The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,075 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: 1,597 out of 2075
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2075
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2075
2075 music reviews
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    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Under the Mistletoe
    Mr. Bieber hasn't ever sounded this good. But even Mr. Harrell can't place Mr. Bieber on equal footing with some of his more accomplished guests
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Immortal
    The new versions can be garish (pseudo-tribal drums and jungle noises in "Ben"?) or touching.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love After War
    Throughout his cheerful jumble of a fifth album, Love After War, he pushes both of those buttons [tight execution and a suspension of disbelief], asking you to admire his tasteful slickness without delving much deeper than the surface.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Come Through for You
    The album stays kindly, polished and simpering all the way through, with only one surprise.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Is a Four Letter Word
    Filled with platitudes and, eventually, psychobabble, dippy even by Mr. Mraz's standards.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    California 37
    California 37 resides gladly in "Hey, Soul Sister's" shadow, full of equally goofy songs, some more so.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Boys Don't Cry
    Rumer can't conjure the right twinge of dissolution for Neil Young's "A Man Needs a Maid," and her lack of urgency on "Soulsville," by Isaac Hayes, is damning. But elsewhere she slides into the premise as into a tub full of suds, communing with Townes van Zandt's "Flyin' Shoes" and Jimmy Webb's "P. F. Sloan."
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Punching Bag
    His records over the last nine years, including the new Punching Bag, slide too easily into benign corniness.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hope on the Rocks
    Whatever left turn Mr. Keith took [with "Red Solo Cup"] has been ruthlessly course-corrected on this album, which is dutiful and workmanlike and totally bereft of passion, so rote it could possibly have been written and recorded over a long weekend.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Global Warming
    The sources wouldn't matter if Pitbull added much to them. But he's not budging from the formula of his million-selling 2011 album, "Planet Pit."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Girl on Fire
    It's a measure of how powerful parenthood really is that it generates so many clichés. The new songs that push that subtext out front quickly grow trite, in words and music.... It's the tracks in which Ms. Keys seems to pay attention to a quieter story rather than building new pedestals for herself--that echo and smudge and smear sounds, that lead toward paradox--that suggest something new for her.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jesus Piece
    When the Game isn't rapping about other rappers--which is rare--he is sometimes rapping like other rappers.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goldenheart
    The results have been slow and messy and atmospheric, full of contemporary R&B's customary ingredients (virtual strings, AutoTune, gold-plated emotion) but stretched out, heavy on atmosphere, light on hooks.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Two Lanes of Freedom
    Two Lanes is an album that’s all compromise and almost no courage, a coloring book that hasn’t been filled in. He is a star resting on what look like laurels but are actually fallacies.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What About Now
    What About Now suggests a few paths for progress, and an ambivalence about committing to any one of them, all under a comfort-zone haze of undifferentiated, low-ambition, lightly rootsy hard rock.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being II
    It’s less manic, less experimental, less unpredictable and, oddly, less consistent.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghost on Ghost
    The arrangements are bold but often misplaced, cluttering and distracting from the songs instead of illuminating them; the characters get lost in their costumes.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fashionably Late
    Throughout the album, there is chaos.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blessed Unrest
    The Blessed Unrest is all shoulder-drooping heft, and her musical choices are vexing.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Embracism
    For each solid purchase on a strong lyric there’s a mess somewhere else; for nearly every powerful accretion of sound there’s a nearly unbearable one. The record’s volatility both saves and mars it.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blurred Lines
    What’s striking is how unambitious most of the rest of the album is, especially the half that’s produced by Mr. Thicke with his longtime production partner Pro-Jay.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    AM
    The songs are still sullen, smart and cleverly constructed. But too often on AM, Arctic Monkeys sound less like amalgamators than like imitators.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fuse
    The words are working hard here, and the music is, too, but Mr. Urban is gliding through, barely quaking at all.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Suffering from Success
    “You Don’t Want These Problems”--a posse cut featuring Mr. Ross, Big Sean, French Montana, 2 Chainz, Meek Mill, Ace Hood and Timbaland--comes closer to hitting the album’s bull’s-eye of gloating complaint.... Much of the rest of Suffering From Success feels rote, with too little payoff for the crassness.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Baptized
    It [his voice] wants badly to roar but is given almost no opportunity to here apart from the savage “Traitor.” And so mostly, Mr. Daughtry is a caged animal on this album.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Panties
    Songs like "Cookie," "Crazy Sex" and "Legs Shakin'" start off as promises of highly skilled sexual attentions, but end up as to-do lists.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Voices In A Rented Room
    Both men put tender wheeze and murmur into their voices, but sing in unison or octaves as a default mode, which grows dull almost instantly.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Riser
    He’s deliberate in his choice of songwriters, including Shane McAnally and Josh Kear, who provide some of the better songs on this hit-or-miss album.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Recess
    Recess arrives feeling more like a checked-off item on a bucket list.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Make My Head Sing...
    As a whole, the album is monochromatic, too single-minded about Ms. Mayfield’s new sound--and, at times, a little too determined to reverse-engineer Nirvana’s flanged guitar effects. And her laconic new lyrics don’t always offer the subtleties and paradoxes of her earlier songs.
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