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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    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lasers
    Lasers is a chaotic album full of gummy rhymes that look better on the page than they sound to the ear, delivered with a tone of tragic bombast.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Collapse into Now
    Where the spirit-void blankness of R.E.M. once felt intuitive and intentional, it now feels accidental. Most of this record's musical temperament seems reheated or purchased.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Johnny Boy Would Love This: A Tribute to John Martyn
    Like most tribute albums, Johnny Boy Would Love This is mixed, with a few misfires, like Snow Patrol's overblown "May You Never." But Mr. Martyn's pensive, moody spirit comes through, and the tribute should send listeners back to his own 1973 masterpiece, "Solid Air."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sweetheart of the Sun
    It's a spare and occasionally stiff album that has more to do with, say, the Indigo Girls than the 1960s bands the Bangles grew up worshiping.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Clear as Day
    The energy of this album sometimes outpaces the singer, who's best when he's deliberate, and whose voice isn't as robust as it could be on these songs.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Great Escape Artist
    The sound is brand-name familiar but all too settled; the songs place their hard-rock hooks neatly but without the original band's startling ups and downs.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stage Whisper
    Her singing is collected and on pitch, whether she's working with a whispery hush or a lemon-tart croon.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    TM:103 Hustlerz Ambition
    All in all it's a step forward for Young Jeezy, even if everyone around him is walking much faster.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Emotional Traffic
    Mr. McGraw has never sounded this casual. It doesn't suit him.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All of Me
    [A] comfortable, small and sometimes vague album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wrecking Ball
    It's got plenty of ups and downs.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blunderbuss
    Few songs on "Blunderbuss" truly knock the wind out of you, as the White Stripes could - even with riffs that were fragmentary, simple or borrowed. This is a songwriter's record, and a kind of orchestrator's record; there's also a new overall vehemence in the lyrics, hammering on dishonesty, jealousy, immorality.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    2:54
    [The album] seems to prefer operating under a steady churn of gloom. But there's real muscle here, both in the singing, which is rendered wide and fat, an ooze of its own; and also in the guitar playing, which is hefty and dark.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thirty Miles West
    He doesn't sound like he's trying to chase after Nashville's contemporary norm, which is admirable. But his confidence often scans as complacency.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cherry Thing
    What's intended to be raw can sound smug. In "Dirt" the Thing pushes past the tenderness that lives in that song to get to aggressive, stylized and finally anonymous squalling. Its loud catharsis rolls over her quieter one, and it's not the only time that happens on this record.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Overexposed
    It's when he deviates from the plastic norm that he actually sounds most awkward.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    MTMTMK
    The partnership [Afro-Euro balance] is more complicated and less satisfying.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Never
    This is an art-school record; Ms. Levi's work resists easy pleasure and traditional beauty.... [yet] her songs hook you.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Christian a Tunde Adjuah
    The album's unity of mood becomes a haze over the course of its nearly two-hour running time.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Charmer
    Charmer, her eighth studio album, represents a sunny turn for her, at least in relative terms.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Glad Rag Doll
    "Wide River to Cross," by Buddy and Julie Miller is a contemporary outlier on an album crowded with relics, and its beautiful realization invites the question of what other sort of album Ms. Krall and Mr. Burnett might have made without any point to prove.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Night Train
    Even at his most powerful, singing hard in his nasal voice--it's got impact but not much traction.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pale Fire
    As she watches love drift into and, more often, out of reach, the songs find themselves dissolving too.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
    The album wears thin in totality, but has isolated moments: entrances and releases and dropouts.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ghost [EP]
    All together, it's just another round of throwing ideas at the wall. Everything sticks, more or less. But for how long?
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Woman to Woman
    Why is her big-voiced delivery so similar and balanced in nearly every song? Why are there no sharp intakes of breath, stutters, meaningful cracks or strange textures, like the battling squeaks that made "Love," one of her early singles, so good?
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    O.N.I.F.C.
    For someone so relaxed, he certainly sounds at odds with much of this album; even the warm, enveloping production, primarily by ID Labs, doesn't loosen up his stiff flow at all.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cross Culture
    Mr. Lovano is taking a step back from the material of jazz and looking at its motivating forces; implicitly, he’s asking why we make it in the first place. As long as the question lingers in your head, the album works. When the music slackens, and the tension dissipates, the question goes away.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Girl Who Got Away
    The electronics are there, however, and they lift the album’s better songs out of the sad-sack zone.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Re-Mit
    The songs on Re-Mit, his 30th studio album with his band the Fall, resemble a row of unevenly smashed windows, or patches of broken concrete in a street--unsightly ruptures within a familiar context, potentially more shapely and interesting the closer you look, but perhaps not.
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