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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    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What About Now
    What About Now suggests a few paths for progress, and an ambivalence about committing to any one of them, all under a comfort-zone haze of undifferentiated, low-ambition, lightly rootsy hard rock.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being II
    It’s less manic, less experimental, less unpredictable and, oddly, less consistent.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghost on Ghost
    The arrangements are bold but often misplaced, cluttering and distracting from the songs instead of illuminating them; the characters get lost in their costumes.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fashionably Late
    Throughout the album, there is chaos.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blessed Unrest
    The Blessed Unrest is all shoulder-drooping heft, and her musical choices are vexing.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Embracism
    For each solid purchase on a strong lyric there’s a mess somewhere else; for nearly every powerful accretion of sound there’s a nearly unbearable one. The record’s volatility both saves and mars it.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blurred Lines
    What’s striking is how unambitious most of the rest of the album is, especially the half that’s produced by Mr. Thicke with his longtime production partner Pro-Jay.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    AM
    The songs are still sullen, smart and cleverly constructed. But too often on AM, Arctic Monkeys sound less like amalgamators than like imitators.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fuse
    The words are working hard here, and the music is, too, but Mr. Urban is gliding through, barely quaking at all.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Suffering from Success
    “You Don’t Want These Problems”--a posse cut featuring Mr. Ross, Big Sean, French Montana, 2 Chainz, Meek Mill, Ace Hood and Timbaland--comes closer to hitting the album’s bull’s-eye of gloating complaint.... Much of the rest of Suffering From Success feels rote, with too little payoff for the crassness.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Baptized
    It [his voice] wants badly to roar but is given almost no opportunity to here apart from the savage “Traitor.” And so mostly, Mr. Daughtry is a caged animal on this album.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Panties
    Songs like "Cookie," "Crazy Sex" and "Legs Shakin'" start off as promises of highly skilled sexual attentions, but end up as to-do lists.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Voices In A Rented Room
    Both men put tender wheeze and murmur into their voices, but sing in unison or octaves as a default mode, which grows dull almost instantly.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Riser
    He’s deliberate in his choice of songwriters, including Shane McAnally and Josh Kear, who provide some of the better songs on this hit-or-miss album.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Recess
    Recess arrives feeling more like a checked-off item on a bucket list.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Make My Head Sing...
    As a whole, the album is monochromatic, too single-minded about Ms. Mayfield’s new sound--and, at times, a little too determined to reverse-engineer Nirvana’s flanged guitar effects. And her laconic new lyrics don’t always offer the subtleties and paradoxes of her earlier songs.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Someday World
    It’s an uneven album, with stretches that were probably more fun in the studio than on replay.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Whispers
    While Mr. Rosenberg can be affecting, the narrowness of his vision can be suffocating. Most of the time his lyrics are like teenager’s scribbled poems.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch
    It’s cumbersome and overstuffed, even if some of its moments are keepers.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Somewhere Under Wonderland
    Somewhere Under Wonderland teems with lyrics full of rambling travelogue and mystical gobbledygook. Mr. Duritz sings them confidently, in a voice that’s not as laden with meaning as he seems to think, and preserving his shambolic nature.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    V
    V is like a peppy new Nissan Altima: It won’t give you too many problems; it won’t attract stares; it probably won’t get stolen. Its parts are reliable, though none have the pulse of “Moves Like Jagger,” the 2011 hit that gave this group new life.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Don't Dance
    In places, there is something hasty and unfocused about this album, a sense of grasping for something just a bit out of reach.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Four
    One Direction’s best and most fun album since its debut, and yet still curiously distant.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hood Billionaire
    Mr. Ross is trying hard to find new ways to present himself, making this an ambitious album, but not always one with the right ambition.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Star Elephant
    The album’s social commitments are stronger than its aesthetic commitments, but it doesn’t suffer for that.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wallflower
    Where Ms. Krall usually plays vigorous keyboards on her albums, here her pianism is all but absent. Most of the fills, played by Mr. Foster, are strictly routine. It’s all the more mystifying because Ms. Krall, when prodded by a rhythm section, can really swing.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hollywood: A Story of a Dozen Roses
    Much of the production on Hollywood is swampy, but it’s a digital swamp. Mr. Foxx’s voice is slathered with so many effects that he veers toward anonymity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    1989
    Mr. Adams isn’t brave enough to depart meaningfully from the script. Where the songs work, it’s because of Ms. Swift’s bulletproof melodies. When they fail, it’s because of his conservatism.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What A Time To Be Alive [Mixtape]
    For the most part, What a Time to Be Alive is a layup from two of hip-hop’s most innovative rappers, not a hasty record, but not an intricate one either, more like a series of energetic first drafts, with choruses often little more than the same phrase repeated ad nauseam.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Storyteller
    She largely picks songs that serve as launch platforms for her ballistic-missile voice, but they don’t cohere into a whole identity.... If Ms. Underwood has developed a thematic specialty, it’s the woman-done-wrong anthem. The ones on this album are some of the better songs here.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Purpose
    Even though Mr. Bieber is younger than all of the men of One Direction, he sounds exponentially more experienced, and exponentially more fatigued on Purpose. He is also the best singer of the bunch, and the one with a clear vision for his sound, even if he’s being largely denied it here.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Buffet
    The point is that all of these songs are capable, and one is not much better than another.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wildfire
    She has a clear, edgeless voice, and she’s versatile, though often here it can sound like she’s blindly experimenting with styles.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    This Is Acting
    Even as she and her producers flaunt their layered vocals and whiz-bang sound effects, there are already so many of Sia’s midtempo victim-to-victory anthems around that they offer diminishing returns, particularly when listened to as an album.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anti
    Anti is a chaotic and scattershot album, not the product of a committed artistic vision, or even an appealingly freeform aesthetic, but rather an amalgam of approaches, tones, styles and moods.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Thank You
    She has a round and slightly stodgy voice that’s most effective when it aims lowest, as on the winning novelty song “Dance Like Yo Daddy,” full of quizzical dance instructions (“Can you overbite? Can you old man overbite?”) and doo-wop harmonies over a skronking sax and sock-hop swing. Elsewhere on this spotty album, Ms. Trainor grinds her way through tough-stand songs like “Watch Me Do,” a homage to Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women (Part 1),” and “Me Too,” where she awkwardly proclaims self-love.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Glory
    Even with her voice upfront, Ms. Spears isn’t singing anything particularly personal.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    AIM
    Much of the album comes across as lightweight. Too many of the songs sound like sketches, running out of ideas midway through.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hopeless Fountain Kingdom
    There isn’t a flicker of musical edge on this album, only a belief in the crowdsourcing of ideas. Where Halsey sets herself apart is in her subject matter and manner of delivery.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Makes You Country
    What Makes You Country is among his most temperate albums, alternately soothing and fatiguing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Man of the Woods
    Sometimes convincing, sometimes limp.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shawn Mendes
    Shawn Mendes is appealing if not wholly engaging, full of pleasantly anonymous songs that systematically obscure Mr. Mendes’s talents.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    DUMMY BOY
    Energetic but scattered.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Girl
    The best songs on “Hero” were disarmingly detailed, and sometimes funny. “Girl,” however, tips away from those strengths in favor of self-help bromides broad enough to exclude no one.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Big Day
    It feels no more fleshed out than “Coloring Book,” from 2016 (which was nominated for a best rap album Grammy), and is less sonically consistent than “Acid Rap,” from 2013. And it’s less impressive than either of them. At 22 tracks, it’s overlong and scattered.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Center Won't Hold
    Too many of the new songs sound diligent and derivative, as if Sleater-Kinney were working through a pop apprenticeship. It’s good to know that the group doesn’t want to repeat itself, that the band is also out to master 21st-century digital tools. But on “The Center Won’t Hold,” Sleater-Kinney hasn’t found its version 2.0.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Search
    He’s an objectively strong rapper who makes work with a moral valence — just like Cordae, just like Chance, just like Lamar or Logic or J. Cole. Where NF falls short is that he mostly works in one gear.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What You See Is What You Get
    “What You See Is What You Get” challenges him less than his debut album did. It is mundanely forceful, laden with chunky guitars and hard-snap drums, and just barely ambitious. Which is to say, in the current country ecosystem, reasonably effective. Where Combs shows the most promise is in his emergent desire to restore the genre to the high-octane pep of the 1990s.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chromatica
    It has some sparkling vocal moments. It reminds us how easily Lady Gaga, 34, can coax the world onto the dance floor. But it feels overwhelmingly safe. ... “Chromatica” is also a mixed bag.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wonder
    His lyrics meander and stop short of true sentiment, and his rhythmic deliveries feel less cohesive. He still has a way with swell, understanding how to inflate his voice from whimper to peal. But on this inconsistent album, rarely does his singing convey depth of feeling.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Justice
    The disorganized, only sporadically strong “Justice,” though, feels like a slap on the wrist to “Changes,” or the version of Bieber it nurtured. Rather than settle for one groove, this album shuttles between several.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Donda
    As a Kanye West album, it feels more like a stabilization than an innovation. ... [The album] is sonically cohesive but also overlong and full of heavily assembled songs — multiple producers and writers, a bounty of male guests. West has long been shifting into conductor mode, and on several songs here, he is the ballast but not the focus.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    JOSE
    The album struggles to truly innovate: “Jose” is an itinerant, unfocused effort that offers an impressionistic inventory of the sounds that have established him as a force: pop-reggaeton, trap and EDM. ... “Jose” colors inside the lines, safeguarding Balvin’s reign by reveling in the familiar.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Equals
    Ultimately, “=” neither adds to nor subtracts from the trusty formula for success that he long ago worked out. It is the sleek sound of stasis.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    WE
    Despite its occasional moments of brilliance, “We” too often finds Arcade Fire stuck in a digital maze of its own design, ignoring the fact that it’s always sounded more at home off the grid.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Born Pink
    “Born Pink” is occasionally galvanic, and occasionally iterative. When the group does push into new territory — or more accurately, unshackles itself from familiar ground — it doesn’t leave much of an impact.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Midnights
    Overly familiar sounding and spotty. ... “Midnights” feels like a concession to an older, safer idea of Swift, full of songs that are capable and comfortable but often insufficient. ... Some of the lyrics can be lackluster and bluntly imagistic, with little of the detail that made Swift one of the signature pop songwriters of the 21st century. ... “Midnights” by and large feels like a fuzzy Xerox of old accomplishments.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Thing at a Time
    Its 36 songs — yes, 36 — show abundant craftsmanship and barely a hint of new ambition or risk. ... But over the lengthy course of the album, the songs tend to cycle through just a handful of approaches. Eventually, the nasal grain of Wallen’s singing starts to feel like Auto-Tune or another studio effect.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Songs of Surrender
    “Songs of Surrender” is the weightier project. Like all of U2’s albums, it’s anything but casual; the songs have been minutely reconsidered. ... But for most of “Songs of Surrender,” less is simply less. What comes across throughout the 40 songs is not intimacy, but distance: the inescapable fact that these songs are being rethought and revived years later, not created anew. Wild original impulses have been replaced by latter-day self-consciousness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chemistry
    The album is often a showcase for the elemental power of Clarkson’s voice and occasionally for her clever turns of phrase as a lyricist, but the arrangements too often rely on modern pop clichés rather than push for innovation or reach back to the soulful traditionalism of her 2017 LP, “Meaning of Life.”
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    For All The Dogs
    “For All the Dogs” includes some of his least ambitious rapping, and whereas on prior albums, he sometimes balances out his complexity with melody, that’s rarely the case here. .... And as is Drake’s wont, there are also a handful of deeply modern, innovative and unexpected production choices.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Rope
    The new LP has more oomph and darkness than the band’s self-produced 2021 LP “Path of Wellness” and more emotional resonance than its mechanical 2019 effort “The Center Won’t Hold.” But even in its wildest moments, when compared to the band’s mightiest work, “Little Rope” sounds unfortunately diminished and curiously restrained.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Vultures 1
    Ultimately, “Vultures 1” is a simulacrum of a strong Ye album — sometimes thinly constructed, but thickened with harsh sound and polished to a high shine. Some of West’s recent albums have been brittle inside and out, but this is music that, for better and worse, matches the moment, with songs that are pugnacious, brooding, lewd and a little exasperated.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everything I Thought It Was
    Abandoning the folksy aesthetic of “Man of the Woods,” “Everything” returns to Timberlake’s comfort zone: Gleaming, lightly profane disco jams that imagine dance-floor seduction as a kind of interstellar odyssey. The results are mixed.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Musicology
    A casual exhibition of Princeliness, stocked with a handful of old tricks but no new ones.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Welcome Back
    A surprisingly tepid collection that might have benefited from a bit more preaching, or at least a bit more passion. [30 Aug 2004]
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    New Danger
    Although Mos Def sometimes finds the casual groove he's looking for, this disc is surprisingly dreary and oddly abstract. [1 Nov 2004]
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Live Like You Were Dying
    McGraw uses references to death and suffering to camouflage rather ordinary songs, and rather ordinary singing.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Concrete Rose
    So this album contains Ashanti's best and most adventurous selection of beats so far. Unfortunately, it also contains the sketchiest and most irritating batch of songs. [13 Dec 2004]
    • The New York Times
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Grown & Sexy
    Like a lot of current pop, he could use a middle ground between thuggishness and sentimentality. [15 Aug 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Back Home
    Yet heartfelt as his sentiments may be, the songs are a letdown: there's neither angst nor exaltation, just tidiness. [29 Aug 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    All That I Am
    Too many of the guest stars and committee-written songs on this album are strictly B-list. [31 Oct 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Standing In The Way Of Control
    This is a transitional album: many of the songs seem underwritten without all that noise on top; sometimes it sounds as if the band is still trying to figure out what to do with its tense, restrained new sound. [23 Jan 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ringleader Of The Tormentors
    While the lyrics are uniformly excellent... the songs mainly range from not good to pretty good. [3 Apr 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    I'm Not Dead
    A wildly uneven mixture of pop treats and melodramatic misfires. [3 Apr 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mobile
    A studious, slightly overcomposed record; we don't hear Mr. Kotche's own rich, natural drum-kit sound so much as the dried fruit of his research. [20 Mar 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Yell Fire!
    Originality seems less important to Mr. Franti than moral directness. [24 Jul 2006]
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Dutchess
    It’s essentially a Black Eyed Peas album with two fewer rappers. That’s an improvement: two down, two to go. [18 Sep 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rotten Apple
    Where “The Hunger for More” was sly and (almost despite itself) infectious, this rather workmanlike CD isn’t so memorable. [9 Oct 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    9
    "9"... has a confused feel: he simultaneously glosses up the production, tries too hard to seem edgy, then compares women to sandy shores and the morning sun like an adult-contemporary sap. [20 Nov 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Light Grenades
    The music’s intricacies become less impressive when so many of them are directly lifted from far better songs. [27 Nov 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Inspiration
    Young Jeezy’s appeal was never his writing, but now words sometimes fail him. [11 Dec 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Introducing Joss Stone
    Her makeover seems too urban for her Starbucks-mom base and too retro for urban radio. [19 Mar 2007]
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My December
    "My December" isn’t a shocking change of direction, though it’s also not very good.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blackout
    The electronic beats and bass lines are as thick as Ms. Spears’s voice is thin, and as the album title suggests, the general mood is bracingly unapologetic.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    E=MC2
    It is in the same vein [as "The Emancipation of Mimi"], but much less good.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    3 Doors Down
    The lack of specificity has also been a 3 Doors Down hallmark and that blankness overwhelms their decidedly unflamboyant, often dull fourth album.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bring Ya To The Brink
    Made with a handful of production teams, it’s a stubbornly fluorescent record, long on thudding downbeats and short on nuance or grace.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    L.A.X.
    Almost everything here, from the boasting ('Money') to the baiting ('LAX Files,' 'Cali Sunshine'), is pro forma. Worse, the Game, never a fluid rapper, sounds positively lumpy, as if he were delivering verses while running up a steep flight of stairs, or as if the last few years of pugnacity have finally left him winded.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Glasvegas
    Glasvegas is determinedly provincial, insisting there is grandeur in everyday lives. But what sounds rousing in Britain can sound sodden and overwrought to American ears.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Universal Mind Control
    It’s a blatant mismatch, Mr. Williams’s blunt-force id with Common’s casual gravity. The Neptunes, who produce seven of the 10 songs here, treat Common as an obstacle to be worked around, which, in fairness, he is.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Different Me
    Where her voice was once assured and three-dimensional, here, although many of the songs are pleasant, Ms. Cole comes off flat.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ryan Leslie
    He shows few idiosyncrasies of his own until the final song, 'Gibberish,' with Auto-Tune effects that render some lyrics unintelligible, as if he thinks they’re irrelevant.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unstoppable
    Unfortunately the album is filled with blank and unspecific emotions that without Mr. LeVox’s pyrotechnics, are distractingly dull.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Epiphany
    Epiphany is an unusually labored album, two artists missing each other at the pass.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Voice
    In fairness he has mostly dispensed with the shouting and the repetition, vocal styles that helped Mr. Jones embed his signature phrases into the hip-hop consciousness. But his rhymes are still lumpy and dim.
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