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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    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vexovoid
    It doesn’t sound as if the songs were inventing their own structures and falling apart in the process.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You're Nothing
    Iceage has only improved on its formula of turbulent energy and disaffected poetry, managing still to sound youthful, even juvenile--not such a stretch, age-wise--while reaching toward new ambitions.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Light Up Gold
    The singing and songwriting mostly split between Austin Brown and Mr. Savage, who are astute enough to write taut, smart lyrics, and self-aware enough to arch an eyebrow while maintaining the pose.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fourth Corner
    Her mercurial, dramatic songs aren’t tied to the standard forms or plain rhetoric of the blues or pop. Her melodies hop and swoop asymmetrically, and most of them ride choppy patterns of distorted guitars, played and layered by Ms. Whitley.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    M B V
    This is vivid music, with color and texture and perhaps taste.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All That Echoes
    The singing is warm and temperate, emotionally expressive without any sign of strain. But there’s an intriguing tension in some of the other material.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Feeling Mortal
    Mr. Kristofferson's voice wavers, indicating general pitch areas rather than specific notes, and he doesn't use it artfully to stress images or ideas as he rolls through the words. Some of those lyrics, though, can be dense and strong, working inside and outside the styles and structures of his best years.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Petra Goes to the Movies
    The arrangements are ingenious, emphasizing Ms. Haden's gift for mimesis: she can suggest the swoon of a string section as handily as the blare of a solitary bugle.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Almanac
    While the songs retain their verse-chorus-verse clarity, the newfound breadth of the music orchestrates and enriches lyrics that take the long view.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beta Love
    When Mr. Miles gets too literal, as on "Binary Mind," you can begin to feel cornered. Far better is his bittersweet keen on "Angel, Please" and "For Once" and "Is It Too Much," songs of direct melodic and emotional thrust.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My True Story
    It's a tasteful genre exercise that employs old-fashioned conventions with strategic license.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mystical Weapons
    In 13 instrumentals that rarely outstay their welcome, it sounds as if the studio was filled with exotic percussion and with wavery analog instruments and effects.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fade
    Together Mr. McEntire and Yo La Tengo have calmed and thickened the band's music.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blood Oaths of the New Blues
    The songs take their time but never ramble, as Mr. Toth faces his existential conundrums with something like equanimity.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Elements of Light
    Elements of Light begins and ends contemplatively, letting metallic tones shimmer and sustain.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Berberian Sound Studio
    The music doesn't need film imagery to be deeply unsettling.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Buddy and Jim
    Mr. Miller and Mr. Lauderdale gave themselves a professional assignment that they could handle, as pals, with aplomb.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    1619 Broadway: The Brill Building Project
    What works best here works gorgeously.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors
    Even in Outkast, Big Boi was never merely a macho cartoon; now, he's revealing he's a grown-up.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Grace/Confusion
    The album clocks in under 40 minutes, and its experimental touches are modest.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Warrior
    There's no revelation here, only strong fun.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bastards
    Most of them, from Death Grips' percussive spatters to Matthew Herbert's spacious processionals, bring out something earthier in the songs.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lonerism
    Tame Impala saves itself from mere revivalism with 21st-century self-consciousness and, tucked amid the swirl and buzz, touching confessions of insecurity.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bish Bosch
    The album can be heavy going, with or without a dictionary, but its sheer, lapidary obsessiveness provides its own rewards.
    • 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?
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Girl on Fire
    It's a measure of how powerful parenthood really is that it generates so many clichés. The new songs that push that subtext out front quickly grow trite, in words and music.... It's the tracks in which Ms. Keys seems to pay attention to a quieter story rather than building new pedestals for herself--that echo and smudge and smear sounds, that lead toward paradox--that suggest something new for her.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rebel Soul
    Kid Rock is an amateurish singer, but over the last few years his unsteady squeal has been become burnished and is now credible.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unapologetic
    The music is just as brutish and bruised; occasionally Rihanna shows up essentially unaccompanied, but most of her songs are built tough and layered. The songs that are the least texturally confrontational are also by far the least successful.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Global Warming
    The sources wouldn't matter if Pitbull added much to them. But he's not budging from the formula of his million-selling 2011 album, "Planet Pit."
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ghost [EP]
    All together, it's just another round of throwing ideas at the wall. Everything sticks, more or less. But for how long?
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
    The album wears thin in totality, but has isolated moments: entrances and releases and dropouts.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lux
    It is killingly beautiful and doesn't do any more than it sets out to do, which is, in a sense, very little.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lotus
    The anonymity of much of Lotus is its biggest crime, more than its musical unadventurousness or its emphasis on bland self-help lyrics or its reluctance to lean on Ms. Aguilera's voice.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King Animal
    Soundgarden doesn't advance beyond reclaiming its proven strengths on King Animal, but those strengths are substantial.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Luxury Problems
    You need several listens to get your head around it, to recognize the landmarks and figure out the proper speed of anticipation and delivery.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    R.E.D.
    What's striking about R.E.D. are Ne-Yo's subtle but notable stylistic departures.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shut Down The Streets
    The melodies are still there, from gently scalloped waltzes to hearty power-pop choruses, and there's a new layer of polish on the arrangements: intros that establish atmosphere along with hooks, richer and more elegant instrumental blends, the self-effacing vocal harmonies of Neko Case from the New Pornographers.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lonesome Dreams
    If the music grew much gauzier, it would cloy. But for most of the album, Lord Huron stays poised precisely at the edge of weightlessness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sorry To Bother You
    The tracks are songs first, not manifestoes. The music is largely upbeat, even zany, with more than a hint of Outkast at its peak.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Haunted Man
    Unlike previous Bat for Lashes albums, which grew gimmicky and overloaded, The Haunted Man keeps Ms. Khan and her unexpectedly succinct melodies in the foreground, urgent and unguarded.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Music From Another Dimension!
    [On Music] the band aggressively reclaims every last one of its trademarks through the decades.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hope on the Rocks
    Whatever left turn Mr. Keith took [with "Red Solo Cup"] has been ruthlessly course-corrected on this album, which is dutiful and workmanlike and totally bereft of passion, so rote it could possibly have been written and recorded over a long weekend.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Made Possible
    The band is tinkering here, and it says something that the album still feels traceable to no other source.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Until the Quiet Comes
    The album's aesthetic is elastic and permeable, and yet strong enough to hold its shape.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran
    With this album Mr. Johnson proves not only that he plays well with others (especially Ray Price, Lee Ann Womack, Willie Nelson and George Strait) but also that his cantankerous charm flows out of a sentimental continuum.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Landing On A Hundred
    It's a knowing classic-soul revision, with Mr. Chesnutt openly indulging his vocal debt to Marvin Gaye. Lyrically he's still reaching for raw emotion and ripe provocation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Psychedelic Pill
    Psychedelic Pill doesn't try to ingratiate itself with new fans. It's a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, and one worth taking.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Night Train
    Even at his most powerful, singing hard in his nasal voice--it's got impact but not much traction.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Oblivion Hunter [EP]
    This album is a throwback to the group's fundamental low-fi assault--less a premeditated statement of musical progress than a controlled release of pressure.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    119
    Lee Spielman, the charismatic and intense frontman, is far more legible a singer here than he's ever been. That lucidity is in service of some of his most pointed lyrics.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Transcendental Youth
    The band used to simply propel Mr. Darnielle's succinct melodies and his friendly but insistent voice; now it has finer calibrations.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ultraista
    The lyrics often hint at the push and pull of relationships, but they're contemplated serenely from afar and cushioned by those synthesizers, just one more element in the pattern.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Formerly Extinct
    This album has more use for intertwined guitar lines that adhere to Eastern scales, and strong but light-footed rhythm.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Traveling Alone
    The depth and clarity of Ms. Merritt's singing make these songs feel properly lived in.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Glad Rag Doll
    "Wide River to Cross," by Buddy and Julie Miller is a contemporary outlier on an album crowded with relics, and its beautiful realization invites the question of what other sort of album Ms. Krall and Mr. Burnett might have made without any point to prove.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    He Is #1
    The guitars don't stay in tune, but the voices do. They're remarkably steady and resolute, filled with spirit.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Melody's Echo Chamber
    As Ms. Prochet's lyrics melt into the hiss and buzz, her lilting tunes come through. Amid the derangement, it's still French pop.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Algiers
    New Orleans seeped into this album anyway, with rhythmic crispness and a moody undercurrent; the production has swampy, haunted depths.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thankful N' Thoughtful
    With a few exceptions the music grounds itself in 1960s soul, staunchly chugging along as Ms. LaVette's bruised, caustic, adamant voice plunges into every line, coming through the songs as an unflinching survivor.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cruel Summer
    Mr. West is often nowhere to be found, and more crucially, nowhere to be felt. Parts of this album - "Sin City," "The One," "Creepers" - feature what's easily the laziest music on any Kanye-related project, with no trace of his trademark meticulousness.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    3 Pears
    The record draws closer to where he started: this music is entirely referential, but doesn't want to be contained. It's got some freelance cool, some autonomous energy.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Truth About Love
    Her sixth studio album, The Truth About Love, is, as usual, an assortment of potential singles.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Charmer
    Charmer, her eighth studio album, represents a sunny turn for her, at least in relative terms.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tornado
    Tornado does turn out to be Little Big Town's least predictable album.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love This Giant
    One of the most striking facts about this record is that it doesn't sound definitively like the work of one or the other, though occasionally you will catch a whiff of something one or the other has created in the past.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Coexist
    A wonderful experiment in the power of absence.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tempest
    He sings forcefully, in a raspy, phlegmy bark that's not exactly melodic and by no means welcoming. Battered and unforgiving, he's still Bob Dylan, answerable to no one but himself.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Centipede Hz
    "Merriweather Post Pavilion," had comparatively more open space, medium tempos, and a lot more Panda Bear, who restricts himself emotionally as he tries to make his limited voice beautiful. This record is dominated, even saturated, by Avey Tare, who does not.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Big Inner
    A dramatic pop-gospel record that hits extremes of the mood spectrum: very easygoing and very obsessive.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    II
    To label this music a tribute would feel disingenuous. To call it an update would be too generous.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Four
    The band's new jolt of stylized catharsis, attempt to engage with issues both personal and sociopolitical, and Mr. Okereke does his part to level the field, inflating some and cutting others to size.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Chapter V
    One of his most consistently strong albums.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Thing Called Divine Fits
    It's a record full of poses and acts, but there's a secret work ethic under all this; the band mates seem to believe in indie-rock maybe a little more than they need to.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fragrant World
    On a first listen, the music sounds aloof and arty - and it is, full of conceptual wiles. But the next time around, pop hooks sink in; more often than not, "Fragrant World" is a snappy synth-pop album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Life's Quest
    8Ball released Life's Quest, an album that, from a distance, appeared relatively low profile but up close proves to be modest and warm in a way that feels like a surprise.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ascent
    His extended solos during one or two-chord vamps - particularly on "Close to the Sky," "Waswasa" and "Even if You Knew," in that order of quality - are scrabbling, circular, slightly heroic, pulmonary with wah-wah and squalid with distortion. They're exciting, but they're also good for the head: they shove you into long-form listening mode.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Way Down Low
    Ms. Edmonson presents a vision of her art that's almost steely in its resolve, with an equal foothold in jazz, cabaret and vintage cosmopolitanism pop.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Boys Don't Cry
    Rumer can't conjure the right twinge of dissolution for Neil Young's "A Man Needs a Maid," and her lack of urgency on "Soulsville," by Isaac Hayes, is damning. But elsewhere she slides into the premise as into a tub full of suds, communing with Townes van Zandt's "Flyin' Shoes" and Jimmy Webb's "P. F. Sloan."
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Just Tell Me That You Want Me: A Tribute To Fleetwood Mac
    The last third of Just Tell Me That You Want Me is completely skippable, but at its best stretches, new obsessions complement those of the originals.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Four MF's Playin Tunes
    The album is a knockout: hard nosed and hyperacute, tradition minded but modern, defined by the high-wire grace of his working band.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Is Your Love Big Enough?
    It's rhythm as resilience and life force, an innate sense of confidence that makes even her bitter songs somehow reassuring.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Christian a Tunde Adjuah
    The album's unity of mood becomes a haze over the course of its nearly two-hour running time.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    God Forgives, I Don't
    Even though Mr. Ross's rapping is prime, it isn't enough to carry this album. Just at the moment that he's finally not underrated, he has underdelivered.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Never
    This is an art-school record; Ms. Levi's work resists easy pleasure and traditional beauty.... [yet] her songs hook you.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gossamer
    "Gossamer" opens up the music and lets it breathe. For all the artificial splendor, there's clearly a very human, very troubled voice at the center of these songs.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Confess
    Most of the time he's bleeding, which is to say alive.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    MTMTMK
    The partnership [Afro-Euro balance] is more complicated and less satisfying.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hypnotic Nights
    It's the simpler stuff that's special.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Another Country
    To her credit, the songs she has written here sustain a mood.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Silfra
    Ms. Hahn, who had tiptoed toward spontaneity in her work with singer-songwriters like Tom Brosseau and Josh Ritter, takes the full plunge [into improvisation] here, with gratifying results.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    KR-51
    Like the rest of the album, it's an exquisite, mutable voyage.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Overexposed
    It's when he deviates from the plastic norm that he actually sounds most awkward.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Spirit Fiction
    His most complete artistic statement, and one of his most self-possessed.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tucson: A Country Rock Opera
    Steel guitar, accordion, mariachi trumpet, lounge piano or a small string section are available as needed, but most of the music stays modest and intimate, staying out of the way of the graceful tunes and laconic thoughts.
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