The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,072 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: 1,594 out of 2072
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2072
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2072
2072 music reviews
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    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Black Sheep Boy
    What's most exciting about ''Black Sheep Boy'' is that Okkervil River sounds more than ever like a band. [9 Apr 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stone Rollin'
    Stone Rollin' is a better, more lively album than the last one Mr. Saadiq made in this vein, "The Way I See It," from 2008.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Soul of a Woman
    Soul of a Woman is a final set of genre-perfect old-school soul: brisk rumba-soul in “Sail On,” hand-clapping neo-Motown in “Rumors,” a girl-group slow dance topped with hovering strings in “When I Saw Your Face.” The band sounds as if it’s playing live in the studio.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chavez Ravine
    Its seriousness never makes it earthbound. Mr. Cooder brings to it all he has learned from a career delving into odd corners of American and world music. [13 Jun 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Harps And Angels
    Intermittently brilliant, occasionally belligerent, it presents a vision of American identity as sprawling and ultimately as confused as the country itself.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I See The Sign
    I See the Sign is a seriously intelligent record, but never cute or overbearing; its Icelandic producer, Valgeir Sigurdsson, has left it dry and full of space, so that you hear the seams.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint
    Mr. Akinmusire has a strong aesthetic compass, and as a bandleader, he keeps a steady hand on the wheel; he’s not just stumbling into the album’s shadowy and unsettled mood.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller
    His performance is a respectful but contemporary nod.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    DAYTONA
    Daytona may stand alone in this moment--particularly in contrast to the woozy, blown-out rap albums dominating the charts because of the primacy of streaming--but it isn’t as effective as “My Name Is My Name,” Pusha-T’s 2013 full-length solo debut album. Daytona is terser, leaving only nits to pick; say, that the second and third verses of “Come Back Baby” lack the fire and wit of the rest of the album.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Boxer
    There are verbal nuggets throughout the album... but it’s not the antihero sentiments that make the songs memorable; it’s the methodical yet obsessive patterns that frame them.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Simple Songs
    It sounds fantastic as a study in symphonic-rock ambition and studio mixing techniques.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
    For the familiar songs the original album choices were usually better, with tauter lyrics and arrangements pushing away from the generic. Still, with a songwriter like Mr. Dylan the rough drafts, alternate lyrics and multiple versions of “Dignity” and “Mississippi” are fascinating glimpses of how restlessly he tinkers with mood and meaning.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happier than Ever
    During its slower stretches, “Happier Than Ever” languishes. ... The risks start to pay off, though, on the album’s strong closing stretch, beginning as the warping “NDA” segues into the brash posturing of “Therefore I Am,” one of several lukewarm singles that benefits from the surrounding context of the album. ... Eilish remains an inveterate rebel. “Happier Than Ever,” though, exposes both the strengths and the limitations of her preferred mode of subversion.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Haw
    The songs ponder mortality and devotion, love and family, searching for peace of mind and finding it, no doubt temporarily, in the folky benediction of “What Shall Be (Shall Be Enough).”
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shaking the Habitual
    This music has deep weirdness but incredible will and charisma.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Agent Intellect
    Protomartyr is from Detroit, and there’s a dour, industrial affect to this record-- the band’s best, though like the others it can sometimes feel like one long song--which seems to confirm everything you think you know about that city.... But Mr. Casey’s excellent lyrics go bigger and more abstract.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
    At first, the songs can seem remote and arty, but gradually they start to add up; they're filled with a sense of loss and a hope for transformation. [6 Mar 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Malibu
    Malibu--his second album under this moniker, following a stretch under the name Breezy Lovejoy--is multilayered. It’s also incisive, languorous and deeply felt, a warm bath of studiously relaxed hip-hop and soul.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So Beautiful or So What
    He's not preaching on this album. He's finding solace, fleeting and fragmentary, and every springy guitar lick is its own benediction.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Relatives in Descent
    Now, on its fourth album, the band is moving toward an idiom that’s more flexible and contrasty yet just as gripping: Protomartyr’s own post-post-punk.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stay Positive
    Despite some subtle new touches --a harpsichord, a banjo, light strings--the sound proposes constancy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reality Show
    Playing a woman too often scorned, she comes out victoriously soulful.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sleep Well Beast
    The National’s 2013 album, “Trouble Will Find Me,” was a culmination of sorts: accomplished, polished, measured, mature. Sleep Well Beast is just as polished and even more intricate. But it also shakes things up.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Benji
    Benji is strong, cultish stuff, full of its own stink, full of stories about death and much, much smaller things; the stanzas are long and the yarns circular.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Drift
    "The Drift" sets out only to follow its own obsessions; it's both lush and austere, utterly personal and often Delphic in its impenetrability.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Semper Femina
    Ms. Marling doesn’t cast herself as heroine or victim, angel or avenger. She does something trickier, and perhaps braver. Clear-eyed, calmly determined and invitingly tuneful, she captures each situation in all its ambiguity.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Old LP
    The music is denser and more intricate, conjuring symphonic grandeur alongside overdriven noise. The jokes are gone; the stakes feel higher. But the band’s underlying moxie hasn’t changed.
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