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: | Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest review score: | Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album |
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 1,594 out of 2072
-
Mixed: 443 out of 2072
-
Negative: 35 out of 2072
2072
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
-
- Critic Score
All together it makes for an often sumptuous debut album of lithe, modern coffeehouse soul (in senses musical and literal: Hear Music is a joint venture between Starbucks and Concord Music Group) that smartly avoids the bohemian.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Their new album, Destination Tokyo, casts a spell in unpolished ways, evoking a gritty hybrid of Krautrock, dance-rock and art-punk.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
His identity crisis, drinking binges and family tensions are chronicled in chunky, rootsy rockers that can be stately or foot-stomping--and can, perhaps, offer some resolution.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Originality, nostalgia, sincerity, camp--none of these are stable elements in Datarock’s world, which may explain why Red comes across as well as it does.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It doesn’t reflect a lack of evolution, or even a regression, but rather the completion of a circle--and probably a landing pad, even as the world continues to whiz by.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The Resistance, the crispest Muse album yet, is unapologetically and ambitiously beautiful.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The songs stay bright, friendly and generalized yet heartfelt, awaiting the singalongs they invite in Ms. Furtado’s latest language.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It’s a set of 11 concise songs in 37 minutes that are mostly fast, loud, sinewy and live sounding.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
On Central Market, Mr. Braxton’s first full album under his own name in seven years, he has moved forward with exponentially more complicated music. It’s exponentially more entertaining, too.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
She still needs every ounce of her pluck on an album with a gloss-to-grit ratio more or less congruent with mainstream country norms. But with her keenly stalwart voice, she’s the picture of self-possession, secure enough to admit to the occasional misgiving.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Together [with producer Rob Cavallo] they broadened the band’s dynamics without sacrificing momentum.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Michael Buble is a master at juggling musical attitudes, and his new CD, Crazy Love, whose title comes from the Van Morrison song, is his most confident balancing act yet.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
John Eatherly’s almost never in her way, though: she’s pugnacious and razor-sharp right from the outset of this often terrific, and sometimes surprising album.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Amerie’s raw voice, blunt lyrics and rhythmic ingenuity make “In Love & War” a designer knockoff that at times rivals the original.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It’s the sonic and emotional expansion her music needed, and its tied to some of her most unguarded songs.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It all suggests a peculiar update of early-1960s exotica, with a heart of darkness in place of a setting sun.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
"I Can See in Color" is the culmination of an album on which Ms. Blige straps herself into the contemporary R&B machine, then grapples her way out.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Somber, arty and quintessentially British: that's Hidden the second album by These New Puritans.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Listeners familiar with Mr. Lang’s more obstreperous instrumental works may not recognize his style here (though a few more meditative ensemble pieces hint at it). But these choral settings, composed from 2001 to 2007, show that he has idiosyncratic but effective ideas about how to use voices.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Mr. Lamkin’s foul moods are a source of vitality on this gritty and amiable album, his songwriting accomplishing loads in compressed, tightly shelved spaces.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This isn’t just sonic research; it’s a real album, paced and considered. It feels good.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
After solo projects for both brothers, the regrouped Field Music remains concise but newly prolific on its third album, “Field Music (Measure)” (Memphis Industries), which is packed with 19 songs and a closing instrumental (actually two, including a hidden track).- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Galactic’s cyber-savvy New Orleans funk remembers the past but stays hardheaded about the future.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
They share the beat, tapping it on the bodhran, and slip in counterpoint from fiddle or Celtic harp. But they don’t try to make their collaborators sound Irish. Like the San Patricios, but with a happier outcome, they put Mexico first.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The new album proves again that she’s not a dabbler, just as it proves again that she and Mr. Ward, her producer, share similar ideals.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Sometimes lush, sometimes turbulent, the arrangements make Mr. Chu’s melodies more luminous while they open up mysterious spaces behind lyrics that ponder continuity and collapse. It’s a splendid transformation.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Luckily, scholarship doesn't eclipse the limber, catchy music and the sheer nuttiness of the whole project.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
I Learned the Hard Way is her fourth album with the Dap-Kings, and to say that it does nothing differently from its predecessors is essentially, among Daptone believers, high praise.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Dr. Dog gives its songs a casual, homely surface; it has perfected the imperfections that make indie-rock approachable.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
I See the Sign is a seriously intelligent record, but never cute or overbearing; its Icelandic producer, Valgeir Sigurdsson, has left it dry and full of space, so that you hear the seams.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Get Off on the Pain is the year’s best country album so far, almost as brilliantly anguished as Mr. Allan’s 2003 masterpiece, “See if I Care.”- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
These are nimble, versatile albums, though collectively the “Revenue Retrievin’ ” dyad is a more successful act of point-proving than execution.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
You’re hearing an overall group, overall sound, an hourlong unity. It’s a great nightclub set--about a quarter of it taken from his record “A River Ain’t Too Much to Love,” with a few older Smog songs (“Bathysphere,” “Our Anniversary”)--by a bar band that happens to have Bill Callahan in it.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The music is hearty and sure of itself. It's the kind of pop that, a few decades back, might have sneaked into the Top 40.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Alison Mosshart inhabits the role of a lead singer cagily, at once beckoning and rebuffing affection; her fellow vocalist Jack White does the same thing, with ruddier results.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
In Ewan Pearson’s thoughtfully modest production, the songs are played by small groups, usually just three or four musicians recorded cleanly, as unglossy and intimate as Ms. Thorn’s songs.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Structure and liberty are both so integrated into the band playbook that they don't assume any kind of opposition. That's more commonplace than it used to be too, though this group still makes it feel special.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Even after wide Internet exposure of their demos, and brief yet clamorous live sets, the album versions of the songs maintain or increase the impact. The tracks don't just rock--they detonate.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Mr. Kath imbues the album with a touch of continuity--surely not the easiest task, given tracks like “Doe Deer,” a corrosive blast of mania, and “Fainting Spells,” which declares its own intended side effect.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
She uses every scrape, shout and break in her raspy voice, with a predator’s sense of timing, to seize the drama of a song.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Even in its boasts, How I Got Over is selfless: an album of doubts, parables and pep talks.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
There are still the bursts of ’60s and ’80s melodies, astral synths and slashing guitars, but this record, crisp and unhesitant, leaps beyond his previous inconsistency and preciousness.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
These are bright, durable songs, and Mr. McCauley liberates them from any telltale hints of artifice, whether he's caressing them alone or roughing them up with his band mates, who manage a credible honky-tonk snarl.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Meticulous but only rarely precious, it's an album distantly haunted by Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, a luminous mesh of acoustic and electric guitars, bass, piano and organ, with airlessly thudding drums.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The music brims with optimism, full of major chords, sparkling synthetic sounds and tireless electronic beats.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's a collection of ballads, hymns and waltzes, sung in long arcs of melody with a voice that enfolds its strength in breathy intimacy.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
He's a ferocious character, an impressive rapper and, as heard on this strong album, a clever and loose thinker, willing to try out new poses.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This studly Welsh baritone, now 70, certainly has the voice to make a lean, tough country gospel album.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album takes decoding, but it's got enough lilt, rhythm and sonic slapstick to make the job fun.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
On Tribal he digs hard into the New Orleans rhythm and blues on which he cut his teeth. His sinewy band, the Lower 911, which will join him on Monday and Tuesday at City Winery, manages to riff on a classic sound without ever going retro. Much the same could be said of Dr. John himself.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Punch Brothers tuck their instrumental prowess into songs, behind or between the arching melodies carried by Mr. Thile's high, aching voice. And he brings something unexpected to the pickin' party: angst, which in these songs often happens to revolve around the dangerous lure of available women.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
With fuzzed guitar answered by jabs of organ, the songs go hurtling forward, racing through melodic ideas. The tough girl group is hardly a new concept--ask Blondie or the Donnas--but done right, like this, it's irresistible.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Own Side Now, her first full-length, is more serious in every way - moodier subject matter; longer, more carefully structured songs; a more robust sense of heritage.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 14, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Yet behind the period arrangements and the antique haze of the production, they're still Mellencamp songs. They can be wry and plainspoken, like the waltzing tall tale "Easter Eve," or earnest and overreaching, like the attempted workingman's parable "The West End."- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Ms. Lewis and Mr. Rice josh and harmonize their way through the album. The songs are upbeat, looking back to folk-rock and 1970s California pop.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Hurley, its eighth studio album, is a surprise, the group's strongest album in recent years.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
When Ms. Bareilles goes for more straightforward tugs on the heartstrings, she often sounds like Sarah McLachlan's gifted apprentice, complete with Ms. McLachlan's trademark of going breathy at the top of a phrase.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's more serious than many, both in programming and in execution. But it doesn't quite make solo piano a stand-alone concept equal to what he does with groups.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Once the great indie hope of Chapel Hill, N.C., this band--Mr. McCaughan, the bassist Laura Ballance, the guitarist Jim Wilbur and the drummer Jon Wurster, who favors dense, thudding bass kicks--has recaptured its grasp on bright, puckish and punkish power pop with no apparent effort.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Yet while the songs are somewhat more conventional, each one nevertheless invents a different combination of melody and irritant. The album isn't a retreat from noise--it's an expansion elsewhere.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
With or without well-known collaborators, his old hard-nosed concision comes through.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 21, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
She's at her most compelling when she loosens that clench, as on "Cinco de Mayo," another opus conceived out of funereal sadness.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Mirror, released in September, is the follow-up to "Rabo de Nube," a proper studio effort aglow with watchful calm.- The New York Times
- Posted Jan 31, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's thin sounding and cheaply made, and it's got soul for miles; it'll take you a while to know it.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
He's exactly the kind of person to be extending the usefulness of songs like "Laura," "Lush Life," "In a Sentimental Mood" and "What's New." Those songs all take their places in an equal collaboration with Mr. Atzmon, the saxophonist, and Ms. Stephen, the violinist. (Mr. Atzmon is the album's producer.) All are composers, and the record sounds cooperative in three ways or more.- The New York Times
- Posted Oct 25, 2010
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
There are minor variations, like key changes and picking patterns, but nothing as radical as the ways he would transform the songs in later years.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The music is always heading somewhere promising; the guitars ping, swoop, peal and buzz.- The New York Times
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Face Tat is cartoonishly alive and shape shifting, but the funny thing is that there some are actual tunes here too with Mr. Hill's enthusiastic singing and big melodies.- The New York Times
- Posted Oct 25, 2010
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Mr. Eno produced Small Craft on a Milk Sea from studio improvisations he shared with the electronica musician Jon Hopkins and the guitarist Leo Abrahams, blending their musicianly interactions with the impersonal, repetitive processes of loops and beats and blurring any distinction between human and mechanized.- The New York Times
- Posted Nov 1, 2010
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Funeral Mariachi, which is psychedelic, cinematic, droning, wayward, ritualistic, sometimes grating and often beautiful, sounds comfortably within its own language.- The New York Times
- Posted Nov 15, 2010
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Annie Lennox is robustly reverent on A Christmas Cornucopia, putting the full and frequently rough power of her voice behind some of the sternest old carols, with devout verses that are often omitted.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 9, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Up to a point it's gothic, ritualistic folk music, with long melodies and fanciful lyrics that go to animistic places. But it also has a theremin, making the atmosphere creepier. And above all it has the clear, strong, resolute voice of Dawn McCarthy, one of the best singers we have right now. (Yes, really; and she wrote three of the four songs too.) It's musky stuff, but not rooted in any particular hippie sensibility.- The New York Times
- Posted Dec 2, 2010
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Celebrity, commodity, singer, sex object, cyborg - Ciara just about fuses all of them on Basic Instinct, her fourth studio album.- The New York Times
- Posted Jan 3, 2011
- Read full review
-
- The New York Times
- Posted Jan 4, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The new album is more abrasive, rowdier, more unstable and pushier in the right ways.- The New York Times
- Posted Jan 10, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album feels disarmingly unspoiled. Recorded and mixed in do-it-yourself fashion, it is rougher sounding than the band's other recent releases, with a more approachable scale.- The New York Times
- Posted Jan 26, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's heady music about the body and its imperatives. And it's every bit as mesmerizing and vertiginous as desire can be.- The New York Times
- Posted Jan 18, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Punk, funk and reggae contribute to the sound - along with hints of math-rock, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie - only to get caught up in the music's precise melee.- The New York Times
- Posted Jan 25, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
On this album his usual exhortations to seize life's pleasures mingle with coming-out manifestos, and he smiles through them all.- The New York Times
- Posted Jan 31, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
As Ms. Calvi sings about the overpowering forces of heavenly love and demonic passion, she can go from whisper to cataclysm in four minutes, and she regularly does.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 21, 2011
- Read full review
-
- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 11, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Delicate Steve flaunts every loose end, every unfinished seam. It might be testing to find the threshold of musical coherence; it might just be having a well-plotted lark. But if Delicate Steve's music were any more polished, it wouldn't be half as intriguing or anywhere near as much fun.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 16, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
To its great credit it's high and low and all over the place. The dislocation works: the record has patience and breadth and almost zero pretension.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 22, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Although Providence has a noise-rock loft scene, the Low Anthem ended up working the quiet side of the street, coming up with a dead-earnest sound that lacks any overt recognition of the modern world.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 22, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Her voice has all its old scrapes and hollows; she'll never come across as too cozy. But her music is newly confident.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 28, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
There's some joy, but not a lot, on this modest but sharp album, which continues the argument for Ms. Evans as an unjustly underappreciated country singer who's becoming more assured as she gets older.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 7, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The title track of Tirtha, a fine, slippery debut from a trio of the same name, unfolds in stages, measured but intent.- The New York Times
- Posted Mar 15, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Mr. Eisold's voice has the certainty of Dave Gahan and the quiver of Robert Smith, and Cold Cave's music is deeply indebted to New Order and, in weaker spots, even has a touch of A Flock of Seagulls: the synths hit hard, vibrating at a bitter frequency, and the guitars are tuned to just this side of serrated jangle.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 26, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's an album full of leave-takings and tearful, solitary longing, both in older songs--like Richard Thompson's "Dimming of the Day," set to pristinely tolling guitars--and recent ones, like Aiofe O'Donovan's "Lay My Burden Down," which welcomes death, and the Angel Snow-Viktor Krauss song "Lie Awake," a breakup song with a deep paranoid undercurrent.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 19, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Tomboy finds him in sustained reflection, singing sublimely about the managing of expectations. It's a deeply interior album, but with an acute awareness of the space it inhabits, and the impression it hopes to leave.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 11, 2011
- Read full review
-
- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 26, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
He's not preaching on this album. He's finding solace, fleeting and fragmentary, and every springy guitar lick is its own benediction.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 11, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Katy B sings smoothly and sweetly, not dashing in and out in between the moving parts, but spreading out evenly, blunting their impact. Her soft voice turns a challenge into a seduction.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 14, 2011
- Read full review
-
- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 15, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Given how slick and intuitive this album is--full of astral soul that owes debts to Terence Trent D'Arby, Pharrell Williams, even Drake--it's more likely that someone will lose his job than that Frank Ocean will lose his record deal over this kerfuffle.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 15, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
For all the ups and downs of the lyrics, the music has no doubt that manic creativity and craftsmanship, along with rhythm and noise, are a survival kit.- The New York Times
- Posted Apr 19, 2011
- Read full review