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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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Antidotes
    Foals make hard, trebly, uncomfortable, spiky, anxious, uptight, straining-to-be-different music, and for all that, it’s rather good.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Consolers Of The Lonely
    The Raconteurs are singing, more often than not, about desperate characters. But that desperation only makes the crunch of the music more euphoric.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shine
    Estelle Swaray is something of a novelty. Not because of her reference points, which range from classic hip-hop to lovers’ rock reggae to 1980s pop, and not because she raps even better than she sings, effortlessly switching between the two.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bright Lights Of America
    Their sound--enhanced by the energies of a second guitarist, Chris Head, and a bassist, Chris #2--literally urges participation. Every song’s chorus helpfully comes prearranged as a sing-along: no room for sullenness here.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold
    The words are upfront, with a naturalistic delivery that sometimes recalls Kanye West. These are storytelling songs, not club tracks, moving at midtempos and often easing back toward ballads.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Santogold
    Through all her riffs and rhythms Ms. White comes across as both a scrappy underdog and a girlish cheerleader for everyone who feels like one.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Supreme Balloon
    The old gizmos and low-res sounds bring out Matmos’s sense of humor in cartoony tracks that go blipping and snorting along in bouncy 4/4, coming up with a new sonic rib-tickler every few bars.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thing Of The Past
    The record is super studied, but never bloodless. And it’s much better than that sounds.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    II Trill
    The tracks on II Trill are brawnier and slicker than before. The minor chords are pumped up with reverb and orchestral heft (though the horns and strings are synthesized), and the songs are full of pop vocal melodies, like the Jamaican singer Sean Kingston’s harmony choruses in 'That’s Gangsta.'
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dystopia
    Cosmically synthetic, subversively euphoric: such are the attributes of Midnight Juggernauts, a three-piece band from Melbourne, Australia. Dystopia, the group’s first full-length album, advances the same mishmash of glam rock, disco and electro pop that won the endorsement of Justice.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lie Down In The Light
    They’ve made a mature record, with steady hands on the tiller.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Watershed
    Watershed, the new Opeth album, broad enough to encompass death-metal pummeling as well as cello and English horn, is typically engrossing--symphonic, and in a way organic.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All I Intended To Be
    The material seems to have been chosen for its precision of image and ease of melody, and perhaps for some inherent ruminative languor.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tooth Of Crime
    Mr. Burnett’s songs for the show are the basis for his new album, and a decade of marinating and reworking has only deepened their black-humor charm.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Thousand Shark's Teeth
    The songs glow with rumination, and she avoids heaviness by staying elusive.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Loverly
    Naturalism is the idea, but this is a beautifully constructed record, from Mr. Moran’s blenderized, genre-defying piano solos to Ms. Wilson’s judicious phrasing, using the full range of her double-smoked voice.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective
    A reasonable first impulse is to try to identify all the sound sources; the inevitable second impulse is to marvel at how well he has chopped up and rearranged them into units of rhythm.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Real Animal
    The particulars of Mr. Escovedo’s autobiography on this album — his wanderings to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin--may not matter much to those not already following his music. But the songs also tell a larger story: of reckless youth and unrepentant maturity, of time’s ravages and insights.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stay Positive
    Despite some subtle new touches --a harpsichord, a banjo, light strings--the sound proposes constancy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fire Songs
    The songs hold sorrow and longing, keeping self-pity in check with serene grace.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Party Intellectuals
    The musicianship is intense regardless of the subtext, with all three players hurling themselves into their effort. They have an equally convincing way with bruising thrash punk, one-chord-vamp heroics and brooding atmospherics.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Agony & Irony
    Their sound is potent in its simplicity.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Partie Traumatic
    Black Kids’ peppy songs juggle yelpy Cure-style lead vocals, beats from the intersection of new wave and disco, wordplay (“Hit the Heartbrakes,” “I get angst in my pants”), comic synthesizer squeals and, under it all, enough ache to justify all that desperate sublimation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Two Men With The Blues
    Armstrong’s example created the conditions for this to happen, and the record is an almost classical example of his old game: eluding American stereotypes of country, city, blues, jazz, race, class, humor and sadness.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LP3
    Like much instrumental rock, Ratatat’s tunes can still sound like a soundtrack in search of a credit sequence. Yet all the new transformations enrich Ratatat’s music both sonically and psychologically, stoking new drama and hinting at hidden reservoirs of melancholy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Coral Sea
    A year later Mr. Shields turned The Coral Sea into an evolving, reverberating, nearly unbroken wash of sound, as boundless and mutable as the ocean itself.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Life Death Love and Freedom
    It’s a brave album in the way it sets aside all his old consolations.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Stoop
    Her songwriting is modern and quick-tongued, as she casually glides between sassy singing and melodic rapping. She handles syllables, rhymes and ideas far more skillfully than her liaisons.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mar Dulce
    Bajofondo brings in guest vocalists as wild cards: singers including Nelly Furtado, Elvis Costello, the Argentine rockers Gustavo Cerati and Juan Subirá, the Mexican rocker Julieta Venegas and the octogenarian Uruguayan tango singer Lágrima Ríos, in her last recording, as well as rapping by Mala Rodriguez (from Spain) and Santullo (from Uruguay). They tip the balance toward imperfect, immediate humanity, and their drama rubs off on the instrumentals too.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New York City
    The album’s surprises are glimpses of misgivings shared with the groove, like the keyboard obsessively jabbing one chord in 'Losing Myself' or the eerie track--tom-toms, fluttery organ notes, high “ahs”--behind 'I Want Out.'
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