The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,072 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1
Lowest review score: 0 Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,594 out of 2072
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2072
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2072
2072 music reviews
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cody
    [Producer Rob Schnapf has] recentered the band’s urgency from its head-rush musical intensity to Mr. Johnson’s voice, which is clearer and more melodically driven than before. The songs have more structure, too.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    13
    13 has enough ominous tension to justify numerical superstitions. In fact, you could do worse than to make this album a cornerstone of your Halloween soundtrack this year.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revolution Radio
    Tumult and desperation ignite the music on Revolution Radio. It’s the group’s first batch of new songs since “Uno! Dos! Tré!,” the three-disc surfeit of more straightforward tunes released in 2012. Those songs were built around snappy catchphrases and brisk, punky riffs. Green Day’s new ones aren’t so easily summed up, but they can roar through their contradictions.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    22, A Million
    The results are, in many places, as ethereally and lustrously beautiful as the best Bon Iver material but more removed. ... Because this album travels in so many directions, there are places where Mr. Vernon sounds unanchored, and where his reluctance gives way to lack of commitment. His naïveté has always been carefully studied, but sometimes here, especially in the middle of the album, it feels just vague.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Had a Dream That You Were Mine
    Persuasively moody. ... More than anything, it seems the simple byproduct of strong personalities enjoying the process of finding common ground.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hard II Love
    While Hard II Love doesn’t include a song as cathartic as Usher’s “Climax,” from 2012, it’s full of smaller satisfactions.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    AIM
    Much of the album comes across as lightweight. Too many of the songs sound like sketches, running out of ideas midway through.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Woman
    The music toys with nostalgia, with the reassuring dependability of structure and instrumental arrangements.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Glory
    Even with her voice upfront, Ms. Spears isn’t singing anything particularly personal.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blonde
    Blonde is dewy, radiant and easeful, with an approach to incantatory soul that evolves moment to moment. It’s feverish but unhurried, a slowly smoldering set that’s emphatic about loneliness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Golden Sings That Have Been Sung
    On some level his songs are all age-old tales, but put together in his own exacting way, which makes them new.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    SremmLife 2
    Rae Sremmurd is particularly well-suited to the carnival sounds of its debut, but in many places here feels as if it’s getting squelched.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bird & the Rifle
    The Bird & the Rifle is her 10th studio album in 17 years, and her most finely focused.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Revelation, Pt. 2: The Fruit of Life
    More often than not, Mr. Marley lives up to the ambition that his last name demands of him. With any luck, his next album will have fewer guests and more of the introspection and steadfastness he reveals in “It’s Alright,” a hymnlike ballad that he sings on his own.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love & Hate
    The music makes space for him to ache.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nothing's Real
    There’s something knowing and clever, but never gratingly so, in the way she’s balancing ideas of newness and collective memory.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    California
    On this pleasantly familiar if not especially imaginative new album, the band’s subject matter verges on the bittersweet, or just outright bitter, but still they grin. ... The album is overlong, and full of songs that have achieved their purpose by the halfway mark.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lil B.I.G. Pac [Mixtape]
    It’s a vivid album about how the appeal of street life is just as powerful, if not more so, than the appeal of a shot at real fame.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ain't Who I Was
    There are a few too many moments--starting with “Mercy,” the opening track--when Mr. Cobb seems fixated on the idea of Ms. Bishop as a new Dusty Springfield. The ghost of “Dusty in Memphis” hovers over much of the album, and while there are worse problems to have, it runs the risk of putting Ms. Bishop in the same corner where a Leon Bridges passes as an acceptable stand-in for Sam Cooke.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Still Brazy
    Still Brazy is an artisanal, proletarian Los Angeles gangster rap record, less tribute to the sound’s golden age than a full-throated and wholly absorbed recitation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Dreaming Room
    Many of her songs seem ready-made for some kind of theatrical adaptation. They’re authentically dramatic, built on the swells of brass and strings and percussion, which might suddenly disappear behind some new peak of melody or meaning sung by Ms. Mvula.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Getaway
    It doesn’t sound exactly like classic-vintage Chili Peppers, but it might just sound like how you remember them.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jackie Lynn
    The record feels short, which might be a good thing: She leaves you guessing what she’s up to.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Tunes
    Several tracks feature Mr. Toussaint alone at the piano, and they’re reminders of the regional traditions he elegantly upheld.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Strange Little Birds
    Even though structurally Strange Little Birds evokes the band’s early work, it’s clear there’s mellowness afoot.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kidsticks
    It’s an experimental record that often sounds like a meditative one, or vice versa, and it often seems better on paper than through the speakers.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Good Times!
    Mr. Dolenz sings as if there’s no reason to take anything too seriously. Fifty years later, the Monkees are still endearing.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tropix
    [A] stylistically varied, intricately detailed, slyly coherent fourth album.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Coloring Book [Mixtape]
    On the jubilant, nourishing Coloring Book, his third solo release, has blossomed into a crusader and a pop savant, coming as close as anyone has to eradicating the walls between the sacred and the secular.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Thank You
    She has a round and slightly stodgy voice that’s most effective when it aims lowest, as on the winning novelty song “Dance Like Yo Daddy,” full of quizzical dance instructions (“Can you overbite? Can you old man overbite?”) and doo-wop harmonies over a skronking sax and sock-hop swing. Elsewhere on this spotty album, Ms. Trainor grinds her way through tough-stand songs like “Watch Me Do,” a homage to Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women (Part 1),” and “Me Too,” where she awkwardly proclaims self-love.
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