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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    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Yuck
    This band's self-titled debut (on Fat Possum) is disarming all the same, certain to be one of the year's most unabashedly beautiful albums.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unlearn
    Unlearn (Hardly Art), their full-length debut, lurches from Tropicália ("Where the Walls Are Made of Grass") to Brill Building pop ("Powerful Lovin'") to doo-wop (the title track), all with an air of shrewd dishevelment.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Anika
    Her voice is faltering and off-key, but dogged. The grooves are minimal, with the bass pushed way up front, and the sound is fresh and lumpy: the songs get your attention; they've got texture.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Christmas Cornucopia
    Annie Lennox is robustly reverent on A Christmas Cornucopia, putting the full and frequently rough power of her voice behind some of the sternest old carols, with devout verses that are often omitted.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Merry Christmas II You
    The rest of this album intersperses originals with classics--a respectful "First Noel," an aptly baby-making take on "O Little Town of Bethlehem," and "Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)" as routed through a strip club. But nothing beats "All I Want for Christmas Is You," from her 1994 album Merry Christmas," one of the great modern holiday albums.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Gift
    Mostly she and the producer Steve Mac render traditionals--"Auld Lang Syne," "O Come All Ye Faithful" and more--in unerringly gorgeous, if wrenchingly polite, arrangements, performances that smooth flat the many creases in Ms. Boyle's sometimes erratic public persona.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Graduation
    Nearly every song on Graduation is memorable for both its hooks and its overall sound.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    James Blake
    His first full album, James Blake, sounds as if it were made for an assignment in an electronic music course. It's a bit intellectual, a bit process-oriented and a bit undercooked.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mission Bell
    Mission Bell, his fourth album on Blue Note, sharpens the payoff.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bird Songs
    The elastic interplay of Us Five is in fact the main point of Bird Songs, which approaches its Parker-centric repertory as a springboard rather than an altar.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Musica + Alma + Sexo
    On this album his usual exhortations to seize life's pleasures mingle with coming-out manifestos, and he smiles through them all.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mirror
    Mirror, released in September, is the follow-up to "Rabo de Nube," a proper studio effort aglow with watchful calm.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Deerhoof Vs. Evil
    The album feels disarmingly unspoiled. Recorded and mixed in do-it-yourself fashion, it is rougher sounding than the band's other recent releases, with a more approachable scale.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Content
    Punk, funk and reggae contribute to the sound - along with hints of math-rock, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie - only to get caught up in the music's precise melee.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kaputt
    The record as a whole can seem to disappear or evaporate almost as you're listening to it. But that's its charm; that's why you might want to hear it again.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ritual
    Every gesture feels like flagging down a passing ship from a barren island. Every emotion registers on the Richter scale. This can be wickedly effective, as many a successful British rock band will attest. And periodically on this album, the stars and planets do align.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Science & Faith
    The best songs here sound as if members of toothless soft rockers like the Fray or Augustana were fixing for a bar fight, maybe even one they could win.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Native Speaker
    It's heady music about the body and its imperatives. And it's every bit as mesmerizing and vertiginous as desire can be.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thank You, Happy Birthday
    The new album is more abrasive, rowdier, more unstable and pushier in the right ways.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Farmer's Daughter
    She has a keen, finely honed pop instinct all her own.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Basic Instinct
    Celebrity, commodity, singer, sex object, cyborg - Ciara just about fuses all of them on Basic Instinct, her fourth studio album.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Best Night of My Life
    It's good that Mr. Timberlake doesn't operate at full throttle, because this album's successes often come in spite of Mr. Foxx, who sings as if he were delivering lines for the camera: declarative, extra literal, sharp at the edges.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    H.F.M. 2 (The Hunger for More 2)
    Mostly, though, he comes up short, delivering rhymes that on paper are clever and punchy, but on record are congested and monotone.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    III/IV
    In the end III/IV may be of interest more for therapeutic than aesthetic reasons, especially when Mr. Adams complicates the issue, as on "P.S.," a postpunk churner: "Don't ask someone to change again/'Til you know what you want them to change into."
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Boys Allowed
    Ms. Hilson's own records aren't tipping toward bona fide dance music as much as Rihanna's, and don't yet have their audience-strafing sweep. But a few songs here are good enough to stop the overthinking comparisons
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Train to Paris
    None of these guests feel out of place here, but not because of the potency of Diddy's vision. Rather, it's because they have made records like these elsewhere, giving Last Train to Paris a secondhand feel.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Calling All Hearts
    Keyshia Cole tries for a slow burn but rarely ignites on her fourth album, Calling All Hearts.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fool
    Warpaint's songs are pensive and elegiac, transmuting the jabs of yesteryear into folky incantations.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    O
    Although the music came out of a computer, it's decidedly unmechanical. Loops and metronomic repetitions are far outnumbered by impulses and spasms, stops and starts. Each track could be a separate Petri dish, testing how selected musical organisms interact.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Letter
    In the main Mr. Kelly has kept his baser instincts in check, without damaging the creative spark they typically give shape to. What remains are, in essence, secular spirituals, bombastic and warm, meant not to raise an eyebrow.
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