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: | Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest review score: | Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album |
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 1,595 out of 2073
-
Mixed: 443 out of 2073
-
Negative: 35 out of 2073
2073
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
-
- Critic Score
It's easy to imagine Santana completely revamping some guitar-centered hits. But for most of the album, that was apparently too daring for Mr. Santana and his pop mentor and co-producer, Clive Davis. These oldies tend to stay close to the original arrangements and vocal phrasing, perhaps hoping that familiarity can sneak them onto the radio.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The rest of her follow-up, No Gravity, a competent, sometimes exciting pop album, collects other attempts: in essence, a series of portraits drawn by people with radically different styles.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Like Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak or her fellow Brooklynite Holly Miranda, Ms. Van Etten has an incandescent, moaning alto that can be fragile or vengeful.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Hurley, its eighth studio album, is a surprise, the group's strongest album in recent years.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's more serious than many, both in programming and in execution. But it doesn't quite make solo piano a stand-alone concept equal to what he does with groups.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Once the great indie hope of Chapel Hill, N.C., this band--Mr. McCaughan, the bassist Laura Ballance, the guitarist Jim Wilbur and the drummer Jon Wurster, who favors dense, thudding bass kicks--has recaptured its grasp on bright, puckish and punkish power pop with no apparent effort.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
When Ms. Bareilles goes for more straightforward tugs on the heartstrings, she often sounds like Sarah McLachlan's gifted apprentice, complete with Ms. McLachlan's trademark of going breathy at the top of a phrase.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Ms. Lewis and Mr. Rice josh and harmonize their way through the album. The songs are upbeat, looking back to folk-rock and 1970s California pop.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The collaboration works, not least because emphasis is placed on the grounded heave of Mr. Bingham's fine working band, the Dead Horses: Corby Schaub on guitar and mandolin, Elijah Ford on bass and Matt Smith on drums.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Familial (Nonesuch), Philip Selway's solo debut, is more like a warm, delicate nest. Surrounded by pastoral acoustic guitars and whisper-level electronics, Mr. Selway--who wrote all the songs and farmed most of the drumming out to Glenn Kotche of Wilco--sings in a breathy, almost maternally soft voice about seeking peace and raising children.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
She's good at finding obscurity, but sometimes not to her benefit. Ms. Powell wrote a lot of the lyrics on Cloak and Cipher with scrambled input from books and various other texts, and she doesn't do much to smooth out the results, savoring the disjunctive and the cryptic.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Redolent of Southern gospel and feather-light country-rock, it's a comfort zone for this group, employed consistently in the choruses, which can be arrestingly sharp, and often elsewhere. But piled on top of plangent guitars, the convergence can become grating, with all the emotion of archery, or some other sport that prizes accuracy above all.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's thin sounding and cheaply made, and it's got soul for miles; it'll take you a while to know it.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Catching a Tiger (Fat Possum), her full-length debut, comes most alive with a handful of songs about reaching for someone who isn't there (e.g., "In Sleep," which evokes Fleetwood Mac) or evading someone who is (e.g., "Loosen the Knot," more of a power-pop surge).- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Not surprisingly, disorientation is his leitmotif, and it can border on the oppressive, especially given his blunt limitations as a singer (and his habit of multitracking himself across two or more octaves). But the bass lines and beats sound great, and the passing textures--robotic percussion, synthesizer drones, sampled sounds--feel right, and carefully determined.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
With varying degrees of success he turns the melodies into post-Beach Boys pop with stacked harmonies performed in a barbershop tradition that erases vocal individuality for the sake of a creamy harmonic blend.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Yet behind the period arrangements and the antique haze of the production, they're still Mellencamp songs. They can be wry and plainspoken, like the waltzing tall tale "Easter Eve," or earnest and overreaching, like the attempted workingman's parable "The West End."- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
While Mr. Adkins shares a sense of gravity and an air of intractability with his new boss [Toby Keith], he lacks the winking cheekiness and self-deprecation that have always been Mr. Keith's aces in the hole.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This one has missteps, but for Mr. LaMontagne it's those songs that feel the most honest, those where he says what he means, not what he hopes you'll think.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
He toggles between petulant cad ("Gone in September") and wounded child ("Save Your Goodbye"), convincing at neither. He has a grating voice, heavily nasal, with a seeming inability to wrap his lips around all of the necessary syllables, meaning that even when he's at his angriest, he sounds as if he's holding back.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's an album about facing limitations, drawing what hope there is from seeing each situation clearly.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
On Tribal he digs hard into the New Orleans rhythm and blues on which he cut his teeth. His sinewy band, the Lower 911, which will join him on Monday and Tuesday at City Winery, manages to riff on a classic sound without ever going retro. Much the same could be said of Dr. John himself.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The songs and arrangements on The House recast Ms. Melua as an arty girl gone wild.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
More than anything, his style betrays a fealty to the West Coast gangsta agenda of 15 years ago, and the EP's production (by Block Beataz, B-Flat Trax and others) riffs on a similar ideal.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This studly Welsh baritone, now 70, certainly has the voice to make a lean, tough country gospel album.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Ms. Cosentino and her collaborator, Bobb Bruno, envelop the songs in guitar reverb and distortion--between the Raveonettes and the Jesus and Mary Chain--to place them in an ominous haze.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
How this sort of music became a cliche in the space of just the past year or so speaks to the speed and density of the Internet. And yet the self-titled Beach Fossils debut, on Captured Tracks, manages to not feel overly 2009.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
He's a ferocious character, an impressive rapper and, as heard on this strong album, a clever and loose thinker, willing to try out new poses.- The New York Times
- Read full review