Chicago Tribune's Scores

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For 566 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 51% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 I Like to Keep Myself in Pain
Lowest review score: 25 Graffiti
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 456 out of 566
  2. Mixed: 97 out of 566
  3. Negative: 13 out of 566
566 music reviews
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    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Joanne
    Once a step ahead of everyone else in recalibrating what it means to be a pop artist, she made her appropriations and reinventions look like fun. Now she sounds like she's just trying too hard.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    American Band
    The band's feel for melodies remains sharp, and Hood's accomplished songwriting is now matched by Cooley, which makes for one of the band's strongest front-to-back albums.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    A Seat at the Table
    A Seat at the Table is in no hurry to deliver a knockout punch. Instead, its subtle grooves and delicate vocals underplay the steely resolve, the long-simmering ache in the words.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    22, A Million
    Bon Iver is moving on, but to where exactly? Even Justin Vernon doesn't appear to know, which may be why this transitional album sounds so muddled and the songs so elusive.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Heads Up
    The band has become more adept at bringing its love of body music to the forefront and melding it with experimental impulses.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Skeleton Tree
    The album peaks in its second half, with a series of songs in which Cave doesn't just again walk the narrow line between love and death, but ponders whether "nothing really matters anymore."
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Schmilco
    Wilco has made a weird little folk record. It not only sounds different than the band's previous album, but slightly out of step with the rest of its discography.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    My Woman
    lsen's songwriting has a way of undressing emotions, and she's got a voice that holds nothing back. Now she's made an album that sounds far bolder than anything she's released so far.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blonde
    The entire album plays like an Ocean view, clear and uncluttered by outsized cameos.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Golden Sings That Have Been Sung
    There's no rage in this music, but it feels unsettling all the same, and that's a major step for a young artist as he starts to find his voice.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Real
    The music is more refined than previous Loveless albums. With the exception of the sonic roar in "Same to You," the pleasures on Real turn on instrumental subtleties.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Love & Hate
    With Burton as his accomplice, the singer has learned how to juxtapose contrasting textures and emotions for maximum impact, and it makes for one of the year's most consistently engaging listens.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Wildflower
    Daydreams don't get much more vivid than the Avalanches iconic debut album, but Wildflower is a worthy--if not quite as revelatory--sequel.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hit Reset
    Hanna has actually upped the ante. In many ways, this is the singer's most personal and musically diverse album.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    blackSUMMERS'night (2016)
    He is subtle rather than strident, sensitive rather than demanding.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Mountain Will Fall
    Shadow's beats programming remains formidable, as he steers clear of standard bangers in favor of something far more difficult to pin down. This isn't an album built for dancing. It's more about its rhythmic intricacy, a master class for connoisseurs of nuanced production.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    case/lang/veirs
    The work is what counts, and it's the songs and their organic presentation that make case/lang/veirs resonate.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Stranger to Stranger
    On Stranger to Stranger (Concord), his 13th solo album, he blends the custom-made, fancifully titled cloud-chamber bowls and chromelodeons of maverick composer Harry Partch with an army of globe-spanning musicians into off-kilter pop songs.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kidsticks
    Mostly the arrangements feel amorphous and vague, and matters aren't helped by the way Orton's voice is positioned in the mix. Her tone veers between conversational and angelic, just another texture in a scattered and shapeless series of musical pieces.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Fallen Angels
    As mood pieces go, Fallen Angels is a notch or two below its predecessor.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    2
    2 picks up where the debut left off, with trace elements of Southern swampiness mingling with sun-kissed West Coast mellowness.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Coloring Book [Mixtape]
    What made "Surf" and now "Coloring Book" compelling is his ability to let his personality seep into the broad canvases on which he and his collaborators paint.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Moon Shaped Pool
    A casual listen or two might consign A Moon Shaped Pool to the latest in a series of Radiohead releases post-“Kid A” (2000) that are more about texture and arty experimentation than guitar rock or pop structure. But as with most Radiohead releases, there’s something more going on.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Ship
    An album that has few direct antecedents in his vast discography and arrives as a late-career landmark.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    VIEWS
    Views is ostensibly set in Drake's hometown of Toronto, but most of it sounds like it's being narrated from a shuttered room at 3 in the morning. The moodiness seeps into a weary, bleary series of recriminations tinged with bitterness and petulance.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    It’ll take a while to absorb everything that Beyonce has poured into her sixth studio album--a dozen songs plus a 60-minute movie that is more than just a mere advertisement for the music, but an essential companion that provides context and deepens understanding. But it’s apparent already that Lemonade is the artist’s most accomplished and cohesive work yet.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Hope Six Demolition Project
    It all builds masterfully to a powerful, closing one-two punch.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Junk
    Junk, M83's seventh studio album, sounds chintzy--a bubble-gum snyth-pop album that indulges Gonzalez's love of decades-old TV soundtracks, hair-metal guitar solos and kitschy pop songs.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Patch the Sky
    Patch the Sky is something of a darker twin to the 2014 "Beauty and Ruin," itself an album filled with grief and reckoning. But the music, in contrast to the often bleak, edge-of-despair lyrics, is cleansing.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Post Pop Depression
    For all of Pop's well-earned reputation as a bare-chested banshee in concert, he has an expressive, even sonorous baritone voice, and a pithiness as a lyricist. His words brim with battle-scarred imagery and humor.
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