Village Voice (Consumer Guide)'s Scores

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For 223 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 73% higher than the average critic
  • 0% same as the average critic
  • 27% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 9.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 82
Highest review score: 100 Pick A Bigger Weapon
Lowest review score: 16 A Day Without Rain
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 184 out of 223
  2. Mixed: 37 out of 223
  3. Negative: 2 out of 223
223 music reviews
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Selling Live Water
    Certainly he understands things about this society that his better-adjusted contemporaries don't. But he's woefully short on not just empathy but humorous self-deprecation.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dying In Stereo
    Their beats beat Stetsasonic's.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    On
    Pop isn't an ambition for these smart people with other things to do, it's a discipline--the tunes strong, the beats solid, the vocals lightly yearning and pungently sweet.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Sonic Nurse
    This unusually songful set is well up among their late good ones, its dissonances a lingua franca deployed less atmospherically than has been their recent practice.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Celebration Castle
    Their second album isn't quite as good as their first album because its hooks are slightly less inescapable.... But the difference is slight, and other differences are positive.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Living With War
    OK, more news event than musical milestone. But a really great news event.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Everything Ecstatic
    The drums get busy at times, but never fear--this sounds more like Rounds than it does like anything else. Just a little funkier.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Relationship Of Command
    In a bad time for young guitar bands, including many barely forgettable ones lumped under the trade name "emo," these ambitious yowlers are reason for hope.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    We Shall All Be Healed
    A singer's record.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    One Part Lullaby
    This is so pretty it's almost a poem about quiet lyricism--and so passive you want to put crystal meth in its apple juice.
    • Village Voice (Consumer Guide)
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Release
    Eventually, the tunes fall into place. What never materialize in sufficient number are the billowing climaxes and cutting remarks that mark their best albums, meaning most of them.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Have You Fed the Fish?
    It's the rare guitar geek who acts like strings and horns are where he's always belonged rather than where he hopes he'll fit in.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Punk Rock
    These aren't indelible tunes like "At Home He's a Tourist" or "Suspect Device." But months later they're still getting not just stronger but rawer, which isn't how this game usually works.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tres Cosas
    Boring strummed singer-songwritering with not terribly interesting electronica.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Echoes
    This is mannerist DOR more accomplished and less sentimental than its sources.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Ten New Songs
    The first four tracks... [are] as powerful as any he's written.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Be Your Own Pet
    Mouthy, destructive, confused, sexed-up but no sex object, Jemima Pearl is the pearl.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Give Blood
    Some observers classify these ditties "country-punk," while other crankily insist they're "anti-folk," proving mainly that nobody knows what to make of simple little guitar-band songs on a scene where everyone's busy refining his or her artistic vision.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Close Cover Before Striking [EP]
    The best of these seven songs is a Stones cover, only not by as much as you first think, and the second-best is the opener ["Astronaut"], ditto.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Black Foliage: Animation Music
    At its most generous, this may be the music of the young Brian Wilson's dysfunctional dreams. But at its most pretentious it's his bad trip.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Art Official Intelligence (Mosaic Thump)
    The lyrics are intelligent of course, clever and moral and street-conscious and just gnomic enough, but their art is in their beats and flow and tunes too.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    A City By The Light Divided
    Working on the humane assumption that all screamo records can't be equally horrible, the reviewerati have singled out this big-ticket effort... Unburdened by theory, however, I find that its distinction boils down to slightly subtler tunecraft and dynamic range.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Discovery
    There are better beats on the damn Jadakiss CD.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Lost In Space
    For her fans, the news is that she's invested her profits in studio musicians. Takes talent to make that more boring than solo acoustic, no?
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Just Like The Fambly Cat
    In a time when so many bands don't know why they exist but keep on vanning anyway, his honest tale is touching and instructive.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Kissin' Time
    Her best bunch of songs since--not Broken English, that's ridiculous, but Strange Weather or A Child's Adventure.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    trampin'
    No, she hasn't regained her sense of humor, but aren't you fast losing yours?
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Cookbook
    It's vital beginning to end--vital even when it's misguided.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Trouble With Being Myself
    Now, done with that id shit, she finds her voice by pleading with her man to stay or come back as the case may be.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Recording A Tape The Colour Of The Light
    [Bell Orchestre] varies its cunningly sequenced, gratifyingly brief instrumental tracks with such old-fashioned amenities as textured melodies, pleasing dynamic shifts, and passages that, if they don't actually r-o-c-k, at least bound down the road in an excited manner.
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