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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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Toy
    Bookended by “Frau Tomium”, a bleep-tastic tribute to electronic pioneer Oskar Sala, Toy could have come from any time in Yello’s career, so resilient are their tropes.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Keep Me Singing
    There’s something of the warmth and fulfilment of Tupelo Honey about the album generally.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hard II Love
    Tracks like “No Limit” and “Need U”, with their miasmic, swirling synths and pulsing vibrato effects, epitomise modern boudoir-soul, as Usher slips effortlessly between warm caresses and pleading falsetto.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Remember Us to Life
    On Remember Us To Life, Regina Spektor exhibits stronger affinities with Randy Newman, thanks to a turn of phrase often leaning towards the ironic, and a deceptive worldview which, like the sardonic string arrangements and ominous piano settings, gives most of these songs a slightly sour sting in the tail.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Head Carrier
    Head Carrier is an altogether more convincing affair than 2014’s comeback album Indie Cindy, the intervening months of roadwork having helped relocate the band’s classic mode.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    22, A Million
    There’s an intensely private quality about 22, A Million that makes it initially hard to penetrate. ... But as the album progresses, it becomes more accommodating.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    American Band
    Thoughtful, engaging and utterly contemporary, it’s one of the albums of the year.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Atrocity Exhibition
    This fourth album is produced by south London’s Paul White, and a shared taste for Talking Heads and especially Joy Division (the LP is named after their song, more than JG Ballard’s novel) takes it way off the mainstream hip-hop map.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Do Not Disturb
    Hammill continues to explore the hubris of human existence. He’s often best, though, when he ventures off-track into more warmly specific tales.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    ArtScience
    The Experiment’s increasingly obvious fault, though, is how close they keep to the middle of their many musical roads.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ape In Pink Marble
    Bubbling synths and glistening ripples of acoustic guitar adorn these tales of elite bohemians.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Heads Up
    Songwriting points remain shrouded, and voices drowsy, but an understated fearlessness pears through the mist.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Away
    After bandmates quit and more heavy blows rained down, he retreated to a cabin, where these wonderful songs poured out. “Frontman In Heaven” is one of several which both mourn and resurrect the idiocies and potent faith of the rock’n’roll age.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chapter and Verse
    The most revelatory song of the now mature songwriter is, though, “My Father’s House”, from Nebraska (1982). There’s a sluggish, nightmare feel as Springsteen dreams of a bramble-tangled house in a haunted field, a home where he’s no longer known; a past he can’t return to. The merits of this rough, questionable compilation lie in such small revelations.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unseen
    There’s a pleasing congruence between the way that the surreal invades the ordinary in Rennie Sparks’s lyrics, and the way that Brett Sparks’ voice and music illuminates that invasion.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    FurFour
    Furfour finds the duo at their poppiest: even though they create songs from improvised sounds, there’s an engaging, hypnotic charm to tracks like “Milky Light” and “Heavy Days” that’s strongly reminiscent of Eno’s pop side.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Skeleton Tree
    The result is beautiful, visceral and, predictably, emotionally devastating.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Braver Than We Are
    Steinman’s sonic fingerprints are all over the album--the furiously arpeggiating piano riffs (one “borrowed” from Randy Newman), the brusque guitars, the Wagnerian pomp--though it is Loaf’s stagey delivery, with that juddering vibrato, which dominates songs.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016
    Despite the diversity of themes and styles, the sense of a confident single voice comes through much louder and clearer than before in this new context.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Schmilco
    Schmilco seems diffident and restrained, mostly built around the folk-rock strummings of Jeff Tweedy’s acoustic guitar, with minimal embellishments. But it’s exactly the right approach for the bitter, painfully personal songs he has written here, which address the living and the dead, the loving and the lost, and most of all Tweedy’s own furies and frustrations.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Here
    Six years on from the last Teenage Fanclub album, not much seems to have changed.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    AIM
    Some of the backing tracks have novelty appeal--the cartoonish, kazoo-like loop of “Bird Song”, the Qawwali elisions percolating through the Zayn Malik duet “Freedun”--but the most striking work here is her virtually acappella treatment of “Jump In”, with just a sparse beat beneath her rhythmic vocal repetitions.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Astronaut Meets Appleman
    Throughout, he creates an absorbing sound-bed from folk-rock grooves embellished with unexpected tones and texture.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Foreverland
    Six years on from the vivacious Bang Goes The Knighthood, Neil Hannon’s latest Divine Comedy outing seems to lack the bite which gives the best of his work its raffish frisson.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Trick
    One step forward, two steps backward: having produced perhaps his best album with 2014’s Carry On The Grudge, Jamie T is at best stationary, and often retrograde, on Trick.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Glory
    Although it marks no significant shift in style--she’s still mining the same pop-R&B seam--it’s undoubtedly a better effort than its predecessor.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hope
    As the album proceeds, the band’s strident Mumfordry becomes all too wearing, these songs patently designed more for festival singalong than introspective reflection.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    And the Anonymous Nobody
    [A] sparkling, multi-faceted comeback album.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blonde
    Less structured and song-oriented than Channel Orange, it’s a long, meandering ramble through Ocean’s passing interests and attitudes, hopes and memories, alighted upon like scenes briefly glimpsed from a train window and then dropped into tracks that aren’t so much sung as delivered in an undulating sprechstimme that seems to be avoiding the difficult choice of a compelling melody.
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