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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Life Of Pablo
    [He] has perfected the art of aesthetic and intellectual bricolage, shape-shifting in real time and counting on listeners to keep up. More than on any of his previous albums, "Pablo" reflects that rambling, fearsome energy. This is Tumblr-as-album, the piecing together of divergent fragments to make a cohesive whole.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Human Ceremony
    Its debut album, Human Ceremony (Fat Possum), moves along briskly and even impatiently with circular picking patterns, transparent strummed chords and or fuzz-toned riffs behind Julia Cumming’s airy voice.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    We Are King
    It’s a musicians’ album, going deeper into the strategies of a strain of R&B that might begin with Stevie Wonder’s “Music of My Mind” (1972) and continue through Patrice Rushen’s “Straight From the Heart” (1982), as well as any number of Prince ballads and Luther Vandross party songs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Promise
    Her dramatic, meticulous and gothic songs describe enticements that twist into admonishments, and everything seems to be slipping out of her hands.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anti
    Anti is a chaotic and scattershot album, not the product of a committed artistic vision, or even an appealingly freeform aesthetic, but rather an amalgam of approaches, tones, styles and moods.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    This Is Acting
    Even as she and her producers flaunt their layered vocals and whiz-bang sound effects, there are already so many of Sia’s midtempo victim-to-victory anthems around that they offer diminishing returns, particularly when listened to as an album.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pond Scum
    Covering an eight-year span, they share a hushed and crackly intensity, often with little more than voice and acoustic guitar.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In the Magic Hour
    Sweetness and sadness find a tenuous balance in the voice of Aoife O’Donovan--and in the songs on her second album, In the Magic Hour.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Catastrophist
    Tortoise is a band about the blurry middles, which is why “The Catastrophist,” at its best and most beautiful (in songs like “Hot Coffee,” “Tesseract” and its title track, switching among strains of cyborg pop and warm, heroic melodies) sounds like incidental music for films, or a record to play on a club sound system in between bands.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Malibu
    Malibu--his second album under this moniker, following a stretch under the name Breezy Lovejoy--is multilayered. It’s also incisive, languorous and deeply felt, a warm bath of studiously relaxed hip-hop and soul.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death of a Bachelor
    Panic! at the Disco has always favored a style both steroidal and slick, and Mr. Urie isn’t out to reinvent it here.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wildfire
    She has a clear, edgeless voice, and she’s versatile, though often here it can sound like she’s blindly experimenting with styles.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ardipithecus
    This is a record that never stops threatening to be dull--in the way that Miley Cyrus’s record of mind-blurt autonomy from this year was dull--but rarely is, except when others try to streamline a lumpy aesthetic.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blackstar
    It’s at once emotive and cryptic, structured and spontaneous and, above all, willful, refusing to cater to the expectations of radio stations or fans.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams
    It’s a more countrified album, with the two singers, partners by marriage, often harmonizing in a rough blend. Things work best when Ms. Williams takes the lead.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Changed a Lot
    Most of this album is an extension of DJ Khaled’s tenets of more and louder and still more. That extends to his guest list, as packed as ever.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tell Me I'm Pretty
    The bigger change is in the songs, which no longer promise that rock brashness can overpower adversity.... It’s a daring, deliberate shift for Cage the Elephant. But in its single-mindedness, the album sacrifices the wildly seesawing balance between life force and mortality that gave the band its verve.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Buffet
    The point is that all of these songs are capable, and one is not much better than another.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mutant
    The downside of the now-ness, the resistance against static definition, is lack of resolution. Mutant is hard to listen to, sometimes in a salutary way and sometimes not.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dark Sky Island
    The lyrics often mention homecomings; the music is a warm bath.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kannon
    Kannon is surprising in two ways. One is its brevity: just over half an hour. The other is its austerity, even for a fairly austere band. This music demands a lot. It’s hard to love, and hard to share.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Head Full of Dreams
    Blissful even at its most bittersweet, it’s an album on which three songs make lyrical references to diamonds--as in, “We are diamonds”--and every surface contentedly gleams.... Mr. Martin, who has rediscovered the radiant properties of his voice, gilds a lot of lyrical treacle and borderline nonsense here.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    25
    25 manages to sound all of a piece, even as the songs veer from phenomenal to tepid. In places, everything comes together.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Montage Of Heck: The Home Recordings
    This is for completists.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Free TC
    Free TC--often exceptional, and easily one of the best R&B albums of this year--is elaborate in conception and execution but still feels off the cuff.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. Misunderstood
    The album, a love letter to his influences, is the gentlest of Mr. Church’s releases, the one that least wears his rowdy tendencies on its sleeve.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Purpose
    Even though Mr. Bieber is younger than all of the men of One Direction, he sounds exponentially more experienced, and exponentially more fatigued on Purpose. He is also the best singer of the bunch, and the one with a clear vision for his sound, even if he’s being largely denied it here.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Made in the A.M.
    Made in the A.M. is much the same, rootless and vague even when it lands on a clear style, like the Coldplay-esque “Infinity,” or “Never Enough,” a wacky number with intense a cappella gimmickry and exuberant mid-1980s drums and horns that recall, of all things, Huey Lewis and the News.... The music is too banal to support exceptional singing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Aquaria
    The narratives of each song are fractured and inconclusive, but Aquaria elapses as an album with a sustained atmosphere of dread, determination and experiment.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    10 Years Solo Live [Box Set]
    We’re off and away by then, following a mind awhirl in creative reverie. Mr. Mehldau--tracing connections, making digressions, but never quite forsaking the original framework--sounds both grounded and almost boundless.
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