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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    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Am What I Am
    Mr. Haggard sounds more fatigued than his old sidekick, his voice less willing to bend. There are some lovely moments of stern self-loathing ("Bad Actor," "How Did You Find Me Here"); Mr. Haggard is always sharper when pointing the finger at himself than when celebrating love, as he often does on this album.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Achin' And Shakin'
    "Giddy On Up" is on the shakin' side, which is the weaker half, chaotic and a little glib... The achin' set of songs forces Ms. Bundy to exhale, revealing a lovely voice with alluring nooks and crannies that need no adornment.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stone Temple Pilots
    In its heyday Stone Temple Pilots brought swagger and darkness to its second-tier grunge. Now the band has returned from its hiatus with less of a musical identity and blander tidings.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Recovery
    What Eminem hasn't let go of is his taste for melancholic bombast in production.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Korn III: Remember Who You Are
    On Korn III: Remember Who You Are, the band has jumped back to the sound and attitude that made it famous - if without particularly inspired tunes - and Mr. Davis, almost 40, seems to have regained some of his younger self as a lyricist.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crazy for You
    Ms. Cosentino and her collaborator, Bobb Bruno, envelop the songs in guitar reverb and distortion--between the Raveonettes and the Jesus and Mary Chain--to place them in an ominous haze.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cowboy's Back in Town
    While Mr. Adkins shares a sense of gravity and an air of intractability with his new boss [Toby Keith], he lacks the winking cheekiness and self-deprecation that have always been Mr. Keith's aces in the hole.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise
    This one has missteps, but for Mr. LaMontagne it's those songs that feel the most honest, those where he says what he means, not what he hopes you'll think.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cloak and Cipher
    She's good at finding obscurity, but sometimes not to her benefit. Ms. Powell wrote a lot of the lyrics on Cloak and Cipher with scrambled input from books and various other texts, and she doesn't do much to smooth out the results, savoring the disjunctive and the cryptic.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Reason Why
    Redolent of Southern gospel and feather-light country-rock, it's a comfort zone for this group, employed consistently in the choruses, which can be arrestingly sharp, and often elsewhere. But piled on top of plangent guitars, the convergence can become grating, with all the emotion of archery, or some other sport that prizes accuracy above all.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being
    While diversity is Lil Wayne's strength, it's a lack of commitment of a different sort that hamstrings this album. Too often Lil Wayne lapses into predictable flow structures, quick ideas paired with built-in rejoinders.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bullets in the Gun
    Bullets in the Gun is his most scattershot album to date, a jumble of attitudes and tactics. Much of the time Mr. Keith, who has been one of the most underappreciated vocal stylists in country music, is singing without conviction on songs that are mere archetypes and lack any of his signature gestures.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Gravity
    The rest of her follow-up, No Gravity, a competent, sometimes exciting pop album, collects other attempts: in essence, a series of portraits drawn by people with radically different styles.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Incredible Machine
    This all amounts to an unwelcome unraveling of the Sugarland formula. As a country duo, the members of Sugarland are surefooted. As tweakers of Nashville orthodoxies, they're goofy and fun, but clumsy.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    $O$
    $O$ may be as much Die Antwoord as the world needs. Except for "In Your Face," the newer songs already sound forced. But Die Antwoord's initial blasts deserved all their mouse clicks.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Living Proof
    What's wrong with the record is plain. The lyrics' first-person mythmaking gets trite. The guest appearances sound fainthearted, tailored to the ears of Grammy voters. But the heart of the record is deeply, honorably misbehaved.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nothing
    Nothing is the fourth N.E.R.D. album and the first to feel altogether detached from its surroundings.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Soulsville
    But aside from transposing the keys--a measure most likely taken to suit a limited vocal range--these songs take few liberties.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Beginning
    It's a much lesser record than "The E.N.D.," and yet it isn't boring, even when the echoes of old songs are more than echoes.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Endlessly
    It's rigorously written, but Duffy sounds uncertain, spotlighting the particulars of her voice: the many crannies, the narrow backbone, the decay at the edges, the tentativeness she feels when it's unclear just how much room she has to maneuver.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Train to Paris
    None of these guests feel out of place here, but not because of the potency of Diddy's vision. Rather, it's because they have made records like these elsewhere, giving Last Train to Paris a secondhand feel.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Boys Allowed
    Ms. Hilson's own records aren't tipping toward bona fide dance music as much as Rihanna's, and don't yet have their audience-strafing sweep. But a few songs here are good enough to stop the overthinking comparisons
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ritual
    Every gesture feels like flagging down a passing ship from a barren island. Every emotion registers on the Richter scale. This can be wickedly effective, as many a successful British rock band will attest. And periodically on this album, the stars and planets do align.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lorraine
    Lorraine is evenly split between mercilessly detailed songs like these and frustratingly blank ones ("Sweet Disposition," "Rocket Science"), which feel like hollow templates designed to be inhabited by other, less imaginative singers. On those songs Ms. McKenna sounds complacent; discomfort suits her better.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silver Pony
    Her uneven but warmly satisfying new album, Silver Pony, attempts the best of both worlds.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lasers
    Lasers is a chaotic album full of gummy rhymes that look better on the page than they sound to the ear, delivered with a tone of tragic bombast.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Collapse into Now
    Where the spirit-void blankness of R.E.M. once felt intuitive and intentional, it now feels accidental. Most of this record's musical temperament seems reheated or purchased.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Johnny Boy Would Love This: A Tribute to John Martyn
    Like most tribute albums, Johnny Boy Would Love This is mixed, with a few misfires, like Snow Patrol's overblown "May You Never." But Mr. Martyn's pensive, moody spirit comes through, and the tribute should send listeners back to his own 1973 masterpiece, "Solid Air."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sweetheart of the Sun
    It's a spare and occasionally stiff album that has more to do with, say, the Indigo Girls than the 1960s bands the Bangles grew up worshiping.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Clear as Day
    The energy of this album sometimes outpaces the singer, who's best when he's deliberate, and whose voice isn't as robust as it could be on these songs.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Great Escape Artist
    The sound is brand-name familiar but all too settled; the songs place their hard-rock hooks neatly but without the original band's startling ups and downs.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stage Whisper
    Her singing is collected and on pitch, whether she's working with a whispery hush or a lemon-tart croon.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    TM:103 Hustlerz Ambition
    All in all it's a step forward for Young Jeezy, even if everyone around him is walking much faster.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Emotional Traffic
    Mr. McGraw has never sounded this casual. It doesn't suit him.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All of Me
    [A] comfortable, small and sometimes vague album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wrecking Ball
    It's got plenty of ups and downs.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blunderbuss
    Few songs on "Blunderbuss" truly knock the wind out of you, as the White Stripes could - even with riffs that were fragmentary, simple or borrowed. This is a songwriter's record, and a kind of orchestrator's record; there's also a new overall vehemence in the lyrics, hammering on dishonesty, jealousy, immorality.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    2:54
    [The album] seems to prefer operating under a steady churn of gloom. But there's real muscle here, both in the singing, which is rendered wide and fat, an ooze of its own; and also in the guitar playing, which is hefty and dark.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thirty Miles West
    He doesn't sound like he's trying to chase after Nashville's contemporary norm, which is admirable. But his confidence often scans as complacency.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cherry Thing
    What's intended to be raw can sound smug. In "Dirt" the Thing pushes past the tenderness that lives in that song to get to aggressive, stylized and finally anonymous squalling. Its loud catharsis rolls over her quieter one, and it's not the only time that happens on this record.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Overexposed
    It's when he deviates from the plastic norm that he actually sounds most awkward.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    MTMTMK
    The partnership [Afro-Euro balance] is more complicated and less satisfying.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Charmer
    Charmer, her eighth studio album, represents a sunny turn for her, at least in relative terms.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pale Fire
    As she watches love drift into and, more often, out of reach, the songs find themselves dissolving too.
    • 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.
    • 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?
    • 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?
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Colored Sands
    The album has stability, consistency. But too much of it.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Hopes
    The best of them--mostly the resigned or farseeing songs, the songs that have no hero and no story--rise above the odds. But a large portion of the record feels, let’s say, official.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lift Your Spirit
    Throughout the album, Mr. Blacc sings with the kind of earthy vitality that many studied neo-soul singers don’t have the voice to match. But too often, the production--most of it by DJ Khalil--is so thoroughly retro that Mr. Blacc only reminds a listener of whom he’s emulating.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The New Classic
    Student’s complete commitment to character and form compensate slightly for the unrelenting weirdness of this project.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Corazón
    In some tracks Corazón feels like a committee crossover project.... But Corazón also finds vibrant international connections.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Xscape
    Xscape does polish up these old songs, even if it wipes away some of Jackson’s ideas, like the big-band tango Jackson invoked on the demo of “Blue Gangsta.” And Jackson’s voice--deliberately pushed up front in the mixes--is more vivid, and less processed-sounding, than it was on his later albums.... Yet it’s clear why Jackson shelved the songs on Xscape. They’re near misses, either not quite as striking as what he released or lesser examples of ideas he exploited better elsewhere.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 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.”
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Piece by Piece
    Every song aims for the monumental, a strategy that’s competitive for radio play but wearying over the course of a whole album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Madness
    Sometimes the lyrics don’t match the energy of the music here, especially Jack Fowler’s guitar. They tend toward the blandly inspirational, with a handful of notable exceptions.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Don't Like Shit: I Don't Go Outside
    At 10 songs that span barely 30 minutes, this album is so terse it makes Nas’s “Illmatic” seem like “Infinite Jest.” And often it can feel as if Earl Sweatshirt is rapping his dense syllabic tumbles with his back facing the microphone, which is perplexing, since few rappers love the sound of sticky syllables as much as he does.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Pier Pressure
    On No Pier Pressure, they [Wilson and co-producer Joe Thomas] juggle past and present in strangely proportioned ways.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dark Red
    Dark Red, his sometimes emphatic, sometimes meandering second full-length album, has moments that underscore just how much Shlohmo--real name Henry Laufer--has evolved.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jekyll + Hyde
    For every song that issues a challenge, there are two that play nice.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Who Is the Sender?
    It means well and conjures fellow feeling and makes you think the long thoughts. But it is a trudge, and strangely ponderous in its smallness.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wilder Mind
    Heard one song at a time, Wilder Mind builds convincing dramas. But Mumford & Sons’ greatest skill--their strategic crescendos--starts to feel like a formula over the course of the album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dreams Worth More Than Money
    Some of the strongest songs on this up-and-down album sound like lost 1998 Stretch and Bobbito freestyles.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    E-MO-TION
    Emotion is full of pure cotton candy--delicious, distractingly sweet and filling, with a mildly suspicious aftertaste.... [The album is] full of excellent songs that seem to give up about two-thirds of the way through.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Story of Sonny Boy Slim
    While he’s well served by the rugged immediacy of the mix--make no mistake, it’s an improvement--his songwriting lags noticeably behind his musical prowess. And he sings much of the album on falsetto, a thin part of his vocal range.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    HitNRun: Phase One
    The successes tend to be love songs.... But those songs arrive late in the album; first come oddities and overreaches.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cass County
    The number and potency of these guests sometimes make Cass County sound like a tribute album to someone not yet gone. They also take away from Mr. Henley, now 68, whose voice has decayed nicely, though it now lacks the wise punch it had on “The End of the Innocence,” his excellent 1989 album.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tell Me I'm Pretty
    The bigger change is in the songs, which no longer promise that rock brashness can overpower adversity.... It’s a daring, deliberate shift for Cage the Elephant. But in its single-mindedness, the album sacrifices the wildly seesawing balance between life force and mortality that gave the band its verve.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ardipithecus
    This is a record that never stops threatening to be dull--in the way that Miley Cyrus’s record of mind-blurt autonomy from this year was dull--but rarely is, except when others try to streamline a lumpy aesthetic.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mind of Mine
    Throughout this album, Mr. Malik opts for a low-octane approach, with varying success.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Colour In Anything
    "The Colour in Anything" grows self-pitying, almost maudlin, in ways Mr. Blake has managed to avoid in the past simply by using more elusive lyrical metaphors. It is also unreasonably long: a little over an hour and a quarter.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kidsticks
    It’s an experimental record that often sounds like a meditative one, or vice versa, and it often seems better on paper than through the speakers.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ain't Who I Was
    There are a few too many moments--starting with “Mercy,” the opening track--when Mr. Cobb seems fixated on the idea of Ms. Bishop as a new Dusty Springfield. The ghost of “Dusty in Memphis” hovers over much of the album, and while there are worse problems to have, it runs the risk of putting Ms. Bishop in the same corner where a Leon Bridges passes as an acceptable stand-in for Sam Cooke.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    California
    On this pleasantly familiar if not especially imaginative new album, the band’s subject matter verges on the bittersweet, or just outright bitter, but still they grin. ... The album is overlong, and full of songs that have achieved their purpose by the halfway mark.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lady Wood
    For this album, she made musical choices that hold back the songs.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Weight of These Wings
    When this album whispers, as it does on large swaths of the second half, it neuters Ms. Lambert’s gifts. Even with a voice as signature as hers, there’s little to elevate songs like “Good Ol’ Days” or “Dear Old Sun.”
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Climate Change
    Jubilant but spotty.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    After Laughter
    She’s still a strong singer, especially on “Told You So,” but some of her essential grit is lost to the machines.
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