The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,073 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: 1,595 out of 2073
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2073
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2073
2073 music reviews
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dennis Coffey
    The enthusiasm all around is palpable, the guitar steps up front in the mix, and Mr. Coffey, now 70, sounds more vicious than ever.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Something Big
    Its new album on Columbia, pushes the furthest yet. There are gut-punching, post-Beyonce tracks with Bo Diddley beats and schoolyard cadences.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Forever Today
    The new album continues that tradition of determined uplift.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2
    As the hip-hop mainstream shouts and booms its way into the 21st century, Beastie Boys are happy temporal outsiders, partying in their never-ending 1980s.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sophisticated Ladies
    The album's concentrated focus on a single mood is relentless. Listening to it from the beginning to the end is like being trapped in a dream with a twisty plot that draws you deeper and deeper into a period Hollywood fantasy of the bad and the beautiful.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Burst Apart
    The Antlers magnify private sorrows to overwhelming scale, creating grand anthems and then smearing them with noise.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smother
    In songs suffused with need and vulnerability, the music leaves itself open, waiting to be approached.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gunz n' Butta
    Cam'ron sounds invigorated on this album, some of his best work in years.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Own Your Ghost
    They're good for one another; Doseone tones himself down to sound conspiratorial and insinuating, and Jel's samples goad the Notwist to think more about catchiness than Minimalism.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Codes and Keys
    This album doesn't try to rejuvenate Death Cab for Cutie by reverting to the sound the band had in the late 1990s. Now, it's a band of grown-ups still eager to evolve.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Torches
    Along with intense mental states, the band's songwriter, Mark Foster, savors the construction details of his perky pop songs: the clockwork counterpoint of terse, staccato motifs played with carefully selected and individually skewed tones. Behind the neat surfaces, oddities thrive.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Dreaming Fields
    Some of the songs have been recorded by others, but Ms. Berg reclaims them with her clear, tremulous, centered voice and arrangements that are restrained but never spartan. She's her own producer, providing herself with space and resonant depth, making the sorrow and longing luminous.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gloss Drop
    Every track is dizzying, eventful and a little zany.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ronnie Dunn
    They're beautiful and affecting songs, the sort one sings as a tribute to a wife who's put up with 20 years of touring, and may have to settle for 20 more.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Channel Pressure
    Ford and Lopatin's first full album, contains their best work. It's got songs, not just suggestions or studies.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sun and Shade
    Sun & Shade, Woods's sixth full-length album, has a spine under its breathable fabrics. It's full of tough, engaging songs, with lyrics that flirt with the uncertain.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    4
    Those ["Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)," "Get Me Bodied," "Crazy in Love" and "Baby Boy"] were also songs that other singers could have plausibly released and made their own. Most of 4, though, no one else could get away with, or would even want to try.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Go Tell Fire To The Mountain
    A shrewdly self-marketing, purposefully confusing gaggle of musicians and visual artists, WU LYF--which stands for World Unite/Lucifer Youth Foundation--plays music that's an exhilarating blur, swathed in echo and cymbal sizzle.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Light of the Sun
    The intimate and the instructive are never far apart for Ms. Scott; neither are lyrics and prose, melody and recitation.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pieces of Me
    Fortunately Pieces of Me, the album, shrugs off this burden [of having the same title as an Ashlee Simpson's single], leaving Ledisi to revel in longing, pride and exhortation--and of course in her voice, a big, expressive instrument that stops just shy of strident.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Up
    The calm rhymes juggle thoughts of black identity, paranoia, lust and possibility. Yes, hip-hop still has an audacious progressive fringe.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zayna Jumma
    Zayna Jumma strikes a kind of compromise: shorter songs, more controlled dynamics, everything clearer. It's a band whose measure can finally be taken.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Better Day
    The songs are all hers, and they cover a lot of ground: falling in and out of love, taking umbrage, carrying on.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Weekend at Burnie's
    It's a welcome surprise to hear this skilled but fundamentally indolent rapper try to awaken himself from his stupor on Weekend at Burnie's, which is both moodier and more vibrant than most of his recent work.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King of Hearts
    It all works: the urge, the sass, the sleaze masked with the pitiable presentation.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take the High Road
    Take the High Road is this venerable gospel group's first organized foray into country music, and it couldn't have gone much better.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sky Full of Holes
    Fountains of Wayne's music has its heart in the 1970's of the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, Stealers Wheel and Nick Lowe, full of strummed acoustic and electric guitars, repeated octaves on the piano and wordless vocal-harmony choruses.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Red Hot + Rio 2
    Every collaboration sounds downright elated, and the cross-cultural derangement of tropicalia easily shines through these 21st-century revamps.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Watch the Throne
    Instead of a monolithic mandate delivered from on high, Watch the Throne delivers something more splintered and haphazard, a legitimate engagement with what it means to be new, in the now. It's a small record by big men with nothing to lose but bigness itself.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Mosaic Project
    The caliber of these artists speaks for itself; there's no sense of compromise here, or of an agenda limiting the options. And Ms. Carrington, who produced the album, brings accessibility and continuity to the listening experience.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marble Son
    Guitars and keyboards take varying paths through each song, gathering for dynamic swells that grow overwhelming, and overlapping in ways that only appear to be serendipitous. There's nothing neo- about this band's psychedelia.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ferrari Boyz
    The songs get the gravity and mystery they've earned.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lenses Alien
    A leaner album that manages to feel rattling and unruly, even if it's less of a surprise.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wild Flag
    The meeting point for the songwriting is in structures that are pushier than Helium's and less knotty than Sleater-Kinney's - in other words, closer to the garage and to Patti Smith's kind of punk.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seeds We Sow
    His lyrics philosophize about love, loss and passing time. But his guitar geekery is the album's governing force, and it's usually for the better.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Own the Night
    It owns its shamelessness. That cocksure stance helps to make it one of the most convincing albums of the year, a huge leap forward for a group that threatened to become famous without leaving a true mark.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paradise
    Paradise is this group's second strong album in a row (including its 2009 debut "Yeah So"), but the first on which it explores tension.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In Heaven
    The band gazes lovingly into the synthesizer presets of late 1970s and '80s soft-pop, which is nothing new, but it goes deep, taking its time with tempos and moving harmonies, adding string arrangements and thoroughly investigating the beauty of clean guitar tones.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Only in Dreams
    Only in Dreams, the second Dum Dum Girls album, seethes with a beautiful, raging confidence, louder and fuller than anything they've done before, and better than the onetime peers they're leaving behind.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What Were You Hoping For?
    This is a messy album, sometimes thrillingly so, a mélange of psychedelic rock, punk energy and R&B desperation.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Things Will Unwind
    Each pinprick or flutter or flourish in Ms. Worden's arrangements manages to feel integral, supporting the songs as well as the singing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wildflower
    It works, not only because Ms. Alaina has a big voice, but also because she doesn't portray herself as an aw-shucks beginner. She's skipped that step, and rightly so.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Days
    On this album Real Estate has lifted its sound out of the haze and, by extension, out of the pool of its peers.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Parallax
    Its songs strum and muse, with Mr. Cox's instruments and voices often doubled and slightly staggered, to dizzying stereo effect.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Replica
    The voices on Oneohtrix Point Never's new album, Replica , were sampled from 1980s television commercials, an amusing sidelight for an album that is anything but crass and insistent (despite a track called "Power of Persuasion").
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Weather
    Weather is her most consistently strong album in some time, a product of vision and discipline.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Coco Beware
    The deliberate soft focus lends depth and an air of mystery to what might have been cool-headed, straightforward indie-rock; there are echoes of the Feelies, the Strokes and, somewhere in the distance, the Beach Boys.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Komba
    Buraka Som Sistema and its guests (including the Portuguese singer Sara Tavares, the Colombian band Bomba Estéreo and the Nigerian-English rapper Afrikan Boy) top them with sly, deadpan, polyglot vocals that cockily assume you'll be dancing.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sepalcure
    This winning album ... is mannered but also vibrant.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    El Rego et Ses Commandos
    The constant is El Rego's singing, by turns rough or suave, often echoed in call and response by Ses Commandos, his steadfast band.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Betty Wright: The Movie
    She hasn't lost a bit of her gospelly grain, flirtatious cooing or hortatory fervor.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Undun
    The album is complete in itself. It's just 39 minutes, made brief to be listened to as a whole.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Back to Love
    He sounds marvelous.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges
    It's the solo work that's so impressive: simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clear Heart Full Eyes
    Instead of howling about misspent youth against huge, churning guitar riffs, he ruminates on the wages of adulthood, musically enveloped in a cosmic, plaintive version of Americana.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cyrk
    Stay with these songs a little while, and see where they go. Some come close to saying very little and end up saying more than you expect.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kisses on the Bottom
    The music ... floats over you like a light mist on a cool spring morning in an English garden as the sun glints through the haze.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Always Want
    Every track, gentle or harsh, leaves Ms. Woodroofe's voice exposed in all its doleful intimacy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Visions
    Easily Ms. Boucher's best work and one of the most impressive albums of the year so far.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carnivale Electricos
    The Carnival spirit of wide-open possibility comes through.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Toward the Low Sun
    Nothing here is neat, but much is very beautiful, expressed in the band's own language, this time with the occasional organ, piano, fuzz-toned violin and free-jazz drumming.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables
    This is country music for nostalgists and liberals, for a listener who most likely expresses shock at what mainstream country music has become, but who likes dogma delivered in a rural package.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ode
    Most of the trio's hallmarks are here: resonant lyricism, floating locomotion, a harmonic approach that brings depth to simple structures and sleekness to the more complex ones.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tuskegee
    A sleek, sure-footed new country duets album by Lionel Richie.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sentenced to Life
    Everything it has done, including the EP "Razor to Oblivion" and the album "Heavy Breathing," has been better than good. But Sentenced to Life (Southern Lord), its second album, reaches a new level of--how else to say it?--professionalism.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seeds
    Ms. Muldrow has been making records for six years, and Seeds (SomeOthaShip Connect), the newest, produced by Madlib, is the strongest yet.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Older Than My Old Man Now
    The autobiographical Older Than My Old Man Now is a gleefully morbid summing up of his life in which he ponders childhood, family history, aging and death with an attitude of incredulity that he should be 65 and turning out songs like "My Meds" and "I Remember Sex."
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bloom
    Beach House's fourth and most sumptuous album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    OFF!
    The Off! songs are tighter and often shorter; this record reflects fast, concentrated work.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Biokinetics [Reissue]
    Nearly every sound in these tracks has amorphous parameters: an indeterminate pitch, a gradual attack and decay, the sensation of being heard from a distance, or perhaps underwater.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Our Reasons
    With All Our Reasons, there's clear potential for another sustained relationship, and a tantalizingly high bar to clear.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Absence
    [A] spellbinding third studio album.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lion the Beast the Beat
    The Lion the Beast the Beat is the fourth, and by far best, studio album by this band, which has finally allowed itself to try new poses and found give where previously there'd been only stiffness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Is Your Love Big Enough?
    It's rhythm as resilience and life force, an innate sense of confidence that makes even her bitter songs somehow reassuring.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    KR-51
    Like the rest of the album, it's an exquisite, mutable voyage.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Four MF's Playin Tunes
    The album is a knockout: hard nosed and hyperacute, tradition minded but modern, defined by the high-wire grace of his working band.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Way Down Low
    Ms. Edmonson presents a vision of her art that's almost steely in its resolve, with an equal foothold in jazz, cabaret and vintage cosmopolitanism pop.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Thing Called Divine Fits
    It's a record full of poses and acts, but there's a secret work ethic under all this; the band mates seem to believe in indie-rock maybe a little more than they need to.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Algiers
    New Orleans seeped into this album anyway, with rhythmic crispness and a moody undercurrent; the production has swampy, haunted depths.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    3 Pears
    The record draws closer to where he started: this music is entirely referential, but doesn't want to be contained. It's got some freelance cool, some autonomous energy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thankful N' Thoughtful
    With a few exceptions the music grounds itself in 1960s soul, staunchly chugging along as Ms. LaVette's bruised, caustic, adamant voice plunges into every line, coming through the songs as an unflinching survivor.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Until the Quiet Comes
    The album's aesthetic is elastic and permeable, and yet strong enough to hold its shape.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Transcendental Youth
    The band used to simply propel Mr. Darnielle's succinct melodies and his friendly but insistent voice; now it has finer calibrations.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Traveling Alone
    The depth and clarity of Ms. Merritt's singing make these songs feel properly lived in.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    119
    Lee Spielman, the charismatic and intense frontman, is far more legible a singer here than he's ever been. That lucidity is in service of some of his most pointed lyrics.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shut Down The Streets
    The melodies are still there, from gently scalloped waltzes to hearty power-pop choruses, and there's a new layer of polish on the arrangements: intros that establish atmosphere along with hooks, richer and more elegant instrumental blends, the self-effacing vocal harmonies of Neko Case from the New Pornographers.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Haunted Man
    Unlike previous Bat for Lashes albums, which grew gimmicky and overloaded, The Haunted Man keeps Ms. Khan and her unexpectedly succinct melodies in the foreground, urgent and unguarded.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran
    With this album Mr. Johnson proves not only that he plays well with others (especially Ray Price, Lee Ann Womack, Willie Nelson and George Strait) but also that his cantankerous charm flows out of a sentimental continuum.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sorry To Bother You
    The tracks are songs first, not manifestoes. The music is largely upbeat, even zany, with more than a hint of Outkast at its peak.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    R.E.D.
    What's striking about R.E.D. are Ne-Yo's subtle but notable stylistic departures.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King Animal
    Soundgarden doesn't advance beyond reclaiming its proven strengths on King Animal, but those strengths are substantial.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lux
    It is killingly beautiful and doesn't do any more than it sets out to do, which is, in a sense, very little.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lonerism
    Tame Impala saves itself from mere revivalism with 21st-century self-consciousness and, tucked amid the swirl and buzz, touching confessions of insecurity.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bish Bosch
    The album can be heavy going, with or without a dictionary, but its sheer, lapidary obsessiveness provides its own rewards.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors
    Even in Outkast, Big Boi was never merely a macho cartoon; now, he's revealing he's a grown-up.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fade
    Together Mr. McEntire and Yo La Tengo have calmed and thickened the band's music.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Buddy and Jim
    Mr. Miller and Mr. Lauderdale gave themselves a professional assignment that they could handle, as pals, with aplomb.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Light Up Gold
    The singing and songwriting mostly split between Austin Brown and Mr. Savage, who are astute enough to write taut, smart lyrics, and self-aware enough to arch an eyebrow while maintaining the pose.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mystical Weapons
    In 13 instrumentals that rarely outstay their welcome, it sounds as if the studio was filled with exotic percussion and with wavery analog instruments and effects.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Almanac
    While the songs retain their verse-chorus-verse clarity, the newfound breadth of the music orchestrates and enriches lyrics that take the long view.
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