This is how I rate things on this site.

5.0: As good as an album can be.

4.5: Hey, you know, this is a great album. Downright perfect almost. But it's not "The Queen is Dead", ya know?

4.0: This record is fantastic! I wish they would have left off this one song, or fixed a few things here or there, but otherwise this is amazing!

3.5: This is really good! There's some good singles here, it sounds really good, and none of the filler is bad. I can dig this!

3.0: Hmmm... this isn't bad. It may not be my thing, per se, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do. There are some tracks that I really enjoy and the stuff I don't enjoy doesn't bother me or bore me.

2.5: Half of this record is totally acceptable. Why didn't they make this an EP though? Because this other part is really pretty not good.

2.0: Those two singles are cool! This one other song wouldn't make me tear a tree out of the ground and use it to smash this band off the stage if I saw them live. But it would certainly give me a great opportunity to take a piss.

1.5: Well, there are like two acceptable songs. The rest of this? Fuck this band man. Why they even bother writing anything else?

1.0: Well, this is an album. It exists. I'm not going to burn anyone's house down because it exists, but I certainly think very little of the people who dig this and the people who created it.

0.5: This record exists and I am angry that I have listened to it. Because I will never get that time back. I don't give a lot of records this rating strictly because I'm not going to listen to something that I assume I am going to hate.

I also try to judge a record based on what its ambitions are. So, if a record was trying to be a power pop record and all the songs are catchy then I am likely to give it a good score. It might not be something that I will listen to more than once or twice but I can appreciate people succeeding in their ambitions. It might even get the same score of a record that I think is actually better in another genre but one that doesn't quite achieve its ambitions.