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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    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Yell Fire!
    Originality seems less important to Mr. Franti than moral directness. [24 Jul 2006]
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Dutchess
    It’s essentially a Black Eyed Peas album with two fewer rappers. That’s an improvement: two down, two to go. [18 Sep 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rotten Apple
    Where “The Hunger for More” was sly and (almost despite itself) infectious, this rather workmanlike CD isn’t so memorable. [9 Oct 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    9
    "9"... has a confused feel: he simultaneously glosses up the production, tries too hard to seem edgy, then compares women to sandy shores and the morning sun like an adult-contemporary sap. [20 Nov 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Light Grenades
    The music’s intricacies become less impressive when so many of them are directly lifted from far better songs. [27 Nov 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Inspiration
    Young Jeezy’s appeal was never his writing, but now words sometimes fail him. [11 Dec 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Introducing Joss Stone
    Her makeover seems too urban for her Starbucks-mom base and too retro for urban radio. [19 Mar 2007]
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My December
    "My December" isn’t a shocking change of direction, though it’s also not very good.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blackout
    The electronic beats and bass lines are as thick as Ms. Spears’s voice is thin, and as the album title suggests, the general mood is bracingly unapologetic.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    E=MC2
    It is in the same vein [as "The Emancipation of Mimi"], but much less good.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    3 Doors Down
    The lack of specificity has also been a 3 Doors Down hallmark and that blankness overwhelms their decidedly unflamboyant, often dull fourth album.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bring Ya To The Brink
    Made with a handful of production teams, it’s a stubbornly fluorescent record, long on thudding downbeats and short on nuance or grace.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    L.A.X.
    Almost everything here, from the boasting ('Money') to the baiting ('LAX Files,' 'Cali Sunshine'), is pro forma. Worse, the Game, never a fluid rapper, sounds positively lumpy, as if he were delivering verses while running up a steep flight of stairs, or as if the last few years of pugnacity have finally left him winded.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Glasvegas
    Glasvegas is determinedly provincial, insisting there is grandeur in everyday lives. But what sounds rousing in Britain can sound sodden and overwrought to American ears.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Universal Mind Control
    It’s a blatant mismatch, Mr. Williams’s blunt-force id with Common’s casual gravity. The Neptunes, who produce seven of the 10 songs here, treat Common as an obstacle to be worked around, which, in fairness, he is.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Different Me
    Where her voice was once assured and three-dimensional, here, although many of the songs are pleasant, Ms. Cole comes off flat.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ryan Leslie
    He shows few idiosyncrasies of his own until the final song, 'Gibberish,' with Auto-Tune effects that render some lyrics unintelligible, as if he thinks they’re irrelevant.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unstoppable
    Unfortunately the album is filled with blank and unspecific emotions that without Mr. LeVox’s pyrotechnics, are distractingly dull.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Epiphany
    Epiphany is an unusually labored album, two artists missing each other at the pass.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Voice
    In fairness he has mostly dispensed with the shouting and the repetition, vocal styles that helped Mr. Jones embed his signature phrases into the hip-hop consciousness. But his rhymes are still lumpy and dim.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Guilty Pleasure
    Ms. Tisdale, an average singer, gasps on 'Hot Mess.' "I’m leaving every piece of my conscience behind." But being bad, it turns out, is sort of boring.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Man On The Moon: The End Of Day
    Man on the Moon, the debut album from this rapper-singer from Cleveland, is a colossal, and mystifying, missed opportunity, misguided if it is in fact guided at all.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    She Wolf
    It’s so undercooked and overwritten--with wan wolf howls and lines about being treated like a coffee machine in an office--that it reaches a special class of fascinating-awful.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    For Your Entertainment
    This is an overwrought, clunky, only sparingly entertaining record, constantly in argument with itself. Worse, 'For Your Entertainment' isn’t an ambitious flop, it’s a conservative one.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Shock Value II
    The productions flaunt Timbaland trademarks: vocal sounds imitating turntable scratching, quick keyboard arabesques, grunts as percussion. But now he fills in the spaces that made his old tracks so startling.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unleashed
    On the whole, though, Hurricane Chris sounds bored. Even on an album this short--10 songs, 38 minutes--he manages to repeat lines and references.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Suite #420
    Suite 420, beyond some sweet spots early in the disc, becomes wickedly boring.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Funstyle
    It's a jumble of snarky (and funny) music-business skits and raps, junky computerized samples, tuneful near-pop songs with awkwardly overstuffed production, thudding cliches and, in tantalizing fragments, glimmers of her unsettling insight into character flaws, including her own.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time
    It's easy to imagine Santana completely revamping some guitar-centered hits. But for most of the album, that was apparently too daring for Mr. Santana and his pop mentor and co-producer, Clive Davis. These oldies tend to stay close to the original arrangements and vocal phrasing, perhaps hoping that familiarity can sneak them onto the radio.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Live It Up
    Only the album's last track, "A Song About Love," feels true. His voice is serrate, his mood is foul, and the song is sturdy enough to stand up to both. It's the sound of Mr. DeWyze's then and now finally colliding.
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