For 2,072 reviews, this publication has graded:
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55% higher than the average critic
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4% same as the average critic
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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: | Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest review score: | Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 1,594 out of 2072
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Mixed: 443 out of 2072
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Negative: 35 out of 2072
2072
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
For much of "Late Registration," the striver has turned into a hip-hop V.I.P., and a cool arrogance has crept into the songs. [29 Aug 2005]- The New York Times
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Taking the onus off his guitar playing dilutes Mr. Banhart's talent, and sometimes "Cripple Crow" makes of him what some people perhaps want him to be: a simulacrum of an obscure 1960's musician, a maker of albums that were so rare they never existed. [12 Sep 2005]- The New York Times
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Mr. Young is pushing toward guilelessness in these 10 songs; these are messages of nearly transcendental forgiveness that have lost their old edges of fear and anger. [26 Sep 2005]- The New York Times
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The album is short (less than 40 minutes), elegant and neat almost to a fault, with no extra instruments or extra verses. [27 Jun 2005]- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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But she's not attempting a simple 80's revival; for all the vaguely familiar hooks, there are also sustained, wistful overlays of strings and acoustic guitar that enfold the music like a haze of indistinct memory. [14 Nov 2005]- The New York Times
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Ms. Lohan has staked out a patch of musical ground between Kelly Clarkson and the Foo Fighters, and she can snarl a little without laying it on too thick. [5 Dec 2005]- The New York Times
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This is music that tries to be over-the-top and uncool: too hard, sometimes. But more often the songs are too contagious and exuberant to dislike.- The New York Times
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While the Los Angeles-based Mr. Miller looks good at the cabaret mike, he's still better when part of a real band. [27 Feb 2006]- The New York Times
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"Show Your Bones" doesn't confide much, but it's a picture of a band that's not quite sure what to do next. [27 Mar 2006]- The New York Times
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This is a serviceable, lighthearted album packed with R&B collaborations. [10 Apr 2006]- The New York Times
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Figurines don't have lyrics as rewarding as those of their obvious polestars, but "Skeleton" puts an intriguingly genteel spin on indie grit. [27 Mar 2006]- The New York Times
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Mr. Toussaint's florid yet precise New Orleans piano, the way he can make a horn section laugh or sigh, and the stubborn idealism and canny humor of his songs temper Mr. Costello's convoluted earnestness.- The New York Times
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Ms. Germano’s music is beautifully haunted and composed, but almost too claustrophobic to bear. [17 Jul 2006]- The New York Times
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Subtle sounds -- acoustic instruments, electronic tones, environmental noises, distorted echoes -- well up around her, and they open up pockets of shadow around her usual pinpoint clarity. Now the atmosphere is as important as the words.- The New York Times
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OutKast’s brains and playfulness sparkle throughout "Idlewild."... But despite the new, jazzy trappings "Idlewild" is more superficial than OutKast’s older albums.- The New York Times
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Black Thought... sounds more focused than he did on the Roots’ last album, “The Tipping Point,” and more engaged than on the one before it, “Phrenology.” But because he’s not the kind of rapper to modulate his emotional pitch, his intensity can level off into monotony.- The New York Times
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“B’Day” isn’t an ingratiating or seductive album, but it is nervy and fascinating.- The New York Times
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It’s the sound the band became known with: big guitars playing suspended chords, crisp drums, barked verses and carefully sung choruses. [17 Jul 2006]- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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Janet is as crafty and poised as ever. Her flirtations are still a pleasure, but an overly familiar one.- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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A few too many of these songs sound like Snoop-by-the-numbers. [20 Nov 2006]- The New York Times
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He’s worth your $13.98 even when he’s only offering a grab bag like this one. [11 Dec 2006]- The New York Times
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Mood music doesn’t get any moodier than the Good, the Bad & the Queen. [29 Jan 2007]- The New York Times
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Clap Your Hands Say Yeah demands a new, irksome level of indulgence on "Some Loud Thunder." But it finds a new richness in the songs it doesn’t sabotage. [29 Jan 2007]- The New York Times
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Claustrophobic with multitracked vocals and baroque effects, the album lacks the wiry catchiness of hits like “Banquet.” [5 Feb 2007]- The New York Times
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Fall Out Boy hasn’t turned into a band of rock-star blowhards yet; it’s still too hyperactive and catchy. But the songs were more fun when it was a band of underdogs. [5 Feb 2007]- The New York Times
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Young Buck’s brusque appeal has its limits: his phrasing isn’t very inventive and his lyrics aren’t very stylish, and on this album he spends way too much time simply trudging through 16-bar verses. [26 Mar 2007]- The New York Times
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After a while, the surfeit of ideas starts to sound like a lack. But the choruses are as effective as ever.- The New York Times
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The group’s gospel-gangsta fusion sounds as weird and as inevitable as ever. [7 May 2007]- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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The acoustic songs are pretty but tend to run together, waltz after waltz. The London versions are more individualized, and they let Ms. O’Connor push toward extremes.- The New York Times
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The disappointment of La Radiolina is that Manu Chao’s music isn’t as arrestingly odd as it used to be. Too often his band’s ska-punk gets uncomfortably close to dull rock, and the repetition doesn’t communicate we are all singing the same song- The New York Times
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Though X doesn’t raise Ms. Minogue’s own high standards, it does sometimes meet them.- The New York Times
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A little something for everyone, in other words, though it probably won’t hold anyone’s focus all the way through.- The New York Times
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Considering all that [has happened], it’s easy to be grateful for a quirky, uneven album like 8 Diagrams.- The New York Times
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Beyond that lead single, produced by Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic, the results start to feel uneven.- The New York Times
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Strangely, given the unified palette and temperament, the album feels disjointed: one track doesn’t pull you to the next.- The New York Times
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For all its craftsmanship, Pretty. Odd. comes across as mannered and overbearing, more studied than exuberant, the magnum opus of a talented band charging wholeheartedly down a blind alley.- The New York Times
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The album includes one unreasonably lovely song, 'The Blue Room,' along with two instrumental tracks and several concussive punk-rock tunes.- The New York Times
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He makes a concerted effort to fill out and roughen up his sound, enlisting the modern-rock producer Howard Benson and an accompanying coterie of seasoned studio musicians. The results don’t suggest reinvention so much as a slight twist.- The New York Times
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It’s effortfully tossed off; it’s a middling record battling against his built-in high standards.- The New York Times
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As workarounds go, Scarlett Johansson’s collection of Tom Waits songs, Anywhere I Lay My Head verges on the heroic.- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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For every moment of clarity on this album, there’s an eyebrow-archer to match.- The New York Times
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Unlike its predecessor, which gave Lloyd’s tender alto room to breathe, much of the production here is gooey and distracting, too dense for Lloyd to make a dent in.- The New York Times
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For all its determined optimism That Lucky Old Sun ends up as more an affirmation of Mr. Wilson’s legacy than an expansion of it.- The New York Times
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Ms. Simpson has a strong voice, but it has little nuance, rendering her exercises in self-empowerment particularly banal.- The New York Times
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This isn’t natural territory for Kings of Leon, and it often shows. At times the band seems content to channel the monumental sweep of U2.- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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Mr. Jerkins has returned as the main producer, and the sentiments of the songs, whether self-affirming or heartbroken, are back to generic ones.- The New York Times
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There’s a lot about Ultraviolet you might want to like. But it runs more on concept rather than talent; too often it feels self-conscious and low on hooks.- The New York Times
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Common Existence is the least pungent and immediate Thursday album since its debut. In places it sounds like an experiment, sometimes a successful one.- The New York Times
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That Mr. Owen rarely sounds out of place is a testament to his mutable, honeyed voice, but also to his fundamental blankness, meaning he rises and falls with the mode he chooses to adopt. And when he chooses poorly, it stings.- The New York Times
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The new environment rejuvenates Mr. Cornell for good and bad: he sounds shallower than he was before but pithier too.- The New York Times
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It all feels tasteful, companionable and often saggingly dull. Perhaps a steelier singer could use this much gauze; for Ms. Peyroux, it’s Vaseline on the camera lens.- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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Not once does Flo Rida overpower his reference points, making him a rarity: an entertainer wholly without ego, a phantom presence on his own songs.- The New York Times
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If Crocodiles revel in a strain of insolence too familiar to feel transgressive, the band also manages some catchy choruses and efficient low-fi landscapes.- The New York Times
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If she's sweating, though, it's not audible. As per usual Ciara, a singer who prizes rhythm over texture and technical fluency, can't do much to outmaneuver the beats, which are consistently inventive here.- The New York Times
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His new album, Further Complications--musically more immediate, lyrically more beleaguered--was engineered by Steve Albini, whose aesthetics dictate big drums, big guitars and small vocals. So Mr. Cocker is shouting to be heard, which only improves on his comic persona.- The New York Times
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This album, the band’s seventh, feels familiar in structure, packed with the usual two-minute bursts of aggression. But it’s improbably weighty and ponderous and unusually slow moving for a band that specializes in gnashing.- The New York Times
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Yet while the album includes its share of blandly pleasant songs--the kind that could position Ms. Avi as a less arty Feist--there are also glints of melancholy clarity that promise more.- The New York Times
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Here were two artists, anxious and passionate, who knew how to talk to each other. That connection is missing from much of the rest of this collection, an exercise in Rolodex-flexing and loose oversight.- The New York Times
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Ginuwine’s new material uses a more generic palette of sounds from R&B slow jams and gospel. There’s more song to them, more piano-ballad chords and swirling Isley Brothers guitars, and more mediocrity.- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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The cuts are manic psychedelic jams--there’s even a sitar--riding electronic drones and throbbing, insistent riffs. Timbres of instruments are barbed with fuzz tone and static; the voices that infrequently appear might be shouting unintelligibly or nearly buried in the mix.- The New York Times
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So let’s file Voltaic, released by Nonesuch a couple of weeks ago, under the category of Things We Didn’t Think We Needed.- The New York Times
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On Keep On Loving You, her spotty 25th studio album, her voice still has that slightly nasal quality that makes it sound always on the edge of a harangue, even though she rarely bares her fangs anymore.- The New York Times
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The uptempo songs on Turning the Mind suggest disco that’s been hollowed out and confined to a solitary outpost, where Mr. Chapman has only his isolation to sustain him.- The New York Times
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No amount of hackneyed songwriting can undermine Ms. Underwood’s voice, which is consistently impressive, capable of pneumatic thrusts. It enlivens plenty of moments here.- The New York Times
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But even while Mr. Bon Jovi is sympathizing with the common man, the scrape in his voice is never wrenching. And while the arrangements are mildly darker than on the group’s previous albums, this group is still drawn magnetically to swelling choruses, its ambition of scale still grander than its ambition of import.- The New York Times
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It’s a seamless continuation of his “Idol” run, full of gentle songs that he only rarely tries to rough up. The flattening of the recording process suits him well.- The New York Times
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He still commands the discipline, skills and microphone presence he brought to hip-hop in the 1980s. But if he’s only going to get around to releasing one album per decade, it should be more than a holding action.- The New York Times
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Just Like You is a workmanlike pop album with shrewdly punky touches, like a ready-made outfit from the mall chain Hot Topic. It flatters Ms. Iraheta as a singer but too often suggests other empowered female stars, like Pink or Brandi Carlile or Kelly Clarkson.- The New York Times
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But all that queenliness, and the sameness of the tempo, start to wear you down. It's not until the 10th track, "Put It in a Love Song," that the record starts to bristle with a less regal impulse: flirting.- The New York Times
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“Talking to You, Talking to Me” grants each Watson Twin more of a showcase, without abandoning their trademark vocal harmonies. Produced by Russell Pollard and J. Soda, members of the Los Angeles band Everest, it also puts a tougher spin on heartbreak, with a bit more grit and a lot more groove.- The New York Times
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Accordingly, Jaheim is not at his best on ballads or on up-tempo numbers (a pair of which, “Another Round” and “Her,” weigh down the middle of this album), but he is on songs that combine the two.- The New York Times
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My World 2.0, his debut full-length album, is far sharper than it needs to be, an amiable collection of age-appropriate panting with intermittent bursts of misplaced precociousness.- The New York Times
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The magic in his stoicism is gone too: Freight Train is filled with songs that are mature but not wise.- The New York Times
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It’s filled with spacey, leisurely songs about desire, longing, betrayal and letting go. The album plays as one long tease on the way to its last song: the 10-minute, three-part “Out My Mind, Just in Time,” which is even more protracted.- The New York Times
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- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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"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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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What Eminem hasn't let go of is his taste for melancholic bombast in production.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
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$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.- The New York Times
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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.- The New York Times
- Posted Nov 4, 2010
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