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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    He And She
    It’s music with taste and spacious arrangements, full of historical knowledge and Mr. Marsalis’s trademarks: hocketing between horns, supercharged trumpet growls, tambourine accents. But you may not whistle it when it’s over.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    MPLSound
    MPLSound, the funkiest of the three discs--transcends its own hectoring. The put-downs aren’t half as good as the come-ons.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Padded Room
    While Joe Budden is enamored of his rhymes, which are taut, intricate and structurally varied, he raps in a scraped-up monotone, a technician first and stylist second.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fork In The Road
    Mr. Young is in his electric bar band mode as the music stomps with bluesy distorted guitar riffs.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Future Will Come
    Mr. MacLean’s attempt at naked vulnerability, on a ballad called 'Human Disaster,' may be this album’s biggest misstep. But at least that song dissolves right into a near-perfect closer, 'Happy House,' which was released as a single last year.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Together Through Life
    Very little on Together Through Life seems destined for his repertory’s long haul. But whether this is basic devilishness, or Malthus revisited, or acceptance of faith, or just a clever poem juxtaposing protest rhetoric with do-nothing rhetoric, it all suits him.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My One And Only Thrill
    She deserves credit for creating an album this focused, even at the cost of vigor.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Outside Love
    The album’s cover depicts a romance novel on crushed velvet, which should set off the archness alarm. But there’s an honest ache in several tunes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cryptomnesia
    The album makes a thorough, nerve-tingling plunge into the Mars Volta’s maelstrom available to shorter attention spans.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Preliminaires
    After the novelty wears off, the keeper is his typically blunt 'Nice to Be Dead'--"It’s nice to be underground/Free of the ugly sounds of life"--which happens to be the album’s one electric-guitar rocker.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    New Again
    Such obvious imitation [of U2] isn’t good strategy; it diminishes well-made songs. Taking Back Sunday is better off merging its old blurted troubles with its new attention to detail.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs Of Desire
    The sound is deliberately barren. The guitars never quite fill the space, and the drumming (credited to Knuckles) often has the mechanized indifference of drum-machine tracks.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Oh My God, Charlie Darwin
    The Low Anthem still needs to devise its own uptempo approach. But the quieter the music gets, in an elegy like 'To Ohio' or a conditional reassurance like '(Don’t) Tremble,' the more its music inhabits its own otherworldly place, where ghosts and angels hover just out of view.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    La Llama
    Creaks, pings, birdcalls, clarinets, rustles, whooshes, echoes and all sorts of other sonic flotsam surround simple melodies and quietly picked acoustic guitars on La Llama.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs)
    The album mixes the hard-nosed character studies he writes for Drive-By Truckers and more personal, guardedly hopeful songs. It juxtaposes his brasher, more cynical younger self with his current role as a husband and father.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fits
    You might listen to both albums and still feel uncomfortable trying to pin the band down. That’s a good thing, mostly. It reflects curiosity and ambition, along with a bit of willful obfuscation.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Born On Flag Day
    Mr. McCauley is a committed formalist and a defiant singer; he loves hating himself, and he’s thorough about it. His band mates (Andrew Grant Tobiassen on guitar, Christopher Dale Ryan on bass, Dennis Michael Ryan on drums) smartly give him room to gasp, but maybe he’s got a future without them as a Nashville songwriter.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Carbeth
    Trembling Bells, from Glasgow, do their homage with a bit of delirious freedom: on Carbeth, they’re all walking around that known territory with one eye closed, roughing up traditional song structures, trying to make themselves feel dizzy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Saturday Night
    Mr. Paisley's songs are better when they're more abstract. The title track celebrates America as a mongrel nation, but it mostly expresses that thought through our playtime consumption: Dutch beer, Canadian bacon, Brazilian leather. A very big thought is being missed here.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Central Dust
    It’s all a clear throwback, but the starkly countrified vibe underscores the plaintive cast of Mr. Farrar’s lyrics.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Life On Earth
    She moves slowly, but she’s a good musician and singer; this is the surprise, because in her line of work you expect more dishevelment.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Leave This Town
    At best Leave This Town inches beyond its predecessor, deeply tunneled into the hard-rock mainstream but a touch more confident and eclectic.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here With Me
    Ms. Williams contributes most to the family tradition, though, when she shuts it out, staking out quiet, warm, insightful territory for herself.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    See Mystery Lights
    It’s indie-rock party music, and its spare-parts feeling comes honestly.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Old, Familiar Friend
    A sturdy power-pop effort in the Paul McCartney vein, it projects an air of self-effacement.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    xx
    In fairness to the XX, that song was one of Aaliyah's most languorous, its eroticism delivered in small, subtle kicks, but that does little to soften the airlessness of the XX's version. And it's that same fundamental reluctance to engage that suffocates this group's self-titled debut album, which has become a favorite of bloggers and the British.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blood From Stars
    If Mr. Henry wants to suggest a less phlegmatic Tom Waits, as often seems the case here, he could stand to loosen up further. His lyrics can feel too artful, too self-conscious.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    King Of Jeans
    There’s a blunt but effective wit at work here, pressed into the service of misanthropy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wind's Poem
    Mount Eerie’s third album, is deeply homemade and crazily dynamic, running from quiet harmonium-and-voice drones to black-metal cataclysm.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Turn Me Loose
    Turn Me Loose also has its share of kiss-offs and entreaties--Ledisi can manage both, though vulnerability eludes her even on a track called 'Alone'--and enough tight musicianship to satisfy any retro-soul partisan.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Classic
    Its sound is lustrous, its personnel impeccable. What’s missing is the sense of conviction that Mr. Nelson brings to his strongest work.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Look To You
    She’s tentatively climbing back into the pop machinery, no longer invincible but showing a diva’s determination.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Time To Die
    Perhaps the idea was to make the Dodos’ introspection more overt, or to cushion the songs’ cryptic reflections on breakups, commercialism, mortality and global warming. The intricacies do come through. But these songs will sound better after they’ve been roughed up onstage.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Haih...Or Amortecedor
    Haih or Amortecedor is a deliberate but merry throwback. Its new songs reclaim the early Mutantes sound.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Joy
    Steve Lillywhite’s clear and ungimmicky production makes Joy sound like the band members onstage responding to one another.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Drunk
    Its self-titled debut was pop-emo at its dimmest, but Love Drunk is, in places, a pleasant improvement, with the band’s brattier instincts tamped down.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Strange Arrangement
    By layering his naive vocals and harmonizing with himself, he conjures a forceful richness, but when it’s just his unadorned voice, aching its way through a melody with audible strain--say, at the top of 'Shiny & New,' where he slithers in and out of the correct pitch as if drunk--his structure begins to collapse.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Masters Of The Burial
    None of this ever feels oppressive because of Ms. Millan’s light touch as a singer.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    There Is No Enemy
    He packs every song with parts--low, midrange and high guitars, vocal la-las and ahs--and all the layers can make the songs overstuffed and woolly, particularly the slow ones. But diligence is one way to fight complacency, and Mr. Martsch’s plaintive cantankerousness keeps breaking through.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Broken Side Of Time
    The combination of seismic guitars and high vocals looks to My Morning Jacket, Kings of Leon and Crazy Horse--sometimes all too obviously. But Alberta Cross sets aside those American bands’ redemptive undercurrents of blues and gospel; instead, it plunges into the very English despair of bands like Pink Floyd.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Where The Wild Things Are [OST]
    The soundtrack strikes a balance between riotous clamor and rueful contemplation, enlisting a lot of mallet percussion and vigorously strummed acoustic guitars.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sigh No More
    For all the torments and uncertainties Mr. Mumford sings about on this album, there's the momentum of a hoedown to carry him through.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Southern Voice
    Distractions aside, Mr. McGraw returns again and again to the melancholy of passing time, and it sounds as if, rightly, he might wish to reframe his entire career around songs about crumbling beauty.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: New Moon [OST]
    Invariably the guitars are played in a low, urgent growl, uniting many of the songs with a dissatisfied drone.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Evolution Of A Man
    Mr. McKnight, perhaps as smooth an operator as R&B has seen, knows what he’s pursuing here: a balance of smoldering sensuality and unguarded chivalry.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Raditude
    Raditude sounds like a high-stakes game of chicken, and the intellectual gamesmanship becomes more satisfying than the music.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Attention Deficit
    The album is confident and catchy, with some telling moments. It’s also a measure of how limited Wale and his label think their hip-hop mainstream is.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Memento Mori
    Memento Mori, Flyleaf’s second album, is precise, muscular and alluring, full of crypto-Christian imagery and husky riffs.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Echo
    Vocal heroism is Ms. Lewis’s game, and she plays it ruthlessly, with an unselfconscious gusto evocative of classic Whitney Houston or Celine Dion.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My World
    Daughters don't have to be hidden away for the duration of One World: 'Down to Earth' and 'One Less Lonely Girl' are uncomplicatedly beautiful and earnest.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Dreamed A Dream
    On an album without humor or melodrama, a devotional spirit reigns.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Untitled
    Call it focus, call it obsession, call it tunnel vision, call it formula: R. Kelly is consistent.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blakroc
    Its sound is hard but loose, rooted in sinewy beats by Patrick Carney, the Black Keys’ drummer, and spooky riffs by Dan Auerbach, its guitarist and singer.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Pursuit
    Too many songs on The Pursuit paint their singer as an un-self-conscious lout, too sure of his hand (“We Run Things”) or his taste (“Mixtape”) or his centrality in the world (“Wheels”).
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Til The Casket Drops
    This is an album animated by letdown, though less effectively than in the past. More than ever Malice is the moral anchor.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Armonico Hewa
    The album’s 13 songs are succinct but eventful: clever structures with a world of references, a short attention span and a vandalistic pleasure in stray noise.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Colossus
    The beat is generally the best part of any track produced by RJD2, but The Colossus--the first album on his new label, RJ’s Electrical Connections--finds him juggling vintage samples, string and horn parts, vocals both outsourced and original.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    July Flame
    It’s full of layered folk and indie-rock bucolia and plain-spoken but stretchy-thinking language, wherein everyday energies or objects transubstantiate into other, metaphorically richer ones.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    End Times
    Through a dozen terse, exposed songs Mr. Everett proceeds from bittersweet memory to guilt to resentment to a kind of acceptance. Even the glimpses of self-pity stay matter of fact.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Real Life Is No Cool
    It can feel facile, this emulation. In a longer form Lindstrom lets his allusions bubble up as if from the depths of a lake. Here they skitter across the surface.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You Break Our Hearts, We’ll Tear Yours Out
    The band cares as much, and probably more, about texture and noise. Each song materializes within its own soundscape. The ingredients are distortion and percussion, in layers that clatter and lurch with unpredictably shifting attacks.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You
    The songs here — Baroque, sometimes arch pop, touching on classic country, Bowie and Queen — begin with sharp-tongued bitterness and, slowly, with detours, work their way through to what for Mr. Hynes seems like an uncomfortable, foreign feeling: bliss.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heligoland
    “Heligoland” comes across as an anthology rather than an album. It’s a dour collection of concepts and strategies — some successful — as Massive Attack ponders what to do after trip-hop.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blackjazz
    Blackjazz was produced by Sean Beavan, who has worked with Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, and its sound skews dark but a bit cartoonish.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Black Noise
    Black Noise is slightly busier than Pantha du Prince’s sublime “This Bliss” (Dial) from 2007, a pensive, slender and tough album that remains his high-water mark.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Stimulus Package
    Made with Jake One, a producer of classic-soul proclivity and G-Unit pedigree, it’s a sumptuous vessel with room for redundancy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American VI: Ain't No Grave
    Not all of American VI has such nerve, which was more common on the earliest releases in the series.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dear God, I Hate Myself
    This album, which he produced with the drummer Greg Saunier of Deerhoof, shudders with the tension of opposing ideals: folksiness and futurism, clarity and ambiguity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snakes For The Divine
    That sound has been changing, clearing up by degrees without sacrificing the band's greasy mysticism--"Blessed Black Wings" from 2004, engineered by Steve Albini, was a breakthrough--but here the band is really getting presentable.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Luck In The Valley
    An album of modest scope but deep conviction, it registers more as a next step than a final gesture.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Permalight
    It’s still not easy to figure out exactly what Mr. Rogue has in mind with choruses like “They’ll lay their boot heel down for a solitary gun.” But the tunes, and the delight of singing them, are anything but unclear.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fight Softly
    Words tend to be swallowed in the mix, but what floats through hints at memories and self-searching: a carnival of introspection.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Broken Bells
    There's ample melody in the music, and the lyrics hold anguish and malaise. But Broken Bells' production numbs the songs. What could have been cries from the heart are turned into in-jokes.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pizza Box
    Some songs hint at the Band, but Mr. Barnes also cranks up to feedback volume on the stomping “Road.” Behind his down-home magical realism is an underlying benevolence.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Interpreting The Masters, Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall And John Oates
    As the title suggests, it's a covers album, fond and focused.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Will Be
    It’s anachronistic, fashionable and sometimes quite beautiful. It’s teen music for adults. It’s also incredibly sentimental.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Country Music
    It's an often robust album that flaunts Mr. Nelson's versatility.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fearless Love
    Mostly, though, she’s tough, and this album, ambitiously produced by John Shanks, matches up, with broad, bruising rock arrangements. (The second half of the album softens musically and the lyrics veer toward inspirational blandness.)
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    True Love Cast Out All Evil
    Mr. Erickson's voice has grown tattered and scratchy. And Mr. Sheff's production acknowledges the '60s without pretending to be vintage.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Compass
    In truth he doesn’t always seem to know his bearings, but he manages to make his confusion compelling.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here's To Taking It Easy
    Yet his voice still ambles all around the beat, and the production is calculatedly bleary, with horns, guitars and piano all entangled, as if two or three bands are playing the same song. Phosphorescent's perpetually woozy aesthetic is intact.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The ArchAndroid
    The 70-minute album sags by the end, and every listener will probably find one must-skip song. But Ms. Monae gets away with most of her metamorphoses, and the sheer ambition is exhilarating even when she stretches too far.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rokstarr
    There are vapid lyrics to navigate (“Hit the floor cause that’s my plans plans plans plans/I’m wearing all my favorite brands brands brands brands,” on “Dynamite” ), but they don’t disrupt the mood, which is emphatic and rarely sensual: turns out Mr. Cruz has no off switch.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Body Talk Pt 1
    The objective here is more ambiguous, and the tone less frisky and more guarded [than her self-titled release].
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mojo
    While there are still nods to the Heartbreakers’ 1980s bigness here, and to the bigness of others, they’re offered in an offhand style.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Streets Of Gold
    It is a Frankenstein monster built wholly from borrowed pieces, taking the accumulated lessons of years of hip-hop assimilation, the sophomoric attitude of frat-rock and the dense, dance-friendly electro-pop of the moment and grinding them into an oppressive and convincing wall of sounds.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Aphrodite
    No one's asking for reality in this pop bubble--just a little bit more innovation.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    MAYA
    On Maya, M.I.A. also descends to more standard hip-hop concerns: stardom, romance, dropping brand names and getting drunk.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tin Can Trust
    It's an album about facing limitations, drawing what hope there is from seeing each situation clearly.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Obadiah
    She phrases intuitively, waiting on a word and then drawing it out, and turns good lyrics to oatmeal, adding strange new colors to vowels, making whole syllables vanish.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beach Fossils
    How this sort of music became a cliche in the space of just the past year or so speaks to the speed and density of the Internet. And yet the self-titled Beach Fossils debut, on Captured Tracks, manages to not feel overly 2009.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The House
    The songs and arrangements on The House recast Ms. Melua as an arty girl gone wild.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    We Walk This Road
    There's an unguarded directness to these translations, for better or worse.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Catching a Tiger
    Catching a Tiger (Fat Possum), her full-length debut, comes most alive with a handful of songs about reaching for someone who isn't there (e.g., "In Sleep," which evokes Fleetwood Mac) or evading someone who is (e.g., "Loosen the Knot," more of a power-pop surge).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Black City
    Not surprisingly, disorientation is his leitmotif, and it can border on the oppressive, especially given his blunt limitations as a singer (and his habit of multitracking himself across two or more octaves). But the bass lines and beats sound great, and the passing textures--robotic percussion, synthesizer drones, sampled sounds--feel right, and carefully determined.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin
    With varying degrees of success he turns the melodies into post-Beach Boys pop with stacked harmonies performed in a barbershop tradition that erases vocal individuality for the sake of a creamy harmonic blend.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Str8 Killa [EP]
    More than anything, his style betrays a fealty to the West Coast gangsta agenda of 15 years ago, and the EP's production (by Block Beataz, B-Flat Trax and others) riffs on a similar ideal.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Heart California
    More often they reinforce each other's introspection, turning thoughts of mortality into power pop or facing down loneliness with tentative voices but utterly sure-footed buildups.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Junky Star
    The collaboration works, not least because emphasis is placed on the grounded heave of Mr. Bingham's fine working band, the Dead Horses: Corby Schaub on guitar and mandolin, Elijah Ford on bass and Matt Smith on drums.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Reckless
    Reckless is a swan song, punctuated with a question mark.
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