For 2,075 reviews, this publication has graded:
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55% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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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:
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Positive: 1,597 out of 2075
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Mixed: 443 out of 2075
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Negative: 35 out of 2075
2075
music
reviews
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- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
She moves slowly, but she’s a good musician and singer; this is the surprise, because in her line of work you expect more dishevelment.- The New York Times
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The cuts are manic psychedelic jams--there’s even a sitar--riding electronic drones and throbbing, insistent riffs. Timbres of instruments are barbed with fuzz tone and static; the voices that infrequently appear might be shouting unintelligibly or nearly buried in the mix.- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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Mr. Paisley's songs are better when they're more abstract. The title track celebrates America as a mongrel nation, but it mostly expresses that thought through our playtime consumption: Dutch beer, Canadian bacon, Brazilian leather. A very big thought is being missed here.- The New York Times
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So let’s file Voltaic, released by Nonesuch a couple of weeks ago, under the category of Things We Didn’t Think We Needed.- The New York Times
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The panache of the singing, and the radiant complexity of the music--an achievement shared by Mr. Rodriguez Lopez and a handful of regular collaborators, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante--drive the album relentlessly forward. And it’s the subtle touches, no less than the sweeping ones, that leave an impression.- The New York Times
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Ginuwine’s new material uses a more generic palette of sounds from R&B slow jams and gospel. There’s more song to them, more piano-ballad chords and swirling Isley Brothers guitars, and more mediocrity.- The New York Times
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The album mixes the hard-nosed character studies he writes for Drive-By Truckers and more personal, guardedly hopeful songs. It juxtaposes his brasher, more cynical younger self with his current role as a husband and father.- The New York Times
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Mr. McCauley is a committed formalist and a defiant singer; he loves hating himself, and he’s thorough about it. His band mates (Andrew Grant Tobiassen on guitar, Christopher Dale Ryan on bass, Dennis Michael Ryan on drums) smartly give him room to gasp, but maybe he’s got a future without them as a Nashville songwriter.- The New York Times
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Ms. Williams contributes most to the family tradition, though, when she shuts it out, staking out quiet, warm, insightful territory for herself.- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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So here’s a Sonic Youth record in which Ms. Gordon sings all the best stuff.- The New York Times
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The Low Anthem still needs to devise its own uptempo approach. But the quieter the music gets, in an elegy like 'To Ohio' or a conditional reassurance like '(Don’t) Tremble,' the more its music inhabits its own otherworldly place, where ghosts and angels hover just out of view.- The New York Times
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Listeners familiar with Mr. Lang’s more obstreperous instrumental works may not recognize his style here (though a few more meditative ensemble pieces hint at it). But these choral settings, composed from 2001 to 2007, show that he has idiosyncratic but effective ideas about how to use voices.- The New York Times
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After the novelty wears off, the keeper is his typically blunt 'Nice to Be Dead'--"It’s nice to be underground/Free of the ugly sounds of life"--which happens to be the album’s one electric-guitar rocker.- The New York Times
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Such obvious imitation [of U2] isn’t good strategy; it diminishes well-made songs. Taking Back Sunday is better off merging its old blurted troubles with its new attention to detail.- The New York Times
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The sound is deliberately barren. The guitars never quite fill the space, and the drumming (credited to Knuckles) often has the mechanized indifference of drum-machine tracks.- The New York Times
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This album, the band’s seventh, feels familiar in structure, packed with the usual two-minute bursts of aggression. But it’s improbably weighty and ponderous and unusually slow moving for a band that specializes in gnashing.- The New York Times
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Words are secondary for Sunn O))), a k a Greg Anderson on bass and Stephen O’Malley on guitar, who long ago made thunderous resonant sounds their stock in trade. What’s striking about this new release is its wealth of additional textures: woodwinds, brass, strings, male and female choirs.- The New York Times
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White Rabbits favor physical instruments over electronic abstractions, and the drums kick the music toward an American sound that fortifies its brains with muscle.- The New York Times
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It’s a fragile recollection of California rock from more auspicious times, with stately melodies and vocal chorales over jerry-built foundations: elegies for vanished certainties.- The New York Times
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His new album, Further Complications--musically more immediate, lyrically more beleaguered--was engineered by Steve Albini, whose aesthetics dictate big drums, big guitars and small vocals. So Mr. Cocker is shouting to be heard, which only improves on his comic persona.- The New York Times
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This album is a blast of nostalgia that doesn’t sound bitter or even particularly dated.- The New York Times
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'You' in this case is a placeholder for Mr. Richie’s core demographic, which skews overwhelmingly female, and generally older than any of his kids. But if that makes Just Go a textbook adult-contemporary album, it also lends credible emotional footing to the songs.- The New York Times
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Yet while the album includes its share of blandly pleasant songs--the kind that could position Ms. Avi as a less arty Feist--there are also glints of melancholy clarity that promise more.- The New York Times
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It’s a bit out of focus, perhaps intentionally. Made with his new band, Us Five, it’s sketchy, groovy and a little burdensome.- The New York Times
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Creaks, pings, birdcalls, clarinets, rustles, whooshes, echoes and all sorts of other sonic flotsam surround simple melodies and quietly picked acoustic guitars on La Llama.- The New York Times
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The fabulously snotty attitude, the melodic wit, the rhymes that tend toward glossolalia: yes, Cam’ron has returned to form.- The New York Times
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Ever the self-conscious transgressor, Peaches presents herself as both exceptional and mutable.- The New York Times
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On Set ’Em Wild, Set ’Em Free, the band has produced something practical, with less clutter, and many times better.- The New York Times
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