The Independent (UK)'s Scores

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For 2,310 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Middle Of Nowhere
Lowest review score: 0 Donda
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,261 out of 2310
  2. Mixed: 1,019 out of 2310
  3. Negative: 30 out of 2310
2310 music reviews
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burst Apart
    With the striking falsetto of Peter Silberman dominating their songs, The Antlers may be America's equivalent of Wild Beasts.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Live at the Royal Albert Hall
    Adele's engaging ebullience is powerfully persuasive on this DVD/CD package.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan
    The interpretations range from the admirable to the abysmal.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Straight Hits!
    This music’s unhinged, pinballing molecules have a wild energy, here and there.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Music for Dogs
    [The hammered piano is] a slightly overdone element, but there’s much to enjoy here in the group’s disenchantment with the dubious benefits of email, blogs, search engines and telecoms.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    KEYS
    While there are high points – many of them, surprisingly, found in their Unlocked iteration – the album fails to leave an impression in the same way as the singer’s previous releases. You’ll like it, for sure. But you may not remember it.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Ghost of the Mountain
    It manages to grip the imagination for a while but ultimately, not knowing the root cause of the action, leaves one adrift in amorphous emotional distress. But there's much to admire here.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rare
    There is a lot to like about Rare. But it never quite gets out from beneath the shadow of half a decade of behemothic bangers.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    So Beautiful or So What
    Paul Simon's ruminations here on love, age and encroaching mortality have a valedictory flavour about them.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rare Birds
    In large part a break-up album, Rare Birds finds Wilson picking through the romantic embers and taking tentative steps forward, over arrangements reflecting both his recent position in Roger Waters’s touring band and his need for healing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magna Carta Holy Grail
    Jay-Z, being Jay-Z, spends most of the time banging on about how rich he is, how brilliant it is being married to Beyoncé, and how irritating it is that some people don't find him quite as wonderful as he does.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Record
    Her first album of new material in seven years finds Tracey Thorn in feisty form, bashing out “nine feminist bangers” with a relish reflected in the confident, striding electropop settings of tracks like “Queen” and “Air”.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Summer of '13
    Perversely set to chortling, bustling electropop synth figures, these songs present existence as “bounded by brackets of life and death, alone from first to last”, delivered in Middleton’s glum brogue, with only the most wafer-thin hints of humour tempering the onslaught of self-recrimination and hypochondria in a track like “Steps.”
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Why Are You OK?
    Why Are You OK finds dad-of-four Bridwell reflecting honestly on the ennui of everyday, surburban life. Unfortunately, the result is largely forgettable.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Now Now
    Unfortunately, outside of those songs [Humility, Hollywood, Tranz, Sorcererz, and Lake Zurich] (which would have made for an excellent EP) The Now Now falls short, the grit and grandiosity of other Gorillaz records is absent.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Duck
    No one will be celebrating Duck for breaking new ground, but long-term fans won’t much be complaining either.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    American Dream
    Too many tracks, however, suffer from a shortfall of melodic potency, and a lack of lateral development, especially in longer pieces such as the 12-minute sci-fi musings of “Black Screen” and the declamatory nine minutes of “How Do You Sleep?”.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    On My One
    Though not quite as potent as Shangri La, but it constitutes a confident negotiation of the “difficult third album” hurdle.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Apache
    His voice, which should be the focus, sounds muffled by effects. Neville’s fluting, melismatic vocal is much better served on the slow waltz hymnal “Heaven”, a persuasive reflection of his faith.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Childhood of a Leader [OST]
    Despite Andrews’ occasionally overwrought attempts to conjure up a mood of malevolent fate by channelling his inner Nick Cave, it’s an absorbing journey.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Nextwave Sessions [EP]
    The only failure is the routine indie chugger "Children of the Future".
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Keepin' the Horse Between Me and the Ground
    It’s the quiet weariness of “Shipwreck Love” that’s most effective, its minimal alliance of guitar and violin gently emphasising Steve’s promise to offer a safe harbour from the “hidden shoals, breaker of souls”.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Every Country's Sun
    Though rooted in familiar influences--“Crossing The Road Material” is like a more anchored Neu!, while “Old Poisons” is old-school psychedelia, with squealing organ and guitar swathed in drums--Mogwai apply subtle details that are unmistakably their own.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wood and Stone
    The narrow range of Nevins's voice limits its character somewhat, but is still compelling when combined with her mountain fiddle on a song such as "Wood and Stone", whose crisp swamp-funk country backbeat brings pep to its message of tradition and heritage.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Can't Touch Us Now
    Can’t Touch Us Now doesn’t have quite the exploratory breadth of Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da, but there’s enough variety to animate their tableaux of social portraits.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Perfect Contradiction
    It does seem as if Paloma’s sacrificed some individuality for some of that bankable overwrought wailing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Positions
    Despite never being freer as an artist, there is a safety to Positions that means it only occasionally takes off.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Alaska
    Pleasant and pleasingly melodic, but lacking the risky edge that makes a band truly great, The Silver Seas are like the living equivalent of a guilty pleasure.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Welcome 2 America
    For three tracks of low-slung ambient funk (the title track), lounge jazz (“Running Game [Son of a Slave Master]”) and tired orchestral soul (“Born 2 Die”), every low expectation of the funk-pop legend’s late-career cast-offs is lived down to. ... Then he rediscovers his imaginative peak-era verve and Welcome 2 America becomes an unexpected blast.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    God First
    For his debut as Mr Jukes, former Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman uses deftly-applied jazz samples, restoring his youthful interest in that genre after years in the indie salt-mines.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Joyride
    While Joyride has its shining points and attempts to remain true to a cohesive, moodier (albeit more mature) tone, it’s missing the strong, catchier elements that helped Tinashe rise in the first place. But there’s no reason to count her out just yet.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Gathering
    Arbouretum deal in an odd blend of folk and heavy rock, these seven tracks trudging along like a deep-sea diver traversing the sea bed in ten-league boots.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Colors
    All told, it’s pretty crowded territory, with too many jams.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Free Spirit
    A very credible record with no real mistakes--but no real personality, either.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everything's Getting Older
    Not a party album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away
    Iit’s sad to lose such a determinedly individual outsider talent, the vulgar bark of whose records, one suspects, was rather worse than his bite.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    We the Generation
    Rudimental’s follow-up to Home is not quite as impressive, though in fairness, most of the contributing vocalists lack the charismatic tone that John Newman brought to that debut album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Star-Crossed
    This record doesn’t find the often-brilliant Musgraves on her sharpest, Dolly Parton-est form. She delivers more platitudes than usual; her melodic shifts often lack their tangier twists. But the sadness and everydayness of her breakup does breathe slowly and honestly through the songs.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fever Dream
    There is no song on Fever Dream that is likely to eclipse, or even cast a shadow on the success of “Little Talks”, but this is a soothing, affable record nonetheless.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Invariable Heartache
    Wagner's hesitant delivery is poignantly underscored by Tidwell's more emotive phrasing, while the arrangements of neat picking and weeping fiddle are applied with customary understatement.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dark Black Makeup
    There’s plenty of talent there, but more homework is needed before they graduate to the bigger leagues.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tell the Devil I'm Gettin' There as Fast as I Can
    Grizzled Americana veteran Ray Wylie Hubbard cooks up a steamy stew of voodoo magick and rock’n’roll mythos on Tell The Devil I’m Gettin’ There As Fast As I Can, a title whose droll self-deprecation is reflected in the weary sprechstimme style with which Hubbard delivers his narratives, homages and sermons.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Told Them...
    Warmth rises consistently from I Told Them, with its easygoing mix of Afro pop, rap and R&B. You inhale it – soft, nourishing and moreish as if it’s steaming off freshly baked bread. There are moments of nutty chewiness, but mostly it’s stretches of pleasant, if airily bland, doughiness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Little French Songs
    It's Bruni's intimacy that's the album's most alluring aspect.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beauty Behind the Madness
    Beauty Behind the Madness leaves one feeling just as estranged from Abel Tesfaye’s depraved character as previous releases boasting less adhesive tunes.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    G I R L
    Like Random Access Memories, it’s an enjoyable dance-pop album lacking a central focus. But one whose diffident charm makes a pleasant change from the overwrought wailing that routinely afflicts R&B.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dirty Pictures, Pt. 1
    At their best, on the barroom piano rocker “Dirty Water”, there’s a brazen, Stones-y charm to the tart, offbeat guitar twitch and raunchy slide guitar; while societal decline is dealt a simple slap in the punchy rocker “Death & Destruction”.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Quiero Creedence
    Other highlights include Los Lobos’ typically confident swagger through “Bootleg”, and the unusual alliance of ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons with Colombian singer La Marisoul on a wonderfully gritty “Green River”.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    We Walk This Road
    [It] features sleek R&B versions of mostly traditional gospel and blues numbers, some bookended with fragments of the originals, alongside interesting covers of things like Dylan's "Shot of Love".
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Joanne
    To a certain extent it works, especially when Josh Homme’s on hand to lend gritty riffing and imaginative lead lines to some tracks: his spiky but fluid breaks on “A-Yo” and “John Wayne” are undoubted album highlights. Sadly, the bombastic orchestral stomper “Perfect Illusion”, a much-anticipated collaboration with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, is less impressive, just stridently dull.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    From a Room, Vol. 2
    While this partner set doesn’t have quite the sustained quality of the preceding album released six months ago, it still affirms the value of spiking country music with a strong shot of rhythm & blues.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lights from the Chemical Plant
    Despite his desire to move more towards pop on this third album, Robert Ellis can’t prevent his country roots showing through.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Low Highway
    It's Springsteen territory, occupied with pride in songs like “21st Century Blues” and the elegiac closer “Remember Me”.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Edgeland
    It's an album as hard to pin down as fog, but redeemed by moments of transcendent beauty.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Improvisations
    The results are often enjoyable and always interesting, with the 11-minute journey of “A3”, in particular, navigating an angular, monochromatic turmoil akin to an Arctic ice field.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Build Me Up from Bones
    With Build Me Up from Bones, Sarah Jarosz restores an earthy inventiveness to folk music--despite the violin and cello of her touring bandmates Alex Hargreaves and Nathaniel Smith tweaking the bluegrass settings with classical flavours that reflect the singer’s conservatory training
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not
    The results are quirkily, unexpectedly appealing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    And Then Like Lions
    Throughout, the band’s gorgeous harmonies temper the sombre mood.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    If You Want Loyalty Buy a Dog
    If You Want Loyalty Buy A Dog is a textbook Little Axe album, stuffed with dub-blues grooves that manage to be simultaneously soothing yet unsettling.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon)
    Pleasingly, it's all comically cosmic, as befits the host movie.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fragrant World
    A frustrating experience overall.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The RCA Albums Collection
    With the hindsight afforded by this monumental 17-disc career retrospective, he seems somewhat less than The One, an idiosyncratic talent undermined by MOR inclinations.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Brian Jonestown Massacre
    Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 18th album might not be breaking any ground, or sitars, but 15 years after Newcombe nearly destroyed himself, it’s good to hear him sound so self-assured.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Am Easy to Find
    I Am Easy to Find feels like an old friend you’re pleased to keep around--even if, had you been introduced today, you wonder if you’d have been compelled to make the effort.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    This is Me…Now
    She’s still in her prime, as you can tell when she delivers a knockout vocal on the guitar-backed ballad “Broken Like Me”. .... But for all her promises to show us the “real her”, it’s a struggle to see it in the slick and sexy production of tracks such as “Mad in Love” or “Rebound”.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Looking into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne
    Across two discs there are too many mediocre versions, most revering the polite preciosity of the original Laurel Canyon folk-rock settings.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    25
    There are isolated moments of musical intrigue scattered here and there through the album.... But as 25 continues, it’s gradually swamped by the kind of dreary piano ballads that are Adele’s fall-back position.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Madame X
    It is an intriguing, often brilliant, though occasionally awful record.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Coexist
    Deceptively uneasy listening at times, but worth the effort.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    - (Subtract)
    Lyrically, the album does fall short, but then Sheeran has spent over a decade trading in vague yet universal issues. ... For the most part, Subtract is testament to the old adage that less is, often, much more.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Little Sand Box [Box Set]
    In typical Gelb manner, it’s wide-ranging in styles and standards: he didn’t get this far by excessive quality control, so some parts have a loose feel, while firmer parameters prevail elsewhere.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Animal
    Between the piano-led dreamscape of “Red Snakes”, the shimmering electronica of “Bloom at Night” and the pop-leaning “We Cannot Resist”, Animal feels restless right up until its six-and-a-half-minute closer “Phantom Limb”, which concludes with Marling’s autotuned voice reading out the album’s credits.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lifted
    Nash is a maestro and, although less experimental than previous efforts, his cosmic almost dreampop Americana featured here provides proof that music comes in many sounds as well as names.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rockstar
    Rockstar is so long that it can feel like a bit of a slog.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Electronic Earth
    Ultimately, however, despite the fizzing electronic undercarriage applied to most tracks on Electronic Earth, Labrinth's real forte may turn out to be the more traditional, earthbound musical skills.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Eternal Sunshine
    While there’s a moreish quality to the off-key guitar of “Imperfect for You” and an unexpectedly golden flush of brass on “Ordinary Things”, Grande’s delicately conversational tone is often left having to compensate for her lack of strong melodic snags.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
    Not an easy listen, but a satisfying one.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Skins
    SKINS is another fiery blast of catharsis, a largely metaphor-free space where depression isn't hinted at poetically but invited to throw down. ... There are no songs as refined or showing such potential as ?'s “infinity (888)” and “Moonlight”, and many of them feel like half ideas.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett
    The Cautionary Tales... is wracked with recrimination, remorse and self-doubt. It can be bleak--the electric piano of “Lockdown Hurricane” seems a sound soaked in self-pity--but the intimate beauty of the strings and woodwinds sweetens the pill.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    1967: Sunshine Tomorrow
    Unlike their earlier tyro works, the simplicity is rarely matched by killer tunes on this album, which yokes together the first-ever stereo mix of Wild Honey with a tranche of outtakes and fragments, and an extra CD of efficient but uninspiring live performances.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silfra
    The duo have devised a series of fascinating improvisations.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Body Music
    The combination works best on the single Attracting Flies; less engaging is the descent to playground chanting on Best Be Believing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fujiya & Miyagi
    This album, drawing together their three recent EPs, also displays the diversity of Best’s lyrical interests, ranging from brain chemistry (“Serotonin Rushes”) to psychoanalysis (“Freudian Slips”) and, in “Impossible Objects Of Desire”, the enigmatic allure of records which defined so many lives.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Politics of Envy
    The splendid The Politics of Envy simply ratchets that process up a few notches.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Wild Swan
    It’s Vance’s sepia growl of a voice that grips most on The Wild Swan, bringing raw conviction especially to the opener “Noam Chomsky Is A Soft Revolution.”
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kicker [EP]
    It’s a return to form, but reveals an expected sense of maturity. Pryor and sometimes guitarist Jim Suptic split vocal duties on the EP.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The New Classic
    Though neither particularly new nor classic, Iggy Azalea’s debut album proper (following two self-released mixtapes) reveals enough smarts and skills to sustain the Aussie rapper’s momentum.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Synthetica
    Throughout Synthetica, an undertow of dystopian unease drags the music away from standard pop territory into darker areas.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 1 [EP]
    The EP opens with the lovely “Sweet Dew Lee”, a genial pop strummer in the manner of early Orange Juice, its buoyant melody evoking a hill climb to an urban vista as the protagonist daydreams of a parallel world in which he and his departed lover are still an item.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Robyn Hitchcock
    He remains a more psychedelic soul, as witness psych-rockers like “Mad Shelley’s Letterbox” and “Detective Mindhorn”. With a sort of repressed power anchoring its drive.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Nocturne Diaries
    Produced by her son Cisco Ryder, it’s a family album of elegant songs, well-framed in folk-rock settings.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Smile
    There’s nothing on this record to equal the giddy delight of Perry’s greatest hits. No fireworks to light up the dance floor, but enough to raise a smile.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Different Gear, Still Speeding
    Beady Eye may be just Oasis minus Noel, but this debut is rather better than the past few Oasis albums, if sadly no more innovative.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trails & Tribulations
    While Martin Simpson’s peerless fingerpicking is in full effect throughout Trails & Tribulations, what’s equally impressive is the way his arrangements reflect the material with empathic sensitivity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Obscurities
    Merritt's main problem may be that his baritone croon makes him sound cynical even when he's baring his heart, an impression only partly undercut by his occasional ukulele strum.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    London Fog 1966 [Live] [Box Set]
    As it is, these seven surviving tracks capture a group in transition from R&B covers outfit to something more significant.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Hope Six Demolition Project
    The tableaux of refugee camps, warzones and dereliction--an abandoned building littered with syringes and shit, a drug-riddled neighbourhood, a polluted river, “a displaced family eating a cold horse’s hoof”--builds grimly throughout, albeit to uncertain ends.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tape Deck Heart
    It's punk-folk pop with its heart on its sleeve and urgency overwhelming reflection, closer to Green Day than, say, Leonard Cohen.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black Rainbows
    While imparting a palpable sense of immediacy to the performances, there are some tracks that could do with more work.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Intoxicated Women
    The creepier explorations of infantile eroticism--the lollipop metaphor of “All Day Suckers”, the fairytale allusion of “Baby Teeth, Wolfy Teeth”--are voiced by Harvey himself, allowing guest singers like Jess Ribeiro and Sophia Brous to indulge the sweeter romanticism of songs such as “The Eyes To Cry” and “Prevert’s Song”, where Gainsbourg’s musing on the poet’s work prompts a moving reflection on transitory love.
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