New York Magazine (Vulture)'s Scores

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For 158 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 45% higher than the average critic
  • 0% same as the average critic
  • 55% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 8.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 God's Son
Lowest review score: 10 18
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 96 out of 158
  2. Mixed: 40 out of 158
  3. Negative: 22 out of 158
158 music reviews
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    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Binaural
    A remarkably overt homage to seventies stadium rock?
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Try This
    Pink pitches a brand of seriousness that is pure Lifetime-TV mawkishness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Neptunes Present... Clones
    Clones testifies to how familiar (and hollow) the Neptunes’ studio tricks have become.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Invincible
    Invincible is an assembly-line bore.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Just Push Play
    Along the way, though, Aerosmith slips into the stylized studio excesses of a professional producer (it might also be their only album to have strings on half the songs), and the ballads the band does deliver are as corny as anything it's ever done.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Heathen Chemistry
    Psychedelia is really only compelling when ego takes a backseat to kaleidoscopic music, and the Gallaghers are, of course, incapable of such a gesture.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Ecleftic 2 Sides II a Book
    True eclectics like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest seek out samples and inspiration -- in jazz, electronic music, even rock -- while Jean merely traffics in superficial gloss.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Raven
    Reed coaxes great performances out of a few unexpected collaborators--Ornette Coleman delivers frenetic sax playing on “Guilty,” and downtown singer Antony warbles in a truly otherworldly soprano on “The Bed”--but these players are crowded out by the album’s sprawling mediocrity.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Damita Jo
    Damita Jo, sadly, is an outdated product of the turn-of-the-millennium pop scene, in which female singers conflated sexual openness with empowerment.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Delivery Man
    [It] doesn’t help in pinpointing the moment Costello veered into self-parody, but it does catalogue nearly everything that’s become impossible to take about him.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Everything Must Go
    Everything Must Go is a profound disappointment.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Blueprint 2: The Gift & the Curse
    What a curse Jay-Z's ideas represent: Nearly everything about The Blueprint 2 sounds like a retread, including its title.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Shaman
    Trots out an unceasingly uninteresting parade of pop personalities singing against a patina of Latin music so drained of ethnicity and soul that it makes Herb Alpert seem like Sun Ra by comparison.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Heathen
    For anyone with a critical reading of his long career, the album is a drowsy downer unconvincingly cloaked in interplanetary piffle.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Survivor
    All fifteen tracks are one-dimensional disses and dismissals of scantily clad women, vengeful boyfriends, and the group's assorted doubters.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    No More Drama
    More than ever, Blige's harmonious state just isn't an interesting place to be: Songs like "Beautiful Day" and "Flying Away" express exuberance of the rainbows-and-flowers variety. Miserable, Blige can be penetrating and profound; happy, she comes off generic and bland.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    By The Way
    By the Way is as enjoyable as being stuck in an elevator playing a Muzak version of "Under the Bridge."
    • 80 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    A Rush Of Blood To The Head
    It's Coldplay's lack of humor, the very straightness of its lyrics, that makes the dourness so detestable. And where miserabilists past had a strong pop sensibility, Coldplay is content to create directionless palettes of sound.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Are You Passionate?
    Young's surprisingly conservative new album, Are You Passionate?, is simply frustrating, and worse, often as risk-averse as a CSNY reunion.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Crown Royal
    The Ishtar of comeback albums -- overdone, underinspired, and marketed to within an inch of its life.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Charmbracelet
    What's particularly, notably bad here is its production.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    18
    Moby is no auteur, a fact made painfully clear by his terrible new album, 18, which revisits the already derivative territory of Play.