The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,073 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: 1,595 out of 2073
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2073
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2073
2073 music reviews
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    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Colour In Anything
    "The Colour in Anything" grows self-pitying, almost maudlin, in ways Mr. Blake has managed to avoid in the past simply by using more elusive lyrical metaphors. It is also unreasonably long: a little over an hour and a quarter.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Moon Shaped Pool
    Grim tidings arrive amid gorgeous backdrops ... The results often hark back to the late 1960s; in a way, "A Moon Shaped Pool" is Radiohead’s psych-folk album.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Will
    [Will] may be Ms. Barwick’s most conventionally light, soothing record, and is sometimes a little inert as a result.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    VIEWS
    Overall, Views contains Drake’s most straightforward lyrics, and his emotional excavations aren’t as striking as they were a few years ago, when they had the sting of the new to them.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hope
    Between the giant, smiley singalongs, there’s a little more darkness than the band’s sound suggests. The verses grapple with impulses toward destruction and self-destruction. “If I weren’t so selfish/I could hear your calls for help,” Mr. Ward sings in “I Still Make Her Cry.” But it’s rarely long before another huge chorus arrives to banish all misgivings.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    ["Sorry,"] is a combative, unglossy track on an album full of them. ... As she did with her 2013 album, “Beyoncé,” she has also paired the music with full-length video that expands and deepens its impact.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Always Strive and Prosper
    Always Strive and Prosper is a chaotic, buoyant album, moving at varying speeds and with different textures. But uniting it all is an almost pervasive feeling of warmth, a sense that its creator comes from a world where he’s surrounded by care, even if he doesn’t always return it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Diary
    There are musical and lyrical nods here to R. Kelly, Jay Z, Big Punisher and more. For better and worse, The Diary is strikingly of its time.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Santana IV
    The album has a few missteps, like the goopy arrangement on the ballad “Sueños” and some hokey lyrics. But what comes through nearly every song is a sense of camaraderie and joyful relief: no more kowtowing to radio and countless ways to jam.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crab Day
    [A] charming and sometimes startling record.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cleopatra
    It’s a move away from crowd-pleasing ditties, a valiant turn inward and, at times--in “Gale Song,” “In the Light” and “Angela”--the songs reach a distillation of yearning and solitude. But over the course of an entire album, a glint of the Lumineers’ old whimsy would have helped.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Junk
    There is some skill here: strong melodies, extra chords, synthesized string arrangements, a tremendously accomplished chromatic-harmonica solo. They are intense.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Streams
    The atmosphere of this music is lighter and less haunted than some of Mr. Hecker’s past work; some parts of the new album, like “Music of the Air,” can be thrilling in its evocation of a seamless connection between the physical and the synthetic. It also, sometimes, seems more impersonal, as if the ideas have the edge over their physical manifestation.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Slay-Z [Mixtape]
    Her outrageous self-possession plays out more vibrantly on some of these tracks, like “Big Talk,” which puts her up against the rapper Rick Ross, and “Riot,” which has a klaxon-like hook handled by Nina Sky. There’s no end to Ms. Banks’s swagger, though her toughest moments veer toward the style of a hometown rival, Nicki Minaj.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mind of Mine
    Throughout this album, Mr. Malik opts for a low-octane approach, with varying success.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Next Thing
    Ms. Kline’s songs don’t last long, and neither does her imagery, but she can be exceptional at capturing how quickly frail things can break, taking devastating turns in just a couple of lines.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lukas Graham
    It’s sweet earnestness in a shrewd, ambitious package. The music, like much Scandinavian pop, ignores genre to draw on whatever works, current and vintage.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke
    Much of the music feels transitory, like smoke escaping. But “Notes on Water,” the last part of the suite, wants to stick around.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gensho
    If you hear the record in the manner suggested to you, Merzbow’s music, unsentimental to the core, sluices through the elegant silences in and among the Boris tracks. There is an aggressive tension here, which often feels awkward or wrong. But then it can remind you of the aggressive tension you may have heard and liked in Boris or Merzbow in the first place.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend
    Fears and sorrows hold a radiant gleam on All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend, the rapturous debut album by the 19-year-old Norwegian singer and songwriter Aurora.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Rarity of Experience
    It evokes aspects of Miles Davis’s electric period and various kinds of rock-beyond-rock--Slint, Sonic Youth and so on. You sense Mr. Forsyth’s control easing a bit here, and the music grows deeper and better.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Emily's D+Evolution
    She still favors too many Wayne Shorterish chord progressions to truly suit the easily impressed. It’s precisely when she stretches--as on “Rest in Pleasure,” which has a melody you wouldn’t wish on a less acrobatic singer--that Ms. Spalding seems most ingenuous and unbound.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heron Oblivion
    A Heron Oblivion moment--there’s a powerful one in nearly every track.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired
    Throughout the album, the lyrics don’t find comfort or resolution. That’s left to the music: in the way the guitars tangle and persevere, in the grace of the melodies, and in the simple fact that Ms. Leschper dared to write these songs.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin
    His agreeably slight new release, Summertime, is a songbook album, a stroll through some of George and Ira Gershwin’s best-loved songs.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    SVIIB
    Minimalist repetition turns into pop certitude, and the arrangements--sorting out the many tracks Mr. Curtis recorded--set aside the buzzy, abrasive keyboard tones of the group’s 2012 album, “Ghostory,” for a sonic vocabulary of reverberation and depth, of optimistic promise.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ladies & Gentlemen
    The roster is impressive--it includes Mary Chapin Carpenter, Joan Osborne, Joss Stone, Lee Ann Womack, Sarah Jarosz and Sara Watkins--and the songs are even better.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In My Mind
    The best parts of In My Mind, BJ’s strong major-label debut album, come when this young singer tasks himself with ethical responsibility.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Phase
    Phase is a virtuosic, thrill-packed album, ricocheting among extremes before concluding with “My House Is Your Home,” which uses just Mr. Garratt’s voice, his piano and apparently a creaky piano stool. Yet underlying each strenuous track is a clear-cut, old-fashioned pop structure: verses and choruses, tension and release, matters of the heart. But now they are buffeted, brilliantly, from all directions.
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