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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    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Britney Jean
    Ms. Spears and Will.i.am have turned to European disc jockeys who have found dance music’s lowest, least funky common denominator: the steady thump of four-on-the-floor. And they’ve settled for too many tepid tracks.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crash My Party
    A few times on the competent but wearisome Crash My Party he sounds dutifully twangy, but those moments are exceptions.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nobody Knows
    It’s possible to like this record in theory while imagining one that’s 50 percent more enjoyable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Colored Sands
    The album has stability, consistency. But too much of it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hall of Fame
    All together, that makes Hall of Fame beautiful more often than it’s interesting, because Big Sean’s ear is working smarter than his mouth.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trials & Tribulations
    The end-zone dance that is “Bugatti” is far more in keeping with hip-hop’s prevailing mood, and half of this album tries to match it but falls short. But most of the rest of Trials & Tribulations is far darker and more reflective.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blessed Unrest
    The Blessed Unrest is all shoulder-drooping heft, and her musical choices are vexing.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fashionably Late
    Throughout the album, there is chaos.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ciara
    Her fifth, is one of the most convincing R&B albums of the year, even if it does a very thin job of being convincing about Ciara herself.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magna Carta Holy Grail
    Though Timbaland’s productions always hold some sly surprises, “Magna Carta ... Holy Grail” comes across largely as a transitional album, as if Jay-Z has tired of pop but hasn’t found a reliable alternative.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ceremony
    The record is awkward and seriously pretentious at times, but you can’t miss the heat of its ambition.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Omens
    This is a clangorous album in every way, full of brick-dense synths and abusive drums, and it often succeeds by blind force. But elsewhere the duo--Nathaniel Motte and Sean Foreman--are much slier and much more successful.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being II
    It’s less manic, less experimental, less unpredictable and, oddly, less consistent.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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
    Jesus Piece
    When the Game isn't rapping about other rappers--which is rare--he is sometimes rapping like other rappers.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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?
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