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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Voyager
    The duet between Miss Kittin’s android vocal and a machine voice on the engagingly dystopian “Hans Is Driving” seems devoid of contact, a sad lament from a world bereft of humans. But it’s Arbez-Nicolas’s magpie ways that leaves a bad taste.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Changes
    This isn’t so much an album that would rile you to the point of turning it off. Rather, it washes over you, with its mostly average beats (“Forever” is a rare exception) and seemingly random cluster of guest features.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mature Themes
    The results are simply irritating, in so many ways.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Elysium
    Elysium is bookended by two of the best songs the Pet Shop Boys have written in years, but flags badly in between.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Laughing Apple
    Most of the album’s tracks also date from an earlier era, four of them retreads of songs originally recorded for his 1967 flop album New Masters. Sadly, they haven’t matured well.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Killer Sounds
    Beneath the bluster it's pretty dull fare, the brittle rock-funk beats and brusque guitar riffs carrying songs that pay eager lip-service to energy and activity but actually offer a series of fairly empty experiences.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Up All Night
    Debut album Up All Night consists of 15 installments of inoffensive daytime radio pop.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Afterglow
    Musically it’s pleasant enough, with string and wind flourishes either emboldening or offering solace from the folk-rock arrangements; but it’s all a bit samey, and after a while, rather dull.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Music From Another Dimension!
    It's all sounding terribly tired now.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Carpenter
    Save for the opening "The Once and Future Carpenter", about a woodworker who abandons his trade to wander, this second album is pretty dismal fare.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crab Day
    She lacks rhythmic ingenuity: most tracks just stump along in unaccented 4/4, the spiky riffs cycling dully over and over.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
    Saturday Night, Sunday Morning is a cohesive enough follow-up, but Bugg still seems conflicted about the sound that first propelled him into the spotlight. ... It rankles when this album was put together by a team best known for the music he claims to despise.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Fall
    As you'd expect, it relies heavily on programmed beats of spare simplicity, and layered dubstep synth riffs over which Albarn sketches his impressions of life on the road.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Short History of Decay
    Ultimately these fixings lack the transformative quality to transmute depression into art.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Trans-Love Energies
    Seven years on from Satan's Circus, Death in Vegas' prime mover Richard Fearless doesn't seem to have moved on at all.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Adult Fear
    There’s much to be said for music as a private, sublime refuge, but Holy Wave rarely hit those heights. They evoke only the mild, gauzy dislocation of dawdling in the midday sun.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crooked Calypso
    Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbott’s third album as a duo is disappointing, with Heaton’s lack of musical intrigue leaving some of his poorest songs badly exposed.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Dog on a Chain
    I Am Not a Dog has its moments, but they are brief and virtually lost amid the more experimental forays.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    MGMT
    Another dilettante excursion with little to recommend it. [The Independent scored this a 2/5 in the actual printed edition not 5/5 as seen on its online edition]
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Is This the Life We Really Want?
    He just sounds like a grumpy geriatric for whom age has brought little of the reflective wisdom of Leonard Cohen.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    24-7 Rockstar Shit
    24/7 Rock Star Shit has to be one of the all-time great rock’n’roll titles; but sadly, lurking behind it is an album which struggles to fulfil such vagabond promise. Rather, it seems terminally enervated: most of these songs have a shrugging, slovenly manner.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Centipede Hz
    While there's some interesting moments to be found here, for the most part Centipede Hz is a fatiguing experience.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    LP1
    It’s all fine: shiny and efficient pop, smelling of body oil and new car upholstery. But Payne treats each track like a rental car. He gives each song a spin and hands the keys back like a good lad without leaving a trace.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dirty Projectors
    David Longstreth’s account of his separation from former bandmate Amber Coffman told through a welter of autotuned, over-treated vocals and jumble of clashing sounds that, to be generous, may be intended as an analogue of the ground shifting beneath their disintegrating relationship.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    143
    The sense of fun that propelled Perry to international stardom has been replaced by a weariness (or perhaps wariness) of the industry she once dominated.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bangerz
    It's full of timid electropop anthems.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    That's Why God Made the Radio
    [TWGMTR] is pitifully thin stuff, with far too many nostalgic hankerings.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Scenic Drive (The Tape)
    If Scenic Drive sets out to be an easy-listening accompaniment to a late-night ride, it’s successful. But if you’re looking for something with more clarity and oomph, your car horn may be the better option.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kiss Land
    This debut album proper fails to develop or change-up his formula of predatory sexuality expressed in tremulous tones.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Low in High School
    For while there’s no denying that Low In High School is more musically exploratory than usual, drawing from glam rock, electropop, tango and Tropicalismo, the singer himself has rarely exhibited such a grating combination of spite and self-pity. ... The album’s lengthy centrepiece “I Bury The Living”, an odious slab of trundling guitar bombast, lambasts as “just honour-mad cannon-fodder” the work of soldiers whom he presumes are too stupid to understand the wars they’re involved in.
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