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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    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In The Maybe World
    Ms. Germano’s music is beautifully haunted and composed, but almost too claustrophobic to bear. [17 Jul 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    For Me It's You
    The music is often too banal to be good, let alone great. [6 Feb 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Malice N Wonderland
    But too often on this album Snoop is a fuddy-duddy, domesticated and palatable.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Certified Lover Boy
    It demonstrates how sonically rigorous even the most casual, tossed-off Drake songs are. But its storytelling doesn’t always hold up to strict scrutiny. ... “Certified Lover Boy” is his least musically imaginative album, the one where he pushes himself the least in terms of method and pattern.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Plus One Is One
    Typically hit or miss.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Makes You Country
    What Makes You Country is among his most temperate albums, alternately soothing and fatiguing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz
    Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz is long and slack, stretching many of its 23 songs out of meager ideas, and puts raw faith in the weird or the nonvarnished, as if she had just recently discovered those concepts.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Corazón
    In some tracks Corazón feels like a committee crossover project.... But Corazón also finds vibrant international connections.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gavin DeGraw
    He makes a concerted effort to fill out and roughen up his sound, enlisting the modern-rock producer Howard Benson and an accompanying coterie of seasoned studio musicians. The results don’t suggest reinvention so much as a slight twist.
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fantasy Ride
    If she's sweating, though, it's not audible. As per usual Ciara, a singer who prizes rhythm over texture and technical fluency, can't do much to outmaneuver the beats, which are consistently inventive here.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Talking To You, Talking To Me
    “Talking to You, Talking to Me” grants each Watson Twin more of a showcase, without abandoning their trademark vocal harmonies. Produced by Russell Pollard and J. Soda, members of the Los Angeles band Everest, it also puts a tougher spin on heartbreak, with a bit more grit and a lot more groove.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ritual
    Every gesture feels like flagging down a passing ship from a barren island. Every emotion registers on the Richter scale. This can be wickedly effective, as many a successful British rock band will attest. And periodically on this album, the stars and planets do align.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magna Carta Holy Grail
    Though Timbaland’s productions always hold some sly surprises, “Magna Carta ... Holy Grail” comes across largely as a transitional album, as if Jay-Z has tired of pop but hasn’t found a reliable alternative.
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Revelations
    Despite Mr. Cornell’s budding outrage, and the band’s attempts to funk up its sound, “Revelations” has a tentative, unfinished air.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lessons In Love
    Unlike its predecessor, which gave Lloyd’s tender alto room to breathe, much of the production here is gooey and distracting, too dense for Lloyd to make a dent in.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Hate And Then There's You
    The riffs are tight, but not so fresh.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Punching Bag
    His records over the last nine years, including the new Punching Bag, slide too easily into benign corniness.
    • 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]
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Recess
    Recess arrives feeling more like a checked-off item on a bucket list.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Out Of Ashes
    Mr. Bennington strives to sound sympathetic, but after a song or two it’s clear that his only sympathy is for himself; there’s no humility, much less humor or proportion. As real as his prolonged adolescent angst is supposed to be, it quickly curdles into narcissism.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Girl Who Got Away
    The electronics are there, however, and they lift the album’s better songs out of the sad-sack zone.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Seventh Seal
    He still commands the discipline, skills and microphone presence he brought to hip-hop in the 1980s. But if he’s only going to get around to releasing one album per decade, it should be more than a holding action.
    • 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Endlessly
    It's rigorously written, but Duffy sounds uncertain, spotlighting the particulars of her voice: the many crannies, the narrow backbone, the decay at the edges, the tentativeness she feels when it's unclear just how much room she has to maneuver.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lies For The Liars
    After a while, the surfeit of ideas starts to sound like a lack. But the choruses are as effective as ever.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anywhere I Lay My Head
    As workarounds go, Scarlett Johansson’s collection of Tom Waits songs, Anywhere I Lay My Head verges on the heroic.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    We Global
    We Global is an orchestra of favor collecting, though slightly dimmer than the two albums that preceded it.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Do You Know
    Ms. Simpson has a strong voice, but it has little nuance, rendering her exercises in self-empowerment particularly banal.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Smile
    “Smile” doesn’t have much of an agenda beyond a general feeling of uplift, and it has a lightness that makes it a better and more nimble record than its predecessor. All I’m asking of a Katy Perry song is for it to make me feel marginally happier than I did three and a half minutes prior. There are a handful of songs on “Smile” that do the trick. Though the singles have flopped, “Smile” provides an excuse to revisit them — most are better than they got credit for.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In Between Dreams
    The songs on "In Between Dreams" (Universal) are so light and self-effacing they might scatter in a tropical breeze. [13 Mar 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Autobiography
    The album is a thoroughly calculated package, aiming for the same audience that embraces Avril Lavigne and Pink. [26 Jul 2004]
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Sellout
    Her scratchy charm gets her through some of the stompers, like "Kissed It" and "Still Hurts," and her old humor surfaces now and then. But the desperation rings all too true in "Help Me."
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Korn III: Remember Who You Are
    On Korn III: Remember Who You Are, the band has jumped back to the sound and attitude that made it famous - if without particularly inspired tunes - and Mr. Davis, almost 40, seems to have regained some of his younger self as a lyricist.
    • 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]
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Come Through for You
    The album stays kindly, polished and simpering all the way through, with only one surprise.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Suite #420
    Suite 420, beyond some sweet spots early in the disc, becomes wickedly boring.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Soulsville
    But aside from transposing the keys--a measure most likely taken to suit a limited vocal range--these songs take few liberties.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No. 6 Collaborations Project
    No one is quite as adept amid a range of styles as Sheeran. ... But right near the top of this album, he stretches too thin. On “South of the Border,” which features Camila Cabello and Cardi B, Sheeran dips into a little Spanish, as has become de rigueur, and leans into the tired trope that going “south of the border” is where real freedom reigns. ... But even though this record presents countless opportunities for Sheeran to fumble, there is something to be said for his choice to release it at all.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Something To Be
    Mr. Thomas can be a cloying songwriter... Still, plenty of emo singers probably envy Mr. Thomas's knack for writing big, slightly sad songs. [25 Apr 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Pier Pressure
    On No Pier Pressure, they [Wilson and co-producer Joe Thomas] juggle past and present in strangely proportioned ways.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jigsaw
    The album--which, like its predecessor, was produced by Medasyn, another Londoner--merely strikes a few new poses.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lasers
    Lasers is a chaotic album full of gummy rhymes that look better on the page than they sound to the ear, delivered with a tone of tragic bombast.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Greatest Story Ever Told
    But much of The Greatest Story Ever Told might as well be running down a familiar checklist--guns, rough sex, big cars, club brawls, anti-snitching--and Mr. Banner is running out of variations.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fireflies
    Marks her rededication to country music and culture. [8 Aug 2005]
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    So-Called Chaos
    The music rings proudly, but the narcissism is suffocating.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    rEvolver
    He mainly revisits old tropes without a wink.
    • 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Gravity
    The rest of her follow-up, No Gravity, a competent, sometimes exciting pop album, collects other attempts: in essence, a series of portraits drawn by people with radically different styles.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    O.N.I.F.C.
    For someone so relaxed, he certainly sounds at odds with much of this album; even the warm, enveloping production, primarily by ID Labs, doesn't loosen up his stiff flow at all.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Minutes To Midnight
    As you might imagine, the band’s emo makeover doesn’t always go smoothly.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Someone To Watch over Me
    Cut by cut, Someone to Watch Over Me is not as strong as its forerunners.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The New Classic
    Student’s complete commitment to character and form compensate slightly for the unrelenting weirdness of this project.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    15 [Mixtape]
    What’s most notable is how relatively natural and at ease Bhad Bhabie, the nonprofessional of the pair, sounds as compared with Ms. Cyrus. ... On the entertaining if erratic 15, Bhad Bhabie raps like someone who is learning to rap in real time, which to be fair, she is. ... Even though she deviates from her trash-talk flow on a couple of occasions--the faux-Young Thug melodies of “Trust Me” and “No More Love”--Bhad Bhabie otherwise has a honed sense of self-presentation.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crash My Party
    A few times on the competent but wearisome Crash My Party he sounds dutifully twangy, but those moments are exceptions.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lotus
    The anonymity of much of Lotus is its biggest crime, more than its musical unadventurousness or its emphasis on bland self-help lyrics or its reluctance to lean on Ms. Aguilera's voice.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bionic
    Now, on her new album, Bionic, how has she decided to present herself? Mostly as a sexbot: a one-dimensional hot chick chanting come-ons to club beats.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Omens
    This is a clangorous album in every way, full of brick-dense synths and abusive drums, and it often succeeds by blind force. But elsewhere the duo--Nathaniel Motte and Sean Foreman--are much slier and much more successful.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Partners
    The choppy calls and responses between Ms. Streisand and her partners, however, lack conversational or narrative flow, and you have an uncomfortable sense that the parts were spliced together after the fact.
    • 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Man of the Woods
    Sometimes convincing, sometimes limp.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Look What You Made Me
    He’s likeable but dull, rapping with nursery-rhyme cadence and simplicity. When he attempts intricacy, his words fall all over one another, scrambling for dry ground.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jekyll + Hyde
    For every song that issues a challenge, there are two that play nice.
    • 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Immortal
    The new versions can be garish (pseudo-tribal drums and jungle noises in "Ben"?) or touching.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Great Escape Artist
    The sound is brand-name familiar but all too settled; the songs place their hard-rock hooks neatly but without the original band's startling ups and downs.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goon Affiliated
    The brightest moments come from his exceedingly thin attempts at concept.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Boys Allowed
    Ms. Hilson's own records aren't tipping toward bona fide dance music as much as Rihanna's, and don't yet have their audience-strafing sweep. But a few songs here are good enough to stop the overthinking comparisons
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Overexposed
    It's when he deviates from the plastic norm that he actually sounds most awkward.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Play On
    No amount of hackneyed songwriting can undermine Ms. Underwood’s voice, which is consistently impressive, capable of pneumatic thrusts. It enlivens plenty of moments here.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unleashed
    On the whole, though, Hurricane Chris sounds bored. Even on an album this short--10 songs, 38 minutes--he manages to repeat lines and references.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wilder Mind
    Heard one song at a time, Wilder Mind builds convincing dramas. But Mumford & Sons’ greatest skill--their strategic crescendos--starts to feel like a formula over the course of the album.
    • 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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Under the Mistletoe
    Mr. Bieber hasn't ever sounded this good. But even Mr. Harrell can't place Mr. Bieber on equal footing with some of his more accomplished guests
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    HitNRun: Phase One
    The successes tend to be love songs.... But those songs arrive late in the album; first come oddities and overreaches.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anthem of the Peaceful Army
    Millennials could use a band that can play instruments in real time, that exults in musical possibilities, that wants to make both a ruckus and a difference. On its debut album, Greta Van Fleet isn’t that band.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Acoustic Sessions
    It's not awful. But while Acoustic Sessions carries the hush of a whispered secret, it divulges little beyond the fact of its stylish presence.
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    California 37
    California 37 resides gladly in "Hey, Soul Sister's" shadow, full of equally goofy songs, some more so.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Man's Thoughts
    Ginuwine’s new material uses a more generic palette of sounds from R&B slow jams and gospel. There’s more song to them, more piano-ballad chords and swirling Isley Brothers guitars, and more mediocrity.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kris Allen
    It’s a seamless continuation of his “Idol” run, full of gentle songs that he only rarely tries to rough up. The flattening of the recording process suits him well.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Circle
    But even while Mr. Bon Jovi is sympathizing with the common man, the scrape in his voice is never wrenching. And while the arrangements are mildly darker than on the group’s previous albums, this group is still drawn magnetically to swelling choruses, its ambition of scale still grander than its ambition of import.
    • 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
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Soulbook
    His new versions are respectful and careful, with his voice recorded in close-up. Compared to the originals, they are just about joyless.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    SuperHeavy
    An almost total lack of good songs constitutes the album's basic problem. Once that's understood, the record becomes sort of entertaining: gaudy, vacuous, densely mannered.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Incredible Machine
    This all amounts to an unwelcome unraveling of the Sugarland formula. As a country duo, the members of Sugarland are surefooted. As tweakers of Nashville orthodoxies, they're goofy and fun, but clumsy.
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