The New York Times' Scores

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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: 100 Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1
Lowest review score: 0 Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,594 out of 2072
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2072
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2072
2072 music reviews
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nabuma Rubberband
    Little Dragon has traded its austere electronic blueprints for 3-D renderings, making its music more approachable but no less eccentric.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unrepentant Geraldines
    Like most of Ms. Amos’s albums, her new one revels in multiplicity and mannerisms; she’s not afraid to warble. The lyrics wander between myth and realism, the personal and the political.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sylvan Esso
    Mr. Sanborn’s programming and production ground these songs in a range of textures, borrowing from techno, electro-pop and dubstep. He’s sensitive to the needs of the vocals, and supple with his touch.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Upside Down Mountain
    All of Mr. Oberst’s gifts align on Upside Down Mountain: his empathy, his unassumingly natural melodies, the quavery sincerity in his voice, the plain-spoken but telling lyrics that he’s now careful to deliver clearly.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In Conflict
    A sustained chamber-synthpop reflection on the idea of romantic and sexual turmoil, the album is also a tangle of confessions and absolutions, artfully and bravely unresolved.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Are We There
    For a wallow in obsessive love, it’s hard to top “Your Love Is Killing Me” on Sharon Van Etten’s fourth album, Are We There.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dereconstructed
    Throughout the album, the guitars provide friction and rough-and-tumble tension, and there’s more of both in Mr. Bains’s words.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Songs
    He has figured out how understatement can lend gravity to a song. Mr. Fullbright joins the lineage of terse Southwestern songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, sticking to a few folky chords and reaching for unassailable clarity.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Platinum
    Her characters in these songs--which feature some of the most incisive songwriting in any genre--are complex, self-confident and self-lacerating all at once, and most crucially, completely knowing and in on the joke.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Comet, Come to Me
    [A] deep-groove, emotionally insinuative new album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    While You Were Sleeping
    His second album on the label--While You Were Sleeping, is a leap forward, brilliant precisely for its blurriness of style.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Last Dance
    Last Dance is by no means a dolorous album, resounding as it does with empathy and melodic accord. There isn’t a solo as outright stunning as Mr. Jarrett’s on “Body and Soul,” from “Jasmine,” but there may be more brilliant flourishes of duologue.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Electric Brick Wall
    Electric Brick Wall, even more than the band’s last record, “Rad Times Xpress IV,” coheres into songs with good form.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gamel
    It’s rugged, inspired, original music.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fuego
    Like the rest of this disciplined but frisky album, the jam doesn’t ramble; guitar solos are pointed, and each section heads for a clear crest.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terms of My Surrender
    Produced by Doug Lancio, the lead guitarist in the Combo, Mr. Hiatt’s fine backing band, Terms of My Surrender has a relaxed and rawboned sound, credibly rooted in live performance.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1000 Forms of Fear
    It’s not the triumphal, laminated, computer-perfected tone of Sia’s clients. It’s the sound of the loopy, unresolved passions that can still be alive within pop formulas.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    World Peace Is None of Your Business
    In its stompy art song streaked with slick noise and nuevo-flamenco guitar, its clumsy lyrics, its condemnation of so much human endeavor, all its stolid idiosyncrasy, World Peace (Harvest/Capitol) constitutes its own weird kind of pedantic success.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hypnotic Eye
    As romance, ethics, community and the economy collapse, Mr. Petty and the Heartbreakers offer two old-fashioned bulwarks: the solidarity of the band and the sinewy construction of the songs.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    By Any Means [Mixtape]
    This mixtape--his third strong one in the last year or so--features some of his most accessible material, songs that pair the savage darkness of mid-1990s West Coast gangster rap with huge, bombastic choruses, as if the one thing that excites him is the chance to be widely heard.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Primitive and Deadly
    The beginning and the end are phases of warming up and warming down, while the middles are rich and complicated.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clearing the Path to Ascend
    It’s a stealth band, working on the rack of riff and repetition, moving slowly toward loud, intense, orange-sky beauty.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Songs of Innocence
    The album is a blast of discoveries, hopes, losses, fears and newfound resolve in lyrics that are openly autobiographical. It’s also a blast of unapologetic arena rock and cathedral-scale production, equally gigantic and detailed, in the music that carries them.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller
    His performance is a respectful but contemporary nod.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone
    She’s pithy and penetrating, bruised but steadfast, proud of the grain and drawl of her voice.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything Will Be Alright in the End
    Weezer has reclaimed what it does best.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rips
    Rips is a feel-good gut-punch of a debut album, working a sound that dates back to the Runaways, but also can hold its own right up against current practitioners like Dum Dum Girls.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I've Been to Many Places
    Hearing him on a record like this has become the quickest and truest way to take his measure.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heart on My Sleeve
    This album is full of the sort of self-lacerating confessional music that was all the rage two decades ago, and now, in a different time, feels both completely foreign and surprisingly refreshing.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1989
    Full of expertly constructed, slightly neutered songs about heartbreak, 1989, which is to be released on Monday, doesn’t announce itself as oppositional. But there is an implicit enemy on this breezily effective album: the rest of mainstream pop, which 1989 has almost nothing in common with.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pain Killer
    Streamlining its roots-minded harmonies and delivering them with new, lean muscle, making for its best album yet, one of the signature country releases of the year.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    RTJ2
    These are pummeling cyber-howls, these songs.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Storytone
    The vocals hold just enough honest rough spots to celebrate, everywhere else, the purity and committed fragility of Mr. Young’s voice, which is high and clear, even though he’ll be 69 on Nov. 12.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clark
    It’s an album that plays as an album, not a D.J. set.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Broke With Expensive Taste
    Most of all, she understands rhythms--house, trap, soul, techno, Latin--and she slings rhymes and melodies that fully engage them.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lost on the River
    The songs unfurl as they go, gathering resonance and gravity. But the personalities of the songwriters, who are bandleaders on their own, push through.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Faith in Strangers
    On his new record, Faith in Strangers, the details are different but the achievement is similar.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's the Girls!
    Her bubbly first studio album in eight years and one of her best.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    36 Seasons
    36 Seasons continues his recent custom of spinning a thin concept into an engrossing narrative.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    December Day
    A casual but captivating album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sucker
    The music is brash and glossy, but its attack is varied and full of clever moments.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Messiah
    It doesn’t leap out of speakers; it oozes and bubbles, waiting for a listener to be drawn in. As it does, the pleasures and rewards keep growing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World
    On the whole, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World strikes a note of pop concision and maturity, building on what worked on “The King Is Dead.”
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Absent Fathers
    Both albums [Single Mothers and Absent fathers], particularly Absent Fathers, are a finely tuned wallow in male heartache.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reality Show
    Playing a woman too often scorned, she comes out victoriously soulful.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Moonlight
    Mr. El Khatib’s garage rock has never been completely faithful to tradition, but it has also never been this loose or appealing. Moonlight is his third album, and also his most convincing, finding a middle ground between the competing excesses of his first two.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vulnicura
    Even amid the most abstruse music, these songs have an emotional immediacy. The physicality of Björk’s voice and the strings are even more striking against the impersonal electronic sounds, all the better to reveal the interior landscape of heartbreak and healing--not a simple story, and all the better for it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Love You, Honeybear
    This warped, lovely album suggests that a true longtime partnership isn’t two people who love each other even for their flaws, but of two people accepting decay--their own and each other’s--and choosing to ride it out nonetheless.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Middle Class
    American Middle Class, her debut album, comes fully formed, clear about its purpose.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reflection
    This strategy [a homage to the last two or so years of pop and R&B] works because all the women of Fifth Harmony--Ally Brooke, Camila Cabello, Dinah Jane, Lauren Jauregui and Normani Kordei--are impressive, flexible singers.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blackheart
    Ms. Richard makes slow, deliberate movements; sometimes they undersell her talent, but just as often they showcase a different side of it.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Break Stuff
    The band’s refractive language makes sense of whatever material it plays. You don’t hear the record and seize on its sense of rupture or argument. Instead, it sounds whole.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dark Sky Paradise
    In the last year, he’s made real strides toward lucidity, and on Dark Sky Paradise, his third and best album, he is more human than ever before.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Another Eternity
    Another Eternity is at once more expansive and more transparent than “Shrines.”
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Don't Lose This
    Mavis Staples and the producer of her recent albums, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, have now completed that album, Don’t Lose This (Anti-), adding some instruments and vocals, and it’s done right: lean, un-slick and focused on Pops’s vividly recorded guitar and determined voice, still finding the unexpected pause and turn.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kintsugi
    It’s a smartly shaped response to two recent disentanglements, at least one of which seems to have left a residue of trauma.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Short Movie
    The fundamentals of her style are unchanged: the austere beauty of her singing; the grace and propulsion of her fingerpicking; the drones that underscore both Indian ragas and pensive British folk.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Pimp A Butterfly
    At its best, it’s a howling work of black protest art on par with Amiri Baraka’s incendiary play “Dutchman,” or David Hammons’s moving decapitated hoodie “In the Hood”.... He hasn’t outrun his tendency toward clutter. He is a dense rapper, and even though he’s more at ease with the music now, he still runs the risk of suffocation.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carrie & Lowell
    A hushed, intent Sufjan Stevens contemplates death, grief, family and memory on his quietly moving new album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Still the King: Celebrating the Music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
    Still the King genuflects little to Nashville’s reigning commercial center, but the artists on deck pull their weight.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At Least for Now
    An album very much about the act of becoming, with a tightrope balance of dramatic artifice and diaristic detail.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Past, The Present, The Future
    If you can forgive the album’s concessions to the musical innovations of the last decade or so, like the Timbaland-assisted production on “Incredible,” it’s a logical, if slightly aged, continuation of the group’s music from its prime.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darling Arithmetic
    While the album is willfully interior and musically conservative, it doesn’t ever feel cloistered, because of the emotional stakes that he keeps clearly in sight.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Infinite House
    It’s welcoming, but it’s weird, this band. It’s got the sound of practice, especially in the rhythm section.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kathryn Calder
    Her own albums--this is the third and most transparent--reveal grander structures and a singular perspective, as she sings with tuneful equanimity about deep, unresolved, enigmatic struggles.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Second Hand Heart
    The album is a reckoning with grown-up love, a battle against disillusionment and a big brash stomp..... He’s still pushing, still sure of what makes a song alive and durable.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    High On Tulsa Heat
    At its best, High on Tulsa Heat is starkly elegant, addressing sadness with clarity and directness.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Waterfall
    All those lyrics about openness, about flow, about mind-body dualism--they suit this band perfectly, along with cavernous reverb and heavy-foot midrange tempos.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Why Make Sense?
    Despite all the allusions, the songs aren’t trapped in revivalism. Part of Hot Chip’s charm has been its combination of intelligence and ingenuity with a self-conscious reserve.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    II
    On its primally satisfying second album, II, it plays with punk attitude, hardcore discipline and construction-site volume. That all adds up to a glorious rumble, and a fetishistic one as well.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dumb Flesh
    He’s giving you something you might find familiar or even commercial by its basic outlines. But he’s still got ways to make it uncanny: close, loud and abrupt.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Multi-Love
    The music is furtively detailed; it’s full of asymmetrical melodies and harmonic detours, bits of countermelody and instrumental interludes. Behind the cheesy facades, Mr. Nielson’s latest batch of songs deals with a complicated roundelay of heartache, androgyny, drugs, decadence and regret.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Della Mae
    Della Mae’s self-titled third album shows a leap in confidence.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Soul Food
    It’s a catalog of strengths, a romp through sacred steel music, blues and Southern soul that often sounds as if it could have been recorded in heated performance.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Simple Songs
    It sounds fantastic as a study in symphonic-rock ambition and studio mixing techniques.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zoy Zoy
    Zoy Zoy is more clearly recorded and no less hyperactive than Tal National’s 2013 “Kaani,” and its songs engage body, conscience and spirit.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At.Long.Last.A$AP
    It’s unrelentingly hazy, a state of mind as much as a musical approach. Rocky is a more precise and impressive rapper here than he was on his 2013 debut album, returning to the nimble and flexible form he displayed on his earlier mixtape and Internet releases.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs By Karen Dalton
    Working separately, the songwriters converged in lonely reflection; the album adds up to a composite portrait of a ghost.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Before The World Was Big
    These songs, written and sung with more subtlety since the group’s first EP from late last year.... It almost doesn’t matter what they’re singing about. The sound of their voices together contains it all.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Before We Forgot How to Dream
    There’s no diffidence in the songs themselves. Soak exposes longings, fears, traumas and resolve--sometimes elliptically, sometimes with disarming bluntness.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything Is 4
    Everything Is 4 is his second strong album in a row.... Here, Mr. Derulo is a shameless collaborator, a gleeful regurgitator of styles, and one of the most surprisingly savvy decision makers in pop.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bad Plus Joshua Redman
    As a chemistry experiment, the album is a knockout.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Don't Weigh Down the Light
    A true post-folk record, dyed in the acoustic sound of the English and Californian folk movements of the late 1960s and early ’70s, but not particularly scholarly or eccentric.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Feels Like
    Bully has in Ms. Bognanno a special weapon. She’s a bracing songwriter, full of quick jabs and mundane details that end up being full of import. As a singer, she’s evocative, especially when her vocals are double tracked.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wildheart
    He doesn’t always try to play the good guy or the heartthrob, either. The music, meanwhile, places sinuous tunes, pushy guitars and lush vocals against uneasy backdrops--seductive, but never without second thoughts.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Currents
    Currents is a tour de force for the songwriter and his gizmos. But it’s also decidedly hermetic, nearly airless.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Something More Than Free
    The best of them glow with bittersweet empathy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ego Death
    There’s convincing thump at work here, but not so much as to overwhelm the lustrous keyboards, the nuzzling bass, the way several of the songs unfurl like blooming roses.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Blade
    In 2013, she released the elegantly scarred “Like a Rose,” a striking album that showed her to be a sly, progressive songwriter and a nimble, tradition-minded singer. At its best, The Blade, her follow-up, continues that arc.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Compton
    Musically, it’s ornate and grand-scaled, and somehow also deft.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jessie Jones
    It all sounds quickly made, yet clear and confident.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beauty Behind the Madness
    The music has moved from the shadowy haze of trip-hop to an emphatic, monumental clarity--high-end pop craftsmanship. The production still conjures huge spaces, but now they are brightly illuminated, with each sound in crisp focus.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paper Gods
    Largely, though, Duran Duran chooses its collaborators wisely here, opting for some from that golden age, like Mr. [Nile] Rodgers, or those who’ve internalized that era’s balance of sleaze and good cheer, like Mark Ronson.... So long as Mr. Le Bon is oozing atop brisk arrangements like this, the specifics of the words don’t much matter. Everyone here has the posture down cold.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    La Di Da Di
    Battles thinks hard and kicks harder.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Me
    Smartly and shrewdly, Empress Of provides the neatness of pop minus the reassurance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thunderbitch
    It’s old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll that is never studied or antiquarian; Thunderbitch still feels the zap.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    GO:OD AM
    One of the most musically appealing hip-hop LPs of the year. It’s lush and crisp, and also diverse.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Honeymoon
    She’s been angry, and then bored of being angry, but now she’s just bored, and her boredom is entrancing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Allas Sak
    What’s special is the less cosmic parts: the hard, self-contained compositions at the center of these tracks.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Agent Intellect
    Protomartyr is from Detroit, and there’s a dour, industrial affect to this record-- the band’s best, though like the others it can sometimes feel like one long song--which seems to confirm everything you think you know about that city.... But Mr. Casey’s excellent lyrics go bigger and more abstract.
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