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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    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Life
    Reinvention isn’t exciting unless there’s something existing to reinvent. A record like this--with grown-up passions and accountable moods, stirring key modulations, gauzy slow jams and hyper-mainstream ballads--maintains the tradition.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Communion
    Accepting the accomplishments on this album of diet club music perhaps requires a suspension of distaste for bandwagoners and carpetbaggers. But in this album’s most thrilling moments, whether the music is effective because it’s familiar or familiar because it’s effective almost ceases to be a concern.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cascade
    The standard comment about Mr. Basinski’s work is that its evocation of decay grips your emotions and reduces you to jelly, though I don’t get that so much from Cascade.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Depression Cherry
    You’ve heard these sounds before, and you’ve felt these feelings before. The added value here, if you want it, is the organization and rigor of the blankness.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Midnight
    On Midnight, everything’s come undone, often for the better. In a few places, it recalls “Tango in the Night,” Fleetwood Mac’s lustrous last (noteworthy) gasp from 1987. Ms. Potter doesn’t quite have the tragedy Stevie Nicks so effortlessly channels, but she nonetheless finds moody pockets for her voice while the band hones a chilly take on brisk rock.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    #AndSeeThatsTheThing [EP]
    On this EP, the duets are more balanced, be it “Hey There” or the rising hit “Back Up,” a back-and-forth with Big Sean.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    High
    The standard narrative is that a band’s second record reflects experience, wisdom or moderation, and High has a bit of that in a larger and more managed sound.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Repentless
    Repentless is comfortable, full of certainty, good enough.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Freedom & Surrender
    Its sound runs slicker and punchier than Ms. Wright’s previous standard.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unbreakable
    For most of Unbreakable, she plays big sister--someone who’s happily in love, willing to offer advice and wishing for a better world. It’s a benign role but a modest one, reinforced by the music.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    V
    The balance of good cheer and dark clouds is partly in the arrangements--V comprises exceedingly bright songs verging on true pop-punk. It’s probably the cleanest-sounding Wavves album to date.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beach Music
    Alex G’s narrators have often been traumatized, druggie, lovesick or inscrutable, and moving up the indie-rock circuit hasn’t made his new songs any more outgoing. Just the opposite: They are more cryptic and withdrawn.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    35 MPH Town
    Where Mr. Keith is truly gentle, though, is in detailing the faultlines of the heart. “Beautiful Stranger” is a sweaty song about rekindled passion, delivered with Teddy Pendergrass intensity.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Documentary 2
    The Game is literally inseparable from his influences. He doesn’t digest them as other rappers might; instead, he wears them like brands. He too is joined by oodles of guests, a striking show of support for a midcareer rapper who’s pugnacious to boot. Both Kanye West and Drake appear here, and in strong form.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cold Beer Conversation
    Cold Beer Conversation is a bit looser than Mr. Strait’s last album, “Love Is Everything,” with convincing flashes of western swing (“It Takes All Kinds”). But the standouts here are the love songs.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Teens of Style
    The music isn’t anywhere near pop-radio gloss. As Mr. Toledo sings about alienation, frustration, suicidal despair and, in “Times to Die,” about theological disputes and getting his demos heard, he’s still every bit the lone outsider. He’s lucky that he exorcises his troubles in the studio--or maybe we are.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Montage Of Heck: The Home Recordings
    This is for completists.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
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