The Observer (UK)'s Scores

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For 2,623 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 37% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 59% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Gold-Diggers Sound
Lowest review score: 20 Collections
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,235 out of 2623
  2. Mixed: 1,370 out of 2623
  3. Negative: 18 out of 2623
2623 music reviews
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Line
    Her incisive storytelling is at the fore on Heads Gonna Roll, which describes a road movie with “a narcoleptic poet from Duluth”. Ringo Starr plays drums on it, such is Lewis’s back-channel clout. More gripping vignettes follow.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wall of Eyes
    The subtle, unfurling I Quit, meanwhile, marries guitar, piano and percussion to create an arpeggiating Doppler effect strafed by electronics. “This is my stop, this is the end of the trip,” sings Yorke. In the same breath he’s ruminating on “conscience” and “brotherhood” and “a new path out of the madness, to wherever it goes”. That path may well be shaped like a smile.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fever Dreams, Pts. 1-4
    It’s keyboards that take centre stage here on a set of energetic, electro-indie cuts that are as dancefloor-friendly as anything he has been involved with since Electronic.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crooked Tree
    A class act.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper
    Lennox still sounds unmistakably like his peaceable bear self, despite having acquired some new carnivorous companions whose firepower, critically, he doesn’t need.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Whistle Down the Wind
    The years have added grain and intimacy to Baez’s magisterial voice, especially on songs centred on retrospection, regret and mortality.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Compass Will Find Home
    Lambert is a consistently thoughtful songwriter and this is an exhilarating blast of ideas as well as heady Alpine air.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Raze Regal & White Denim Inc.
    Over 10 tunes, Regal and Petralli fashion taut, soulful pop nuggets out of jazz fusion licks, a sound not a million miles from Tame Impala meeting Thundercat, but gnarlier and different at every turn.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Two Hands
    Two Hands is more earthbound than UFOF – in that there’s nothing here that quite matches that album’s astonishing peaks.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mutilator Defeated at Last
    His ninth album as Thee Oh Sees has its fair share of songs that resemble long-lost Nuggets-era gems (Withered Hand and Rogue Planet are particularly bracing). But there is light and shade amid the trademark distortion.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hit Me Hard and Soft
    Hit Me Hard and Soft clearly wants to make a virtue of its subtlety, a strategy that Eilish gets away with, due to the chef’s kiss production work and her lyrical zingers. (“And the internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny/ And somebody’s gotta feed it,” she sighs on Skinny.) But it would have been fun to hear this album’s “hard” edit.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Relentless
    A Love and Let the Sun Come In recall the jangle of their early-80s imperial phase. The ballads are equally well executed, most notably the closing I Think About You Daily, with Jonny Greenwood’s hypnotic string arrangement imbuing Hynde’s uncharacteristically swagger-free vocals with a powerful sense of regret and vulnerability.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Club Meds
    Harmonious one minute, turbulent the next, Club Meds is an album rich in sounds and moods.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Third Avenue
    This is an accomplished full-length that, while not a game-changer, certainly slots neatly into the burgeoning UK canon.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Etch And Etch Deep
    At times it’s reminiscent of Zach Condon’s band Beirut, but Haiku Salut never stay still for too long, nuzzling up to folk one minute and slow drum’n’bass the next.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Giants of All Sizes
    Giants of All Sizes is not an album to be filleted and squashed into playlists; it’s the sort of deeply serious and carefully crafted work that would sprout a beard and a cable-knit jumper if you turned your back on it for a second.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Double Exposure
    The arrangements are sharp and witty, the singing deceptively easygoing, and the guitar playing just terrific.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wanderer
    Marshall now has a manager, but Wanderer has that spooked strangeness of old. The grim reaper looms large. ... But there are tunes, too--pretty things like Horizon, which pays tribute to her family, while Marshall simultaneously eyes the exit.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghost Culture
    The pleasure, and it’s considerable, is in the detail.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Screen Violence
    Their formative years in the underground have always supplied this trio with a sharp and occasionally dark edge. It is an edge no more, but the defining feature of this pugilistic album.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sprinter
    Sprinter combines the raw energy of Torres’s 90s forebears with modern minimalism; the result is captivating.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bright Phoebus [Reissue]
    A few songs here--best of all, Shady Lady--are full of the kind of 60s harmonic whimsy associated with the Beatles, locating the album in the 20th century, but The Scarecrow remains timeless and terrifying.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lodestar
    The mood is austere, studded by encounters with mortality, but the accompaniments from Oysterband’s Ian Kearey are full of subtlety and surprise, with delicate guitars and blasts of squeezebox. A late-flowering triumph.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Honey
    Rather than try to top her peerless pop peaks, Robyn has instead uncovered a new warmth, and the effect, on the lofty, dark techno of Human Being and the trippy tempo dips of Baby Forgive Me--redolent of lost small hours and fleeting epiphanies during dancefloor marathons--is sweet indeed.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rare Birds
    Rare Birds is sprawling, rich and, by and large, a triumph, its cosmic mindset and focus on detail breathing drama into songs that in lesser hands might sound stale.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chris
    Here, as with Grimes, percussion is used as a weapon; none of the lyrics are clichéd top 40 pap. Unlike Grimes, however, Letissier has a bold, synthetic funk payload to commend her, and her lyrics are more obviously personal.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    T2: Trainspotting [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    Like its parent film, T2 Trainspotting’s soundtrack eschews cosy Cool Britannia nostalgia for something weirder and better.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Earl Grey
    The influence of shambly 1990s indie such as Pavement and, most obviously, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci is clear on their winningly gauche debut, but it stands in a longer line of British faux-naifs stretching back through Postcard Records and the Raincoats.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fyah
    You struggle to comprehend how the extraordinary sounds near its inception are coming out of a tuba (via a wah-wah effect). On The Offerings and Radiation, Cross’s prowling tone is slung so low as to sound filthy. One can only hope his lips and lungs are insured.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino
    Once you ditch the notion that AM’s successor should rock like it, and give yourself up to rolling around in the psyche of one of our very greatest songwriters like an olive in a martini, then it’s a riveting and immersive listen--an album-bomb dropped without preceding singles, re-emphasising the importance of a cohesive work, rather than a shuffled, Spotified deconstruction.
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