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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Petra Goes to the Movies
    The arrangements are ingenious, emphasizing Ms. Haden's gift for mimesis: she can suggest the swoon of a string section as handily as the blare of a solitary bugle.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Waiting for Something to Happen
    In songs about getting swept up by infatuation the music sounds like a suddenly shared, irresistible impulse.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All That Echoes
    The singing is warm and temperate, emotionally expressive without any sign of strain. But there’s an intriguing tension in some of the other material.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    M B V
    This is vivid music, with color and texture and perhaps taste.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amok
    The songs don’t prize catchiness; they’re too busy tweaking and interweaving, toying with texture and momentum.... Yet at the same time, there’s sheer exhilaration in the profusion of rhythms.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Total Folklore
    The key is that the melodies are hearty ones in cheerful major keys. They could almost be Celtic pipe tunes, if they weren’t set on stun. It’s a merry onslaught.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Love Surreal
    With lush, glimmering keyboards and electronics, lean indie-rock guitars or Robert Glasper’s limpid jazz piano the songs tease and insinuate. Their meanderings lead somewhere.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like a Rose
    There’s not likely to be a more earthy feeling and backward-sounding country album released on a major label this year.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Muchacho
    The scriptural cadence and mythic gravity of Mr. Houck’s lyrics, here and elsewhere, manage not to overburden his emotional payload.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jama Ko
    Ngoni Ba was already remarkable for its plucked, pointillist modal grooves, and on Jama Ko, its passionate defense of Malian culture makes the music even sharper.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wyoming
    This duo’s dark, lonely, roots-minded indie rock is affecting, all the more for its sparseness.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Same Trailer Different Park
    Ms. Musgraves has a sweet character to her sound, which allows her to deliver a cynic’s wisdom in the voice of an inquisitive child.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amygdala
    [A] sleek and immersive new album.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nomad
    [Dan Auerbach] helped Bombino make a spacious, centered record, one that stretches to appeal to Western listeners--like the nomads, known for their circular dancing, who temporarily inhabit the fields of Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tenn., every June--without strain or clutter or hipness overload.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beautiful Africa
    The Malian singer Rokia Traoré has a gentle voice with a steely core, one that’s revealed more clearly than ever on Beautiful Africa.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paramore
    [Guitarist Taylor] York is Ms. Williams’s collaborator throughout most of Paramore, and they have pushed the band beyond pop-punk without abandoning momentum or the big, catchy chorus.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She
    The songs ponder affection and honesty, desire and independence, rightly confident that their modesty makes them all the more approachable.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sing to the Moon
    Her songs move from yearning and questioning to seizing an insight and turning it into an incantation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Silence Yourself
    This four-woman English band has rekindled the post-punk of the late 1970s, with music that’s stark and overpowering.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Functional Arrhythmias
    This is tangled funk with a higher calling, furious mainly in its focus.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Your Turn
    It’s a cranky record that gets exciting entirely on its own schedule.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Demi
    [An] often impressive fourth album.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trouble Will Find Me
    This time, the National utterly refuses to buttonhole listeners; the music calmly awaits attention, but amply repays it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Abandon [EP]
    Boy, those throbs are deep; boy, those screams are wrenching; boy, those patterns are sustained.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Excuse My French
    Every word hits hard. The quicker beat turns his lethargy into something of a strategy, and he sounds like no one but himself.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ...Like Clockwork
    Mr. Homme’s new songs are as strong as anything in that extensive catalog.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Immunity
    The first four songs are striking, stirringly beautiful techno numbers.... The album’s second half emphasizes ambience and texture, making for songs that are slow, contemplative and nourishing.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghost Brothers of Darkland County [OST]
    Those songs rise above the story line, but probably wouldn’t have existed without characters to sing them--reason enough for a rock songwriter to venture into a musical.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One True Vine
    As a whole, One True Vine is as introspective and diffident as a gospel album can be.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All of Them Witches
    The guitar playing is explosive but focused, and the cohesion within the band is unshakable. However dense or spaced out this music gets, there’s no question that it sounds alive.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Spirityouall
    An album that’s simultaneously playful, down-home, innovative and devotional.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lickety Split
    The guitar work is explosive and vibrant, and Mr. Randolph’s band is accustomed to turning a congregation into a howling audience (and vice versa). At times it’s easy to forget that this isn’t a live recording, which seems like the point.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rhythm & Blues
    Whether he’s singing about his mother’s advice or the eternal blues staple, woman trouble, Mr. Guy hits home.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghil
    You’re not hearing traditional technique, but you are hearing an excellent musician’s physical and emotional connection to her instrument. You’re inside the connection, basically. These are real noisy love songs.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Perpetual Surrender
    Following through on both the gleaming productions of 1980s pop and the evocative murk of the short-lived trendlet called witch house, Diana creates larger-than-life soundscapes where private musings can flourish.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Hate Music
    They’re love songs about persistence, and that’s embedded in the sound of the record; you don’t need a lyric sheet to hear it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hero Brother
    Hero Brother stands very much alone as an artistic statement, calmly ravishing and emotionally centered.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pain Is Beauty
    Her fourth album in three years, confirms her steadiness as a singer-songwriter of gothic intention, drawn to romantic fatalism and beautiful ruin.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Repave
    Volcano Choir puts Mr. Vernon’s voice and words up front and builds something like songs around them, often with crescendos marching toward full-scale choruses--enough to make the often inscrutable lyrics sound passionate enough to be worth puzzling out.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
    The melodies are forthright, the arrangements are hand played, and Ms. Case’s voice is open and robust, with the richness of prime Linda Ronstadt and Patsy Cline.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Factory Floor
    With repetition and fractures, tiny noises amid stark silences, Factory Floor generates extraordinary propulsion in its dark, empty spaces.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yours Truly
    [A] surprisingly strong album.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kiss Land
    Kiss Land is pulpy, mournful, pungent, unnerving.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tookah
    [An] extremely poised new album.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kaani
    The mesh keeps changing; the momentum never lets up.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Defend Yourself
    Insecurity, guilt, confusion and doggedness--set to winsome melodies or gnarled guitar chords and run through battered equipment--were the makings of some of the best indie-rock of the early 1990s. On Defend Yourself, Sebadoh’s first studio album since 1999, Lou Barlow still has them all.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    True
    Don’t see True as the album in which dance music imports the sounds of the American heartland into the club in hopes of digging up new audiences, or even new ideas; see it as the one in which country takes its place front and center in global pop.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Is...
    It plays like a sweet-toothed sparring session, one punch after the next of joyful high-pitched barking.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pull My Hair Back
    Ms. Lanza, who is Canadian, moves with purpose and authority in and around the rhythms on this album which, produced by her with Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys, in places nods explicitly to Timbaland’s skittish production.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Herein Wild
    Ms. Rose’s pop confections aren’t simple escapes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Days Are Gone
    Thanks to its overwhelming and triumphant exuberance and the care with which it embraces its palette of influences, Haim has made itself impossible to hate.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reflektor
    Some of the tracks go on longer than necessary, but it’s an excess of generosity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Event II
    Del the Funky Homosapien hasn’t lost his verbose velocity, and his partners retain their gift for brooding airs and funk grandeur. But what felt ahead of its time around the turn of this millennium now scans as classicism, only tweaked to include newer co-conspirators like Emily Wells.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Old
    With all these styles packed in tight, Old ends up being a maybe-inadvertent career retrospective for Mr. Brown, echoing his speedy and jagged evolution over the past few years.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Blow
    Cheap and bloodless electronic pop is too easy to imitate and score points with these days. Someone’s been studying how to transcend that problem; this album is always both intelligent and sentimental.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lightning Bolt
    What comes across is the teamwork of musicians who have been working in tandem for decades. They’re grown-ups with fewer demons and more polish, but they’re still pushing themselves.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New
    The songs are full of contrasts. It’s easy to imagine Mr. McCartney gathering his favorite phrases from assorted works in progress and challenging himself to pull the miscellanies together.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big Wheel and Others
    He’s into strange turns and oblique repetition, but as with some of his past records, he will come at you every once in a while with a single track that will pin you down with its beauty. Like a John Lennon love song. There’s a few of those here: “Angel Blood,” “Dealing” and “Untitled Spain Song.”
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wenu Wenu
    The beat is strong; the music is fused enough.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wed 21
    For all its clarity and premeditation, her music still perches on the edge of delirium.
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Nov 4, 2013
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Night Time, My Time
    [A] bracing, aggressive and surprisingly tender debut album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get There
    They wrote, sang and played everything (except drums) on the album, meshing individual styles where they comfortably overlap, in a zone of graceful, grown-up folk-rock.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Woman I Am
    Ms. Pickler sees the humor in country music, and its pathos, and its pulpy core, and she sings it with whimsy and complication.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Open
    I can’t think of a record I was less eager to go back to a second time, and I can’t think of a record I changed my mind about more on the second, third and fourth time, except maybe the Necks’ last one.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nina
    Recorded in a day, it’s the least ingratiating sort of tribute, dedicated to the spooky, unsettling side of Simone’s art.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Live at the Cellar Door
    Live at the Cellar Door--the latest rough diamond from his archives is from a booking in Washington, and it has the coiled tension of its time.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    7 Days of Funk
    The two [Dam-Funk and Snoop], collaborating as 7 Days of Funk, have a loose and luxurious self-titled album (on Stones Throw) that places both men on comfortable turf.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rival Dealer [EP]
    It’s the sound of something--or someone--rumbling to the surface, about to erupt.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wig Out at Jagbags
    [The album sounds] well rehearsed in all its complexities, but enthusiastic and offhand. Mr. Malkmus has written enigmas that are open to exegesis, but they also just roll on by with a whoop and a grin.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After the Disco
    The songs are full of characters.... The pop structures, meanwhile, are comfortingly crisp verse-chorus-verse and the settings are, at best, subliminally familiar without being too blatant about their sources.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Choir of Echoes
    Guitars intertwine and gather around them, in ever-thickening skeins of picking and strumming, pulling a listener into all the mesmerizing turbulence of those troubled romances.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Too True
    A few chords, a clear melody and succinct verse-chorus-bridge structures are filled with darkly allusive lyrics and floated amid gauzy, sweeping guitar effects.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mind Over Matter
    Mind Over Matter has a fuller, brassier sound than this group’s debut, and especially emphasizes the guitars of Jacob Tilley and Eric Cannata.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Benji
    Benji is strong, cultish stuff, full of its own stink, full of stories about death and much, much smaller things; the stanzas are long and the yarns circular.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Haden Triplets
    The album’s center of gravity, always, is the Hadens’ vocal blend, which isn’t seamless or airless but rather a series of alert, intuitive micro-negotiations in the realm of intonation and timbre. At times you notice how much is actually happening, moment to moment, in that blend.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Haiti Direct: Big Band, Mini Jazz & Twoubadou Sounds, 1960-1978
    The groundbreaking compilation Haiti Direct gathers 27 tracks from those decades: big bands with jubilant horn sections (including the one led by the compas pioneer Nemours Jean Baptiste); “mini jazz” bands that replaced horn sections with guitars; rock bands with a psychedelic streak; small twoubadou (troubadour) groups and more.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lights from the Chemical Plant
    [A] gut punch of a third album of downcast roots music and soft, soft rock.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Burn Your Fire for No Witness
    Her band’s arrangements are deliberately scrappy, but keyboards or guitars surge in whenever she needs them.... She has stripped away both sweetness and protection so that her songs grow even spookier.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Morning Phase
    He’s found the right sound for his disposition and, he resonates like crazy with that sound.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    St. Vincent
    With the producer John Congleton, Ms. Clark creates an unpretty backdrop for some of her most alluring melodies.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blank Project
    It’s a stark but warm-blooded product of avant-garde pop, just the sort of album you might have once hoped for from Ms. Cherry, whose singing is still limber and unlabored, earthy but cool.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bluebird
    She builds the title track around a moment of beauty and renewal, and elsewhere she sings of companionship and comfort. Her backing band on the album, including Tony Scherr on bass and Rob Moose on guitars, violin and viola, sounds cozy enough to be playing in a living room.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Atlas
    The calm, earthy and delicate Atlas, the third Real Estate album, is less ambitious than its second album, “Days,” and somehow more heroic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Soul of All Natural Things
    The album is brave in its fragility and sincerity; it’s not for the cynical. But it’s not naïve, either.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Slow Me Down
    What elevates these beyond mere plaints is Ms. Evans’s robust and sweet voice. She sings with power, grace and dignity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Teeth Dreams
    It’s a more intricate embrace of the 1970s guitar rock that the Hold Steady has always prized, but it’s also a leap forward.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Krazy Life
    YG has grown mightily as a rapper, and because DJ Mustard, who produced more than half of the album, has found a way to make his sketches theatrical without sacrificing their urgency.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint
    Mr. Akinmusire has a strong aesthetic compass, and as a bandleader, he keeps a steady hand on the wheel; he’s not just stumbling into the album’s shadowy and unsettled mood.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tremors
    The promise of Sohn’s debut album is that he has still more ideas hiding in the shadows.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So It Goes
    This album is chilly and paranoid and urgent, sloppy as the city Ratking hails from.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Under Color of Official Right
    Mr. Casey mopes mightily as the frontman of the Detroit postpunk band Protomartyr, which on its darkly romantic and droll second album Under Color of Official Right (Hardly Art) has honed its sound.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Testimony
    Most of this album moves with slowness and throbbing deliberation that focuses the ear and adds urgency to Mr. Alsina’s confessions. It’s also poignant for its intimacy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Way and Color
    With productions that rely on analog-sounding synthesizers and drums both live and programmed, Teen can hint at Stereolab, Erykah Badu or Dirty Projectors. Yet the songs also tend to metamorphose as they go, starting out perky and pointillistic and ending up, perhaps, in a brass-section chorale or a brawny rock guitar riff.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shriek
    When everything clicks, as in the ghostly bounce of “Schools of Eyes,” the band’s new direction seems inevitable.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Turn Blue
    It’s surer and more satisfying than either of those previous albums [El Camino and Brothers], and seems less labored.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Never Learn
    This is harsh, unyielding stuff, and most of this jolting album contains more the same. On her two previous albums, Lykke Li has been something of a floating presence, but everything about this album is intensely grounded.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Toumani & Sidiki
    Pensive or hyperactive, the duets are always gorgeous.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Be Kind
    To Be Kind continues a run of evermore committed, detailed and powerful work since the band formed again with a new lineup four years ago.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shine On
    Her songs materialize in grand resonant spaces, with pealing guitars, piano chords haloed in reverb and drums that boom without aggression. Her voice whispers breathily, swells right up to the verge of tearfulness and then gracefully backs away, ever sympathetic and ever poised.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    III
    The songs on III encompass majestic processionals, droney space rock, whipsaw distorted funk and songs in which it’s best simply to hang on for the ride.
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