The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vulnicura
    Even amid the most abstruse music, these songs have an emotional immediacy. The physicality of Björk’s voice and the strings are even more striking against the impersonal electronic sounds, all the better to reveal the interior landscape of heartbreak and healing--not a simple story, and all the better for it.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Moonlight
    Mr. El Khatib’s garage rock has never been completely faithful to tradition, but it has also never been this loose or appealing. Moonlight is his third album, and also his most convincing, finding a middle ground between the competing excesses of his first two.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World
    On the whole, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World strikes a note of pop concision and maturity, building on what worked on “The King Is Dead.”
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Slurrup
    These songs were written on the guitar, not the piano, and at their best--“Outhouse,” “Fight Magic With Magic”--their inspirations might come from Big Star, or the Who, or the Byrds. At their weakest, they suggest ’60s garage rock as only a set of anonymous mannerisms.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Absent Fathers
    Both albums [Single Mothers and Absent fathers], particularly Absent Fathers, are a finely tuned wallow in male heartache.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clark
    It’s an album that plays as an album, not a D.J. set.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Toumani & Sidiki
    Pensive or hyperactive, the duets are always gorgeous.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shrink Dust
    This batch of songs also proffers some unvandalized melodies (often with echoes of Neil Young) and some glimmers of heart amid the phantasmagoria.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unflesh
    In her synthetic universe, nothing is stable and anything can be a threat, a condition she greets with matter-of-fact bravery even at her most fragile moments.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reality Show
    Playing a woman too often scorned, she comes out victoriously soulful.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper
    In these songs, Panda Bear has lifted his voice above the instrumental swirl, just enough to reveal some worries about family, friends, purpose and mortality, and to move his music ever so slightly toward pop.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Pinkprint
    The Pinkprint is her third studio album, and like the first two it’s full of compromises and half-successes.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sucker
    The music is brash and glossy, but its attack is varied and full of clever moments.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Messiah
    It doesn’t leap out of speakers; it oozes and bubbles, waiting for a listener to be drawn in. As it does, the pleasures and rewards keep growing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    December Day
    A casual but captivating album.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    36 Seasons
    36 Seasons continues his recent custom of spinning a thin concept into an engrossing narrative.
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Better Tomorrow
    Even as grown-ups, Wu-Tang Clan still has sharp, startling reflexes.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rock or Bust
    There’s not a thing you haven’t heard before in its 11 new songs. What’s important is that they have the band’s traceable fingerprints all over them.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's the Girls!
    Her bubbly first studio album in eight years and one of her best.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Broke With Expensive Taste
    Most of all, she understands rhythms--house, trap, soul, techno, Latin--and she slings rhymes and melodies that fully engage them.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Faith in Strangers
    On his new record, Faith in Strangers, the details are different but the achievement is similar.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Four
    One Direction’s best and most fun album since its debut, and yet still curiously distant.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nick Jonas
    His most mature and riskiest work to date.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lost on the River
    The songs unfurl as they go, gathering resonance and gravity. But the personalities of the songwriters, who are bandleaders on their own, push through.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Man Against Machine
    His first album of original music since 2001, is defiantly behind the times, and skillful enough--mostly--to transcend them.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rips
    Rips is a feel-good gut-punch of a debut album, working a sound that dates back to the Runaways, but also can hold its own right up against current practitioners like Dum Dum Girls.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pain Killer
    Streamlining its roots-minded harmonies and delivering them with new, lean muscle, making for its best album yet, one of the signature country releases of the year.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Storytone
    The vocals hold just enough honest rough spots to celebrate, everywhere else, the purity and committed fragility of Mr. Young’s voice, which is high and clear, even though he’ll be 69 on Nov. 12.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Flesh & Machine
    This is hardly a new concept, but Mr. Lanois knows how to put an accessible stamp on his more experimental protocols.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anything Goes
    Florida Georgia Line is a literal breeze, with songs that land like feathers. Anything Goes doesn’t pack quite the raw shock of that duo’s 2012 debut album, “Here’s to the Good Times.”
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    RTJ2
    These are pummeling cyber-howls, these songs.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rock & Roll Time
    On all of them, Mr. Lewis sounds peaceful, steady-rolling; this is as easy for him as falling off a log. What’s missing is the thing he’s great at: creating a feeling of surprise or danger.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1989
    Full of expertly constructed, slightly neutered songs about heartbreak, 1989, which is to be released on Monday, doesn’t announce itself as oppositional. But there is an implicit enemy on this breezily effective album: the rest of mainstream pop, which 1989 has almost nothing in common with.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sings the Great Diva Classics
    The vocals sound spontaneous and unprocessed, not hiding the occasional strain; “People,” in a slow orchestral arrangement, strives but creaks. There’s only one complete mismatch of song and treatment: a snappy big-band version of “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heart on My Sleeve
    This album is full of the sort of self-lacerating confessional music that was all the rage two decades ago, and now, in a different time, feels both completely foreign and surprisingly refreshing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I've Been to Many Places
    Hearing him on a record like this has become the quickest and truest way to take his measure.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Old Boots, New Dirt
    Mr. Aldean’s shtick is effective--his sturdy voice, paired with production that has more in common with sensual 1980s hard rock than modern country, makes for uncommonly brawny country music.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lily-O
    Mr. Amidon’s singing is unforced but sturdy, and possibly playing with your notions of guilelessness.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything Will Be Alright in the End
    Weezer has reclaimed what it does best.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    PlectrumElectrum
    What constrains PlectrumElectrum is its rigorous, deliberately retro back-to-basics mandate. Prince at his best doesn’t just collect and recreate genres; he smashes them together.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Art Official Age
    While the production details of each track are full of lessons in musicianly ingenuity, only “Breakdown” has a melody that lingers. The others are overshadowed by Prince’s back catalog.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A New Testament
    There are some quite serious by-the-numbers clichés of American music here, which might be more problematic if the record weren’t so suffused with a spirit of trust--in idealized relationships, in his favorite musical sources, perhaps in clichés themselves.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone
    She’s pithy and penetrating, bruised but steadfast, proud of the grain and drawl of her voice.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tomorrow's Modern Boxes
    On the new album, Mr. Yorke is both instantly recognizable and less crowd-pleasing than ever. But for anyone who’s stayed with him this far, it’s worth following him further into the murk.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Popular Problems
    There’s no lesson, no punch line, just the unflinching gaze of someone who’s already seen too much.
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    X
    X is one of his least ambitious releases.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller
    His performance is a respectful but contemporary nod.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Partners
    The choppy calls and responses between Ms. Streisand and her partners, however, lack conversational or narrative flow, and you have an uncomfortable sense that the parts were spliced together after the fact.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Songs of Innocence
    The album is a blast of discoveries, hopes, losses, fears and newfound resolve in lyrics that are openly autobiographical. It’s also a blast of unapologetic arena rock and cathedral-scale production, equally gigantic and detailed, in the music that carries them.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Goddess
    Out in a naturalistic realm, supported by the music rather than encased by it, Banks sounds more ordinary. She’s at her best facing down a sterile, indifferent universe.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clearing the Path to Ascend
    It’s a stealth band, working on the rack of riff and repetition, moving slowly toward loud, intense, orange-sky beauty.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Seen It All: The Autobiography
    This is a strong, if unimaginative album.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Primitive and Deadly
    The beginning and the end are phases of warming up and warming down, while the middles are rich and complicated.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Manipulator
    There are 17 songs here, and after a while, they feel short on basic songwriting surprises: Built on narrow foundations, high on crude intuition, they keep running into walls.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Moonshine in the Trunk
    A shiny clunker of an album, it rings of brand rehabilitation and topical retrenchment.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Get Hurt
    The music on Get Hurt is broader and more muscular. It feels like music made from the outside in, not the other way.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hypnotic Eye
    As romance, ethics, community and the economy collapse, Mr. Petty and the Heartbreakers offer two old-fashioned bulwarks: the solidarity of the band and the sinewy construction of the songs.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    By Any Means [Mixtape]
    This mixtape--his third strong one in the last year or so--features some of his most accessible material, songs that pair the savage darkness of mid-1990s West Coast gangster rap with huge, bombastic choruses, as if the one thing that excites him is the chance to be widely heard.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nobody's Smiling
    The rapping is muscular, self-assured and occasionally even startling, as in the offbeat accents during a stretch of “Hustle Harder.” Which makes the missteps all the more vexing, none more so than “Diamonds,” with a hook and verse by Big Sean and a premise already picked clean by Kanye West.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Honeyblood
    Honeyblood has a core idea, but it sustains slight expansions of the musical palette.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terms of My Surrender
    Produced by Doug Lancio, the lead guitarist in the Combo, Mr. Hiatt’s fine backing band, Terms of My Surrender has a relaxed and rawboned sound, credibly rooted in live performance.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    World Peace Is None of Your Business
    In its stompy art song streaked with slick noise and nuevo-flamenco guitar, its clumsy lyrics, its condemnation of so much human endeavor, all its stolid idiosyncrasy, World Peace (Harvest/Capitol) constitutes its own weird kind of pedantic success.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Where We Come From
    The music pushes dancehall toward pop, with slow-chorded synthesizer anthems produced by Dre Skull and snappy electro lines from Dubbel Dutch; even with Popcaan’s thick Jamaican accent, the plan is to make singalongs easy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Favorite Waitress
    The songs lurch, sway, plunk and rock out; they turn cryptic or offer direct comfort, focusing the album’s many allusions to economic inequality.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What Is This Heart?
    The songs allow drama instead of losing themselves in repetition and reverie. The music is closer to pop, but it’s still within Mr. Krell’s interior world.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fuego
    Like the rest of this disciplined but frisky album, the jam doesn’t ramble; guitar solos are pointed, and each section heads for a clear crest.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1000 Forms of Fear
    It’s not the triumphal, laminated, computer-perfected tone of Sia’s clients. It’s the sound of the loopy, unresolved passions that can still be alive within pop formulas.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Trigga
    There’s more reckoning with feeling, but it’s somewhat hidden.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gamel
    It’s rugged, inspired, original music.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    PHOX
    Phox and its producer, Brian Joseph (a recording engineer for Bon Iver who worked with the band at Bon Iver’s April Base Studios), make the most of studio flexibility in songs that develop and transform themselves radically as they go.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Electric Brick Wall
    Electric Brick Wall, even more than the band’s last record, “Rad Times Xpress IV,” coheres into songs with good form.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Neon Icon
    Neon Icon is a fine hip-hop album from someone who seemed as if he’d make anything but
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last Dance
    Last Dance is by no means a dolorous album, resounding as it does with empathy and melodic accord. There isn’t a solo as outright stunning as Mr. Jarrett’s on “Body and Soul,” from “Jasmine,” but there may be more brilliant flourishes of duologue.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Band of Brothers
    Mr. Cannon’s restrained but ever-supportive production uses Nashville session players and the harmonica player Mickey Raphael from Mr. Nelson’s band, in his perpetual dialogue with Mr. Nelson’s vocals, while Mr. Nelson’s succinct lead guitar turns up regularly.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    While You Were Sleeping
    His second album on the label--While You Were Sleeping, is a leap forward, brilliant precisely for its blurriness of style.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lazaretto
    Sometimes it’s tightly argumentative, weirdly superstructured, assertive in not wanting to be understood too easily. Sometimes it relaxes into pre-existing Americana hyphenates--blues-rock, country-rock, energies closer to what certain adult listeners hold up as “real music.” The less real Mr. White is, the better he sounds.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Early Riser
    These songs don’t have a great dynamic range, or produce very surprising events. They float past you, often made of three or four chords and a trickling, curious beat.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Comet, Come to Me
    [A] deep-groove, emotionally insinuative new album.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Platinum
    Her characters in these songs--which feature some of the most incisive songwriting in any genre--are complex, self-confident and self-lacerating all at once, and most crucially, completely knowing and in on the joke.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Songs
    He has figured out how understatement can lend gravity to a song. Mr. Fullbright joins the lineage of terse Southwestern songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, sticking to a few folky chords and reaching for unassailable clarity.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Government Plates
    Those instrumentals stop and start, throb and zap, sprint and lurch, empty out or swarm with noise, and they often completely switch texture in midtrack--the more disorienting the better.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    III
    The songs on III encompass majestic processionals, droney space rock, whipsaw distorted funk and songs in which it’s best simply to hang on for the ride.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nabuma Rubberband
    Little Dragon has traded its austere electronic blueprints for 3-D renderings, making its music more approachable but no less eccentric.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Are We There
    For a wallow in obsessive love, it’s hard to top “Your Love Is Killing Me” on Sharon Van Etten’s fourth album, Are We There.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In Conflict
    A sustained chamber-synthpop reflection on the idea of romantic and sexual turmoil, the album is also a tangle of confessions and absolutions, artfully and bravely unresolved.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Divide and Exit
    Divide and Exit is their most consistent record, but this is not music with a wide range.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dereconstructed
    Throughout the album, the guitars provide friction and rough-and-tumble tension, and there’s more of both in Mr. Bains’s words.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Brightly Painted One
    On Brightly Painted One (Bella Union), her second album, her music never sounds glibly pleased with its present; she is always looking uneasily toward the next line, or moving toward mysticism.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sylvan Esso
    Mr. Sanborn’s programming and production ground these songs in a range of textures, borrowing from techno, electro-pop and dubstep. He’s sensitive to the needs of the vocals, and supple with his touch.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Upside Down Mountain
    All of Mr. Oberst’s gifts align on Upside Down Mountain: his empathy, his unassumingly natural melodies, the quavery sincerity in his voice, the plain-spoken but telling lyrics that he’s now careful to deliver clearly.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Be Kind
    To Be Kind continues a run of evermore committed, detailed and powerful work since the band formed again with a new lineup four years ago.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Turn Blue
    It’s surer and more satisfying than either of those previous albums [El Camino and Brothers], and seems less labored.
Page: