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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    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Someday World
    It’s an uneven album, with stretches that were probably more fun in the studio than on replay.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Whispers
    While Mr. Rosenberg can be affecting, the narrowness of his vision can be suffocating. Most of the time his lyrics are like teenager’s scribbled poems.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch
    It’s cumbersome and overstuffed, even if some of its moments are keepers.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Somewhere Under Wonderland
    Somewhere Under Wonderland teems with lyrics full of rambling travelogue and mystical gobbledygook. Mr. Duritz sings them confidently, in a voice that’s not as laden with meaning as he seems to think, and preserving his shambolic nature.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    V
    V is like a peppy new Nissan Altima: It won’t give you too many problems; it won’t attract stares; it probably won’t get stolen. Its parts are reliable, though none have the pulse of “Moves Like Jagger,” the 2011 hit that gave this group new life.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Don't Dance
    In places, there is something hasty and unfocused about this album, a sense of grasping for something just a bit out of reach.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Four
    One Direction’s best and most fun album since its debut, and yet still curiously distant.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hood Billionaire
    Mr. Ross is trying hard to find new ways to present himself, making this an ambitious album, but not always one with the right ambition.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Star Elephant
    The album’s social commitments are stronger than its aesthetic commitments, but it doesn’t suffer for that.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wallflower
    Where Ms. Krall usually plays vigorous keyboards on her albums, here her pianism is all but absent. Most of the fills, played by Mr. Foster, are strictly routine. It’s all the more mystifying because Ms. Krall, when prodded by a rhythm section, can really swing.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hollywood: A Story of a Dozen Roses
    Much of the production on Hollywood is swampy, but it’s a digital swamp. Mr. Foxx’s voice is slathered with so many effects that he veers toward anonymity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    1989
    Mr. Adams isn’t brave enough to depart meaningfully from the script. Where the songs work, it’s because of Ms. Swift’s bulletproof melodies. When they fail, it’s because of his conservatism.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What A Time To Be Alive [Mixtape]
    For the most part, What a Time to Be Alive is a layup from two of hip-hop’s most innovative rappers, not a hasty record, but not an intricate one either, more like a series of energetic first drafts, with choruses often little more than the same phrase repeated ad nauseam.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Storyteller
    She largely picks songs that serve as launch platforms for her ballistic-missile voice, but they don’t cohere into a whole identity.... If Ms. Underwood has developed a thematic specialty, it’s the woman-done-wrong anthem. The ones on this album are some of the better songs here.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Purpose
    Even though Mr. Bieber is younger than all of the men of One Direction, he sounds exponentially more experienced, and exponentially more fatigued on Purpose. He is also the best singer of the bunch, and the one with a clear vision for his sound, even if he’s being largely denied it here.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Buffet
    The point is that all of these songs are capable, and one is not much better than another.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wildfire
    She has a clear, edgeless voice, and she’s versatile, though often here it can sound like she’s blindly experimenting with styles.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    This Is Acting
    Even as she and her producers flaunt their layered vocals and whiz-bang sound effects, there are already so many of Sia’s midtempo victim-to-victory anthems around that they offer diminishing returns, particularly when listened to as an album.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anti
    Anti is a chaotic and scattershot album, not the product of a committed artistic vision, or even an appealingly freeform aesthetic, but rather an amalgam of approaches, tones, styles and moods.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Thank You
    She has a round and slightly stodgy voice that’s most effective when it aims lowest, as on the winning novelty song “Dance Like Yo Daddy,” full of quizzical dance instructions (“Can you overbite? Can you old man overbite?”) and doo-wop harmonies over a skronking sax and sock-hop swing. Elsewhere on this spotty album, Ms. Trainor grinds her way through tough-stand songs like “Watch Me Do,” a homage to Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women (Part 1),” and “Me Too,” where she awkwardly proclaims self-love.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Glory
    Even with her voice upfront, Ms. Spears isn’t singing anything particularly personal.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    AIM
    Much of the album comes across as lightweight. Too many of the songs sound like sketches, running out of ideas midway through.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hopeless Fountain Kingdom
    There isn’t a flicker of musical edge on this album, only a belief in the crowdsourcing of ideas. Where Halsey sets herself apart is in her subject matter and manner of delivery.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Makes You Country
    What Makes You Country is among his most temperate albums, alternately soothing and fatiguing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Man of the Woods
    Sometimes convincing, sometimes limp.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shawn Mendes
    Shawn Mendes is appealing if not wholly engaging, full of pleasantly anonymous songs that systematically obscure Mr. Mendes’s talents.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    DUMMY BOY
    Energetic but scattered.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Girl
    The best songs on “Hero” were disarmingly detailed, and sometimes funny. “Girl,” however, tips away from those strengths in favor of self-help bromides broad enough to exclude no one.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Big Day
    It feels no more fleshed out than “Coloring Book,” from 2016 (which was nominated for a best rap album Grammy), and is less sonically consistent than “Acid Rap,” from 2013. And it’s less impressive than either of them. At 22 tracks, it’s overlong and scattered.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Center Won't Hold
    Too many of the new songs sound diligent and derivative, as if Sleater-Kinney were working through a pop apprenticeship. It’s good to know that the group doesn’t want to repeat itself, that the band is also out to master 21st-century digital tools. But on “The Center Won’t Hold,” Sleater-Kinney hasn’t found its version 2.0.
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