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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    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Prism
    Self-help and sauce remain the remit, which might have been less tiring if “Roar”, “Walking on Air” and “This Moment” offered forms fresher than, respectively, the robo-stutter of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”, weary Italo-house pianos and strenuous stadium bluster to enliven their empowerment-speak.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    X
    Charmless kiss-offs (“Don’t”) and sappy sentiments (“People Fall in Love in Mysterious Ways”) dominate otherwise, landing with the thud of the authentically uninspiring.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Talk That Talk
    As off-the-peg as Primark, the Rihan-droid returns with more dancefloor fodder which has all the right bleeps in all the right places, but nothing to make you go "wow".
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Someone To Watch over Me
    Boyle's versions are professionally executed but phenomenally dreary.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ways To Forget
    Every intro twinkles and every chorus swells effectively enough. But if indie carries on like this, we're gonna need a bigger landfill.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Joyful Noise
    Ditto & co ... appear to have disastrously lost their fire. Only "Love in a Foreign Place" shows the sort of strutting disco beast they are capable of. It's too little. But not, one still hopes, too late.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ashes and Roses
    Sadly for the listener, this is mostly a collection of one-paced songs more heartbroken than heartbreaking.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Roses
    An album which merely proves that the Cranberries haven't lost their knack of saying nothing in a grating way.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Turn in the Dream-Songs
    When he shuts up, and lets the shambling jangle and daydreamy exotica take over, it's great. When he sings, it's murder.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Battle Born
    This is a production in search of an album, a massive empty shell, a big expensive nothing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Some Nights
    This quickly becomes the stuff of a thousand, middling US soft-rockers and when they're not whining like Maroon 5, they're whining like Blink-182.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Female Boss
    Like most pop albums, it's front-loaded. The banging club tunes, like the chart-topping "Young" are at the start, then it slumps into a series of obligatory ballads on which her unremarkable voice is somewhat stretched.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Strangeland
    Strangeland is drenched in reverb-heavy piano, Chicken Soup for the Soul maxims and moderately maudlin musings about not being young any more.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Since I Saw You Last
    [Since I Saw You Last] falls below Barlow’s best--“Patience”, “Rule the World”--at just the point when he needed to up his game.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Magpie and the Dandelion
    There are too many plodding ballads, sentimental on the piano and heavy on the cymbals.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    No End
    Mostly No End sounds like pretty much anyone noodling about in their shed.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Belly of the Brazen Bull
    Everything's turned up to 11 but content is absolute zero. If the Cribs were any more landfill, they'd have seagulls following them around.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Devil You Know
    The results have a tendency to make you look at the ceiling.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sun
    Sun is an album of polished electronic pop that mostly struggles to distinguish itself from the current slew of female singers.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kiss
    The rest of Kiss is like opening a tweenager's diary (titles include "Tonight I'm Getting Over You") and setting it to synthy, house beats, but nothing has the crossover appeal of that debut single.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fallen Empires
    It's an hour of radio-friendly pop-rock in a Deacon Blue meets pre-ironic U2 vein, all over-reverbed vocals and mildly modish electronics.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Circuital
    The sixth album by these Kentucky alt-country types sees them risk destroying forever the aura of existential gravitas they've accrued with the previous five.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Re: ECM
    Apart from a lovely snare-drum loop on "Recat" (annoyingly, all the tracks are called Re-something or other), this is barely even a head-nodding experience.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Opposites
    Most of disc one consists of ponderous, blustering nonsense, with a black chandelier used as a metaphor for depression. Disc two shows more promise.
    • 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".
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Sticks + Stones
    All Syco needed to do was reprise her staggering first TV audition. Astonishingly, they've dropped the ball.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Connection
    It's nice that Shaddix is still alive, but Papa Roach remain irretrievably atrocious.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    American Soul
    Tthey run the gamut from cheesy to cheesier with Hucknall managing to make every song sound impressively dated.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Blurred Lines
    Nothing to see here.
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