The Independent on Sunday (UK)'s Scores

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For 789 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 57% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 40% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 One Day I'm Going To Soar
Lowest review score: 20 Last Night on Earth
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 495 out of 789
  2. Mixed: 280 out of 789
  3. Negative: 14 out of 789
789 music reviews
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Disc-Overy
    Turn a deaf ear to the Cowell-connected producer Labrinth's uninspired Brit-hop beats and instead concentrate on the surely intentional comedy of Tinie's "I've got so many clothes I keep some of them in my aunt's house" and "I've been to Southampton but I've never been to Scunthorpe" (both from number-one single "Pass Out").
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rome
    With guests such as Jack White and a surprisingly bearable Norah Jones, Rome makes a fine fist of recreating the elegance of prime 1960s Euro-pop. All good, no bad, and never ugly.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Let Them Talk
    This is another acting job, in a sense, and Laurie's faux-Southern drawl grates a little, but he's assembled a band of N'awlins old hands to add authenticity.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darwin Deez
    Darwin Deez, a New York-based artist for whom the word "offbeat" seems to have been invented. Not that there are any in his music--all straight 4/4 and po-mo lyrics--but there are plenty of tunes, not a little charm and a fair old sense of humour.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Into the Murky Water
    It's charming enough, but it's as well mannered as a picnic with Cath Kidston accoutrements.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Colour of the Trap
    Too safe, too familiar...and was that really a power-ballad key change? Good guitarist when the songs allow it, though.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Smother
    The Cumbrian quartet haven't fumbled the ball with the follow-up. Smother, recorded in the shadow of Snowdonia, tinkles and twinkles like the classiest adult-alternative pop of the 1980s.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Everything's Getting Older
    As with some diseases, the album gets worse before it gets better, but by the end you're left stunned in admiration. Hell, there's even a redemptive arc. Amazing.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Light After Dark
    Her Lennox-meets-Tyler, or Welch-meets-Tunstall lungs boom out across a Heart FM-friendly pop-rock sound which sometimes attains a sweeping Stevie Nicks drama but often merely reaches Dido level.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Magnetic Man
    Tracks such as "Boiling Water" wouldn't sound out of place in a naff holiday resort. There are notable exceptions, though, such as "Fire" feat Ms Dynamite.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sophisticated Ladies
    The repertoire leaves room for instrumental chops from saxophonist Ernie Watts, while Haden's big bass fiddle thumps out the time with authority.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    James Farm
    It's good, but you want to hear them live.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Who Kill
    Catchy yet abrasive, noisy yet intimate, kind of funny yet also kind of scary, this is post-pop at its most vertiginously original.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2
    A welcome addition to the Beastie canon, and if it gets them back out on the road, it'll be an absolutely precious one.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Helplessness Blues
    Helpnessness Blues is, like its predecessor, archaic and pastoral to the last.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Walk the River
    WTR is a classy bit of radio-friendly Mercury-bait which highlights Dangerfield's development as a songwriter.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tha Funk Capital Of The World
    There are collaborations with Bobby Womack, Sheila E and George Clinton. All driven by the heavy funk bass of Collins. Which is never a bad thing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Remember Me
    Sadly, the Showgirls star is no Alicia Keys (who contributes three songs), and while she unquestionably has a voice, the material's nothing you'll want to remember.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hard Bargain
    It is stately, rather imperious music, conveying emotion through the deployment of technical effects rather than through the revelation of a voice.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mirrorwriting
    Woon's work is unashamedly bucolic (he writes songs about going for a walk) and beat-literate (he's worked with Burial), and his tremulous, medieval folk singer voice makes it perfectly bearable.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive
    As befits a novelist, the songs are narratives concerned with the big issues. Life, death, that sort of thing. Good record.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Generation Indigo
    Generation Indigo is a hugely enjoyable electro-pop album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The English Riviera
    Tracks such as "The Bay" have enough to get heads nodding, but if you hear this on a dancefloor, it'll be courtesy of a seriously hard-working remixer.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Best of 00 - 10
    The internationalist (Scouse-Chinese-Scottish-Bulgarian-Israeli) electro-rock quartet may not have presented a comprehensive summary of their career here, but it's a superb starting point for Ladytron latecomers.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Safari Disco Club
    The second Yelle album is essential for anyone who appreciates dancefloor-friendly European synth pop.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paper Airplane
    Fans of Raising Sand and O Brother...will find much to love. As – more surprising this – will fans of classic-era Fleetwood Mac.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here We Rest
    Isbell is an accomplished and serious songwriter and what keeps Here We Rest from being the stonker it so nearly is is not the writing but the slightness of his voice – and his band.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Fall
    Though there's no smash hit leaping out, with its consistent unity of atmosphere, The Fall is the most cohesive Gorillaz album yet.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Defamation Of Strickland Banks
    And whaddayaknow, this ugly duckling – out of a hoodie and into a tux – turns out to have a fine white soul voice and has followed a record you couldn't bear to hear more than once with a record you'll want to play over and over.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On a Mission
    Unless I'm going insane, On a Mission sounds like a modern pop classic.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alela Diane & Wild Divine
    The voice (Joni Mitchell meets Anna Calvi), is as tough and tender as before but the music now acts as a bouncy counterpoint to songs with lyrics such as "death is a hard act to follow", blurring the line between unsettling and uplifting nicely.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alexander
    There's a master at work here and if he finds his filter he'll no doubt lose some of that fairy dust.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wasting Light
    For all its faux-primitive origins, their seventh studio album is every bit as likely to ship platinum as the previous six.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Credo
    What matters is that the I Monster team have cooked up a production that matches our expectations of a League LP.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Euphoric Heartbreak
    A strange end to a strange album, whose mood, to invoke one of their earlier songs, is not so much "Fuck You, It's Over" as "fuck yeah, it's over!"
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blood Pressures
    Nonchalant no more, here they spike their sparse blues-print with humour and humanity, dub grooves and Southern gothic flavours.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    What Did You Expect from the Vaccines?
    Presumably not this unremittingly OK collection of hazy pop-rock singalongs paying anodyne homage to the Ramones, Jesus and Mary Chain and, er, Interpol.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hunger
    It's essentially 1980s indie jangle with hints of Afro-pop and Northern Soul, carrying echoes of Orange Juice.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hold on Tight
    It's actually a more interesting artifact than the Mitchell one. Having said that, it is also hobbled by a paucity of good songs and a slightly splashy production. Solomon rides the turbulence like a whale.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Who You Are
    It plays like a very conventional, early-90s pop record.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Femme Fatale
    Max Martin, Mr "Baby One More Time", has been roped in again along with scores of interchangeable Scandinavians to create an album of autotuned landfill chartpop which you will scour in vain for anything on a par with "Womanizer".
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What Makes Bob Holler
    It's all very gladsome, technically fine and will lift your day. But, as with all such heritaged musics, it won't make your day over. Pleasant though.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Horses and High Heels
    Her voice hangs inertly among racks of lustrous guitars like a worn shirt.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Go-Go Boots
    Either way, we get what we always get: the analogue rendition of a stick of Southern yarns, long on observation, short of syllable and rough as your old boots.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Angles
    Coming from a band who blatantly don't want to be a band any more, Angles is inevitably disjointed. But it's not disastrous.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last
    The fourth album from the award-winning strings-and-sisters folksters is a thing of shivery and spooky charms.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Gate
    Despite a version of Earth Wind & Fire's "After The Love Is Gone" that is so good you can play it for days, this dream-team collaboration between jazz singer Elling and big-time weirdo producer Don Was delivers less than it promises.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cornershop & the Double-O Groove Of
    Enchanting stuff.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bootleg, Vol. 2: From Memphis to Hollywood
    The most rewarding part of this double-disc is the first quarter. Not that the hissy old demos and rarities on the rest of the collection are without their charms. But it's the opening section which really whisks you back to another age.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dancing Backward in High Heels
    With new recruit Earl Slick on guitar they've made a third reunion album filled with ramshackle glam and girl-group trash, reverberating with street-corner romanticism and hard-won wisdom.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Majestic Silver Strings
    The results are fluent, tasteful, ghostly and more than a little wistful. Ideally served with morning coffee.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Last Night on Earth
    Even if it's a joke, it's a joke you don't wanna hear.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Live in Marciac
    There are times in this 100-plus minutes of a concert recording duplicated over two CDs and one DVD where you want to jog Mehldau's elbow, but overall it's a triumph of imagination and structure.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Palermo Snow
    Not really "folk" at all but a programme of music for solo guitar (and occasional clarinet) drawing on three centuries of complex harmony; or at least the harmony which appeals to the gruff old Pentangle picker.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Build a Rocket Boys!
    Commendably, the Bury band's fifth album doesn't see them chasing the mainstream or pandering to the ear of the daytime radio dilettante.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Collapse into Now
    R.E.M's 15th album could trade places with almost any of the previous 14.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Secret Sisters
    Just simple, old-fashioned talent and charm.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kmag Yoyo (& Other American Stories)
    In a crowd of loudish country and R&B guitars he tells brief stories of everyday lives with a correspondingly everyday voice, but with a kind of unslung abandonment that goes rather well with the guitars. It's very good.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Yuck
    For anyone who lived through grunge, this is mere nostalgia. Anyone who didn't is advised to go straight to the source.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Smart Flesh
    Set your sights high, by all means, but when each track sounds like an attempt to emulate a specific great (Bruce, Bob, Leonard, the Band etc) the confused listener can't help but be left thinking "Will the real Low Anthem please stand up?"
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blessed
    The songs are mostly shaped in her traditional chord-to-chord method, their melodies looping behind the tempo of the guitars and, for once, in a spirit of uplift.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Different Gear, Still Speeding
    Oasis minus the organ-grinder needn't be an entirely horrific prospect.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under
    It's touching, witty, and like everything else the Bostonian ever does, brilliant.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    100 Lovers
    It's still a cut above most epic global-influenced rock.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Time for Dreaming
    Bradley, a 62-year-old ex-plumber and James Brown impersonator, has a raspy, infinitely pained voice but there doesn't appear to be any real interaction between him and the band.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Songs From a Zulu Farm
    Pervaded by children's laughter, this is a lovely departure from the Mambazo norm, as befits the quest it reflects.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Invariable Heartache
    While Wagner's voice is not always up to it, Tidwell's authentic country pipes are the real revelation here.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    City of Refuge
    It's a little too polished for the Oh Brother... crowd, but fans of Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss should take note.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ashore
    There is in these performances a slightly mannered theatricalism which you will need to reconcile with any desire you may harbour for either simple affect or no affect at all.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The King of Limbs
    The King Of Limbs, named after a famous oak in the Savernake forest near the studio where In Rainbows was made, is good but not great.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    En Form For Bla
    This is meditative, spacious, profoundly dark music, evidently haunted by Miles Davis's early-1970s excursions into free electronica, as well as the wolves of the Nordic imagination.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell
    It's coated in a layer of pseudo-authenticity, but ultimately it's a record which aims for Bo Diddley or Johnny Cash and merely attains Dire Straits.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Broken Wave
    It borders on the twee. That it doesn't cross the frontier is the reason this is worth your attention.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Excerpts
    Desperately, painfully arty but worthy of your recollection.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hotel Shampoo
    Subjects resulting from such reveries include imperialism, the environment and the more familiar home turf of love and longing. Nobody does it better.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The People's Key
    Conor Oberst has always been an artist to inspire, irritate and frustrate, and on what he says will be the final BE album he does these things in equal measure.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dynamite Steps
    The sound is a return to the Whigs' finest and the mood is whiskey, cigarettes and damnation.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let England Shake
    It's an album about what war does to the aggressor, as much as what it does to the vanquished victim.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bird Songs
    Parker's music is approached from a post-Coltrane, post-free jazz aesthetic, with the rhythmic edginess of bebop elided into an all-the-time-in-the-world fluidity. A masterpiece.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blue Songs
    If H&LA's 2008 debut was an ideal accompaniment to the clubland chaos, then Blue Songs is the gentlest of comedowns.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Violet Cries
    Throughout the exquisitely mournful Violet Cries, Rachel Davies issues Cassandra-like predictions of woe and mayhem, while Thomas Fisher's filigree guitars shimmer like sunset on a lake.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    James Blake
    Built for repeat listening, this will keep on giving. Don't you just hate it when the hype is right?
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bella
    The soundtrack to Jennifer Aniston. Nice. Attractive. Hygienic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rolling Blackouts
    Right at the end of what is officially the most depressing month of the year comes a shaft of unadulterated sunshine.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    21
    There's no "Chasing Pavements"-style killer, but she has murdered the Cure's "Lovesong" using Heart FM-friendly jazz-lite as her weapon.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Party Ain't Over
    In the main, she remains stylistically faithful to the originals.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kiss Each Other Clean
    Here, Beam adds funky Stevie Wonder synths to the mix. And marimba. Lots of marimba.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The King Is Dead
    It's lovely to fall asleep to. Which is a compliment, not a complaint.
    • The Independent on Sunday (UK)
      • Posted Jan 18, 2011
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