reference vocals for the sort of stadium-status UK indie stars that know how to squeeze the maximum amount of drama out of the minimum amount of wordplay.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons
    Even as life interferes, you can imagine the album as a flight of whiskey: subtle variations on one recipe, pure fun to consume, liable to intensify one’s desire to punch cops. Very occasionally, the production is countryfied to achieve a spaghetti western vibe, or larded with Halloween pedal effects.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Connection
    Connection is the first time that Ceramic Dog has made dissent sound like just a collection of recordings, instead of a prickly, teeming world of its own.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You
    Oldham long sounded like he had wisdom to share, and he sometimes did. Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You overflows with it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Sundial
    The one slight drag of Sundial: In contrast to Noname constantly barring out, her hooks sound a little weak, as on “Hold Me Down,” where her plain melodies are backed by the type of full-throated choir that sounded better on Chance’s Coloring Book. The features, however, are explosive.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    End of World
    End of World is hellishly inconsistent, its mid section adrift in ’80s funk-rock sheen, like INXS being harassed by an angry wasp. But when it works, End of World, more than any other recent PiL album, offers the winning combination of instrumental oddity and vocal drama.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Eyeroll
    On Eyeroll, Ziúr crafts warmer yet more extreme textures, responding to the composed poems and vocal improvisations of a handful of guests. Ziúr’s collaborators are a fierce and versatile cohort.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Central City
    Central City is a distillation of Freedia’s pump-up talents and endless charm.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    Ooh Rap I Ya
    Ooh Rap I Ya plays it entirely too safe, feeling less like a biting subversion of nostalgia than a straight-up “remember when.” This could have been saved by meatier hooks, a more realized emotional arc, or production choices that didn’t feel as if they were well and fully covered by Neon Indian and Washed Out over a decade ago.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    They Live in My Head
    If They Live in My Head lacks the woozy danceability of vintage Tetras, it doesn’t skimp on the political bite.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    New Reality Mind
    When, on “The Same Again,” she sings, “Move slow when you speak, so you really get to say what you’re meaning,” sounding as if her face is scrunched into a grimace, she turns a fairly oblique phrase into a razor-sharp barb. These moments, although far between, suggest that A New Reality Mind could have been a more dynamic record if it had zeroed in on Kenney’s intentional, suggestive performances.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Alchemy
    For the first time in a while, it sounds like they’re listening to what’s happening in clubland and asking themselves not what they can poach for the charts, but what they can bring to the table.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Soft Landing
    The complexity of the music helps to make up for the comparatively placid lyrics, but Mackey’s writing is most interesting when she zooms in on domestic bliss.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Prestige
    “True Love,” “Up,” “Everybody’s Saying That,” and “Love Is Enough” bob to the same Chic formula: skanking guitar, twangy bass, canned strings. It’s a solid formula, but the textural sameness makes more idiosyncratic tracks like “Give Me Your Love” stand out.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hands That Bind [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    Jim O’Rourke’s soundtrack is perfectly calibrated to this unforgiving space squashed between parched fields and blown-out sky. His palette—detuned piano, watery vibraphone, and a muted, amorphous shimmer that might be harmonium or synthesizer—matches the film’s dusty tones of beige and pewter and mobile-home brown.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 59 Critic Score
    Natural Disaster
    Cosentino sounds strongest when she gives herself permission to veer from her influences and find her own voice.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Euphoric
    Georgia’s willingness to experiment is promising, but it’s unfortunate that Euphoric takes such a predominantly safe journey. As on Seeking Thrills, some songs also succumb to vague lyrics that resemble placeholders.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 [EP]
    It’s tempting to speculate that there are more versions like that out there, just waiting to be discovered. Blackbox Life Recorder, the EP, might seem relatively modest, but the black box that is Aphex Twin’s extended universe remains delightfully unfathomable.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    The Loveliest Time
    The Loveliest Time is a solid counterpart to its sister album, trading quiet, introspective power for brassy, headlong joy.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 92 Critic Score
    Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy
    Coltrane reaches at once into the future and the place where music began. He touches the primeval and follows along with the changes.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    Austin
    For some reason—fear of boring his fans, obedience to the preferences of the streaming services, a career focused on club bangers—Malone won’t let these songs breathe. The result is an album that’s overstuffed and undercooked.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Love Hallucination
    Constantly varied yet consistent to her core sound, Love Hallucination is Lanza’s most fleshed-out album to date. She simply sounds more comfortable luxuriating in it all.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Joni Mitchell at Newport [Live]
    Mitchell’s voice is gorgeous and rich throughout, a piece of high-pile cotton velvet warmed in the daylight. She renders “Both Sides Now” with the wisdom of survival, the “up and down” having still somehow delivered her here. But too often, her patient approach is swallowed by the tide of well-intentioned boosters, associates who make Mitchell feel like little more than an honorary guest at her own party.
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