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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    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lorraine
    Lorraine is evenly split between mercilessly detailed songs like these and frustratingly blank ones ("Sweet Disposition," "Rocket Science"), which feel like hollow templates designed to be inhabited by other, less imaginative singers. On those songs Ms. McKenna sounds complacent; discomfort suits her better.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cass County
    The number and potency of these guests sometimes make Cass County sound like a tribute album to someone not yet gone. They also take away from Mr. Henley, now 68, whose voice has decayed nicely, though it now lacks the wise punch it had on “The End of the Innocence,” his excellent 1989 album.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    WE
    Despite its occasional moments of brilliance, “We” too often finds Arcade Fire stuck in a digital maze of its own design, ignoring the fact that it’s always sounded more at home off the grid.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Highway Companion
    For about half of “Highway Companion” Mr. Petty’s reticence opens the songs to a sense of mystery. For the rest, he just sounds reserved and cagey, singing about restlessness but sounding all too settled. [24 Jul 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    KOD
    KOD, his fifth album, has the feel of a casual placeholder between bigger ideas--it has neither the grim purpose or intense emotional acuity of his 2016 LP “4 Your Eyez Only,” nor the cohesion of the prior one, “2014 Forest Hills Drive,” the record that set the terms for his new direction.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rated O
    The cuts are manic psychedelic jams--there’s even a sitar--riding electronic drones and throbbing, insistent riffs. Timbres of instruments are barbed with fuzz tone and static; the voices that infrequently appear might be shouting unintelligibly or nearly buried in the mix.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dark Night Of The Soul
    Here were two artists, anxious and passionate, who knew how to talk to each other. That connection is missing from much of the rest of this collection, an exercise in Rolodex-flexing and loose oversight.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Prairie Wind
    Mr. Young is pushing toward guilelessness in these 10 songs; these are messages of nearly transcendental forgiveness that have lost their old edges of fear and anger. [26 Sep 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Com
    The embarrassingly specific lyrics about her personal life… give the album the feel of a nocturnal diary with the immediacy of a Web log.[16 May 2004]
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Charmer
    Charmer, her eighth studio album, represents a sunny turn for her, at least in relative terms.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tell Me I'm Pretty
    The bigger change is in the songs, which no longer promise that rock brashness can overpower adversity.... It’s a daring, deliberate shift for Cage the Elephant. But in its single-mindedness, the album sacrifices the wildly seesawing balance between life force and mortality that gave the band its verve.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wasteland
    Trippy, fitful and attitudinal; there are almost no classic soul arrangements, nor even the hard swing of 1990s hip-hop soul. “Wasteland” demonstrates the limitations of that approach as often as its strengths. ... Faiyaz sings with conviction, but he’s rarely grounded. Instead, he lives somewhere out in space — a man regarding his experiences from afar. Its production, which zigzags, wheezes and soothes, rarely feeling steady, sometimes tells the story more effectively than he does.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cradlesong
    Cradlesong, his second persistently polite, numbingly polished solo album.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    8 Diagrams
    Considering all that [has happened], it’s easy to be grateful for a quirky, uneven album like 8 Diagrams.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Futures
    Jimmy Eat World's ballads sink into sentimentality. [8 Nov 2004]
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shawn Mendes
    Shawn Mendes is appealing if not wholly engaging, full of pleasantly anonymous songs that systematically obscure Mr. Mendes’s talents.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    She Wolf
    It’s so undercooked and overwritten--with wan wolf howls and lines about being treated like a coffee machine in an office--that it reaches a special class of fascinating-awful.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kidsticks
    It’s an experimental record that often sounds like a meditative one, or vice versa, and it often seems better on paper than through the speakers.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let The Dominoes Fall
    This album, the band’s seventh, feels familiar in structure, packed with the usual two-minute bursts of aggression. But it’s improbably weighty and ponderous and unusually slow moving for a band that specializes in gnashing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise
    This one has missteps, but for Mr. LaMontagne it's those songs that feel the most honest, those where he says what he means, not what he hopes you'll think.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    JOSE
    The album struggles to truly innovate: “Jose” is an itinerant, unfocused effort that offers an impressionistic inventory of the sounds that have established him as a force: pop-reggaeton, trap and EDM. ... “Jose” colors inside the lines, safeguarding Balvin’s reign by reveling in the familiar.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Colores
    Affable but slightly numbing. ... But by and large, these are polite songs, and familiar, too. Balvin is a sweetly elegiac singer — see especially “Azul,” where he stretches out soft vowels like taffy — but his rapping is largely blank.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hall of Fame
    All together, that makes Hall of Fame beautiful more often than it’s interesting, because Big Sean’s ear is working smarter than his mouth.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    How To Walk Away
    Produced by Andy Chase of the indie-pop band Ivy, the record pairs Ms. Hatfield’s compact songs with an unabashedly commercial sound, a strategy that works about half the time.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tha Carter V
    Excess was always a part of his proposition, but this album drags and seeps, with long stretches of shrug in between moments of invention.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Okemah And The Melody Of Riot
    The band's underlying, stubborn seriousness, and nearly Amish unwillingness to change, creates its appeal. [11 Jul 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Standing In The Way Of Control
    This is a transitional album: many of the songs seem underwritten without all that noise on top; sometimes it sounds as if the band is still trying to figure out what to do with its tense, restrained new sound. [23 Jan 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Musicology
    A casual exhibition of Princeliness, stocked with a handful of old tricks but no new ones.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch
    It’s cumbersome and overstuffed, even if some of its moments are keepers.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Idlewild
    OutKast’s brains and playfulness sparkle throughout "Idlewild."... But despite the new, jazzy trappings "Idlewild" is more superficial than OutKast’s older albums.
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