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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    • 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.
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