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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    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nostalgia, Ultra.
    Given how slick and intuitive this album is--full of astral soul that owes debts to Terence Trent D'Arby, Pharrell Williams, even Drake--it's more likely that someone will lose his job than that Frank Ocean will lose his record deal over this kerfuffle.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cotonou Club
    The grooves lean toward salsa in "Koumi Dede" and Afrobeat in "C'est Moi ou C'est Lui," but Orchestre Poly-Rythmo ratchets up the rhythms. Its singers work hard too.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Salt On Sea Glass
    Behind the glossy surface, on this album, is a cerebral seduction.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On a Mission
    Katy B sings smoothly and sweetly, not dashing in and out in between the moving parts, but spreading out evenly, blunting their impact. Her soft voice turns a challenge into a seduction.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Constant Pageant
    Sometimes, here and there, you want a better take of a vocal. You might want the solos to be a bit more worked out and the drums to sound bigger. You might want a producer pushing the band around a bit.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So Beautiful or So What
    He's not preaching on this album. He's finding solace, fleeting and fragmentary, and every springy guitar lick is its own benediction.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tomboy
    Tomboy finds him in sustained reflection, singing sublimely about the managing of expectations. It's a deeply interior album, but with an acute awareness of the space it inhabits, and the impression it hopes to leave.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Chopped and Screwed
    For a few songs the dissonant clatter of Micachu's debut album, "Jewellery," gets transferred to grunting strings and the band's homemade instruments, but most of the new music is slower and spookier, with sliding, wavering massed strings and a sulky, gathering, finely orchestrated paranoia.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Femme Fatale
    More than any of her previous releases Femme Fatale is blank. Ms. Spears isn't much more than a celebrity spokeswoman for the work of the producers Max Martin, Dr. Luke and others, who need artists like Ms. Spears as calling cards.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Georgia Clay
    He sings with an easy, un-self-conscious Southern accent, and his songs, often written with collaborators, address the issues you'd expect: family, courtship and self-doubt, with a faint flicker of vice.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    F.A.M.E.
    Mr. Brown sings, with a modicum of angst [on "Up To You"]. But for much of this album--almost the whole second half, actually--Mr. Brown is chasing Usher with a ferocity out onto the dance floor, where no one will pay much mind to his words.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anna Calvi
    As Ms. Calvi sings about the overpowering forces of heavenly love and demonic passion, she can go from whisper to cataclysm in four minutes, and she regularly does.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Losing Sleep
    With or without well-known collaborators, his old hard-nosed concision comes through.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tirtha
    The title track of Tirtha, a fine, slippery debut from a trio of the same name, unfolds in stages, measured but intent.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Own Side Now
    Own Side Now, her first full-length, is more serious in every way - moodier subject matter; longer, more carefully structured songs; a more robust sense of heritage.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Constant Future
    The lesser tracks here actually seem fit for a Burning Man festival; maybe it's the earnestly cryptic lyrics, or the brightly pummeling rhythms. Better tracks, like "Outnumbered" and "Bright White," convey the potency of this band's formula.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wounded Rhymes
    Wounded Rhymes, her follow-up on the same label, has thumping drums, Farfisa organs, girl-group vocal harmonies and darkly pealing guitars. It also has songs of desolate stoicism and disconsolate fury.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Collapse into Now
    Where the spirit-void blankness of R.E.M. once felt intuitive and intentional, it now feels accidental. Most of this record's musical temperament seems reheated or purchased.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Goodbye Lullaby
    It's the pop-factory material, not Ms. Lavigne's own presumably more personal songs, that offers details, humor and a sense of letting go. Her grown-up seriousness could use a little more of them.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stronger
    There's some joy, but not a lot, on this modest but sharp album, which continues the argument for Ms. Evans as an unjustly underappreciated country singer who's becoming more assured as she gets older.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Music's Not for Everyone
    It's meta and enigmatic and inconclusive; it's also very droll.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kmag Yoyo (& Other American Stories)
    What makes Mr. Carll something other than a torchbearer is the frank timeliness of his lyrics, which draw few distinctions between the personal and the political.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silver Pony
    Her uneven but warmly satisfying new album, Silver Pony, attempts the best of both worlds.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Asleep on the Floodplain
    For me it doesn't work; it stomps on the fragility he's been building up for 40 minutes. But because it comes together so slowly, it's of a piece with this record's careful mood.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light, Vol. 1
    The guitarist Dylan Carlson is still Earth's leader, playing slow themes over and over with minimal improvisation on Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I (Southern Lord), the first of a projected two-parter; but now the cellist Lori Goldston has joined the group, putting an achy drone into the long, dark, peaceful songs.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    II
    This is instrumental power-trio prog-rock for those who never had time for Rush and find the Mars Volta a bridge to nowhere; it's greasy and physical and incredibly loud.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blessed
    Her voice has all its old scrapes and hollows; she'll never come across as too cozy. But her music is newly confident.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    21
    Sometimes the additional flourish comes from Adele herself, who is a forceful enough singer, so confident with her agony, that she can bend words into new shapes without losing their meaning.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smart Flesh
    Although Providence has a noise-rock loft scene, the Low Anthem ended up working the quiet side of the street, coming up with a dead-earnest sound that lacks any overt recognition of the modern world.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Seefeel
    Trudging, lurching beats and sullenly deliberate riffs are heaped with distortion and distraction, and every so often Sarah Peacock's voice can be heard with possible explanations for the sonic wreckage.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Teenage And Torture
    Ms. Ray isn't shy about unleashing her raspy howl or working up to a shriek. Yet behind all the hollering and the band's frenetic buildups it's not all comedy. Ms. Ray's songs zero in on all the contradictory pressures women face: to be cosmetically perfect but authentic, independent but nurturing, flippant but honest, and more.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cloud Nothings
    His first full album, Cloud Nothings (Carpark)--11 songs in 28 minutes--raises the production values only slightly, cutting back distortion while layering on guitars. But it keeps the sound of a guy holed up with his instruments, concocting hooks and strumming retaliation for every slight.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    We're New Here
    To its great credit it's high and low and all over the place. The dislocation works: the record has patience and breadth and almost zero pretension.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    the JaneDear girls
    Their album, produced by the country modernizer John Rich, is brassy and chipper and fun. And polished too.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Love EP
    By all means, skip over the wan, pointless re-enactment of Prince's "I Wanna Be Your Lover." And put aside the interminable live version of "Que Sera Sera," a poor approximation of Sly & the Family Stone. What's left? A winningly seductive neo-soul take on Bob Marley's "Is This Love," released as a single last year. A sparse, lilting reading of Paul McCartney's "My Love." And a wild card, "Low Red Moon," by the 1990s alternative-rock band Belly.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wondervisions
    Delicate Steve flaunts every loose end, every unfinished seam. It might be testing to find the threshold of musical coherence; it might just be having a well-plotted lark. But if Delicate Steve's music were any more polished, it wouldn't be half as intriguing or anywhere near as much fun.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Let England Shake
    Ms. Harvey's vocals rise out of a kind of bleary skiffle, with the strumming of Autoharp or distorted electric guitar above rudimentary drumbeats.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tell Me
    Slouching into her notes, with the barest tremor of vibrato, she can almost suggest a precocious child peering past the bounds of innocence.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Talk About Body
    Talk About Body, the band's first album, sounds alternative, but not off to the side; it's not the greatest record you'll hear this year, but it's pretty remarkable as a political and musical polemic.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    By The Hedge
    The sound is focused, thick, lovely.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Yuck
    This band's self-titled debut (on Fat Possum) is disarming all the same, certain to be one of the year's most unabashedly beautiful albums.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unlearn
    Unlearn (Hardly Art), their full-length debut, lurches from Tropicália ("Where the Walls Are Made of Grass") to Brill Building pop ("Powerful Lovin'") to doo-wop (the title track), all with an air of shrewd dishevelment.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Anika
    Her voice is faltering and off-key, but dogged. The grooves are minimal, with the bass pushed way up front, and the sound is fresh and lumpy: the songs get your attention; they've got texture.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Christmas Cornucopia
    Annie Lennox is robustly reverent on A Christmas Cornucopia, putting the full and frequently rough power of her voice behind some of the sternest old carols, with devout verses that are often omitted.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Merry Christmas II You
    The rest of this album intersperses originals with classics--a respectful "First Noel," an aptly baby-making take on "O Little Town of Bethlehem," and "Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)" as routed through a strip club. But nothing beats "All I Want for Christmas Is You," from her 1994 album Merry Christmas," one of the great modern holiday albums.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Gift
    Mostly she and the producer Steve Mac render traditionals--"Auld Lang Syne," "O Come All Ye Faithful" and more--in unerringly gorgeous, if wrenchingly polite, arrangements, performances that smooth flat the many creases in Ms. Boyle's sometimes erratic public persona.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Graduation
    Nearly every song on Graduation is memorable for both its hooks and its overall sound.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    James Blake
    His first full album, James Blake, sounds as if it were made for an assignment in an electronic music course. It's a bit intellectual, a bit process-oriented and a bit undercooked.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mission Bell
    Mission Bell, his fourth album on Blue Note, sharpens the payoff.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bird Songs
    The elastic interplay of Us Five is in fact the main point of Bird Songs, which approaches its Parker-centric repertory as a springboard rather than an altar.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Musica + Alma + Sexo
    On this album his usual exhortations to seize life's pleasures mingle with coming-out manifestos, and he smiles through them all.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mirror
    Mirror, released in September, is the follow-up to "Rabo de Nube," a proper studio effort aglow with watchful calm.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Deerhoof Vs. Evil
    The album feels disarmingly unspoiled. Recorded and mixed in do-it-yourself fashion, it is rougher sounding than the band's other recent releases, with a more approachable scale.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Content
    Punk, funk and reggae contribute to the sound - along with hints of math-rock, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie - only to get caught up in the music's precise melee.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kaputt
    The record as a whole can seem to disappear or evaporate almost as you're listening to it. But that's its charm; that's why you might want to hear it again.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Science & Faith
    The best songs here sound as if members of toothless soft rockers like the Fray or Augustana were fixing for a bar fight, maybe even one they could win.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Native Speaker
    It's heady music about the body and its imperatives. And it's every bit as mesmerizing and vertiginous as desire can be.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thank You, Happy Birthday
    The new album is more abrasive, rowdier, more unstable and pushier in the right ways.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Farmer's Daughter
    She has a keen, finely honed pop instinct all her own.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Basic Instinct
    Celebrity, commodity, singer, sex object, cyborg - Ciara just about fuses all of them on Basic Instinct, her fourth studio album.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Best Night of My Life
    It's good that Mr. Timberlake doesn't operate at full throttle, because this album's successes often come in spite of Mr. Foxx, who sings as if he were delivering lines for the camera: declarative, extra literal, sharp at the edges.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    H.F.M. 2 (The Hunger for More 2)
    Mostly, though, he comes up short, delivering rhymes that on paper are clever and punchy, but on record are congested and monotone.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    III/IV
    In the end III/IV may be of interest more for therapeutic than aesthetic reasons, especially when Mr. Adams complicates the issue, as on "P.S.," a postpunk churner: "Don't ask someone to change again/'Til you know what you want them to change into."
    • 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
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Train to Paris
    None of these guests feel out of place here, but not because of the potency of Diddy's vision. Rather, it's because they have made records like these elsewhere, giving Last Train to Paris a secondhand feel.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Calling All Hearts
    Keyshia Cole tries for a slow burn but rarely ignites on her fourth album, Calling All Hearts.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fool
    Warpaint's songs are pensive and elegiac, transmuting the jabs of yesteryear into folky incantations.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    O
    Although the music came out of a computer, it's decidedly unmechanical. Loops and metronomic repetitions are far outnumbered by impulses and spasms, stops and starts. Each track could be a separate Petri dish, testing how selected musical organisms interact.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Letter
    In the main Mr. Kelly has kept his baser instincts in check, without damaging the creative spark they typically give shape to. What remains are, in essence, secular spirituals, bombastic and warm, meant not to raise an eyebrow.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Man on the Moon, Vol. 2: The Legend of Mr. Rager
    The album makes for uneasy listening, though Kid Cudi is not entirely oblivous to commercial imperatives.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lady Killer
    Throughout, Mr. Green's vocals are buried low in the mix, mere decoration for the arrangements and textures, which are the real stars.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Libra Scale
    Ne-Yo's best songs--like "So Sick" from 2006 or "Closer" from 2008, which he doesn't outdo on Libra Scale--are driven by obsessive longing, not self-satisfaction. And halfway through the album the tone changes.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Me Back
    Her voice is narrow and jagged, with more grain and more tears as she applies gospel dynamics to her venting; the productions use hip-hop programming but aim for soul. While Ms. Sullivan revels in drama, she still has a sense of humor.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Beginning
    It's a much lesser record than "The E.N.D.," and yet it isn't boring, even when the echoes of old songs are more than echoes.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Light of a Vaster Dark
    Up to a point it's gothic, ritualistic folk music, with long melodies and fanciful lyrics that go to animistic places. But it also has a theremin, making the atmosphere creepier. And above all it has the clear, strong, resolute voice of Dawn McCarthy, one of the best singers we have right now. (Yes, really; and she wrote three of the four songs too.) It's musky stuff, but not rooted in any particular hippie sensibility.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Get Closer
    That's two versions of a daylight watch, from two ends of the romantic spectrum, and Mr. Urban sells them both. It's the emotional distance between them that lends this album, optimistically titled Get Closer, a hint of intimacy.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Loud
    Loud works the pop gizmos as neatly as any album this year, maintaining the Rihanna brand. But the album has a hermetic, cool calculation until it gets to "Love the Way You Lie (Part II)," her take on the tortured hit she shared with Eminem.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Live It Up
    Only the album's last track, "A Song About Love," feels true. His voice is serrate, his mood is foul, and the song is sturdy enough to stand up to both. It's the sound of Mr. DeWyze's then and now finally colliding.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death Seat
    His characters are round and puzzling, not just sour. He uses bitterness not just as a good look but as a method of getting inside his characters.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Funeral Mariachi
    Funeral Mariachi, which is psychedelic, cinematic, droning, wayward, ritualistic, sometimes grating and often beautiful, sounds comfortably within its own language.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Living Proof
    What's wrong with the record is plain. The lyrics' first-person mythmaking gets trite. The guest appearances sound fainthearted, tailored to the ears of Grammy voters. But the heart of the record is deeply, honorably misbehaved.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nothing
    Nothing is the fourth N.E.R.D. album and the first to feel altogether detached from its surroundings.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Small Craft On A Milk Sea
    Mr. Eno produced Small Craft on a Milk Sea from studio improvisations he shared with the electronica musician Jon Hopkins and the guitarist Leo Abrahams, blending their musicianly interactions with the impersonal, repetitive processes of loops and beats and blurring any distinction between human and mechanized.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Face Tat
    Face Tat is cartoonishly alive and shape shifting, but the funny thing is that there some are actual tunes here too with Mr. Hill's enthusiastic singing and big melodies.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Charleston, SC 1966
    This album is in small ways slicker than his outstanding 2008 country debut, Learn to Live, and of course less surprising.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    For the Ghosts Within
    He's exactly the kind of person to be extending the usefulness of songs like "Laura," "Lush Life," "In a Sentimental Mood" and "What's New." Those songs all take their places in an equal collaboration with Mr. Atzmon, the saxophonist, and Ms. Stephen, the violinist. (Mr. Atzmon is the album's producer.) All are composers, and the record sounds cooperative in three ways or more.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Funstyle
    It's a jumble of snarky (and funny) music-business skits and raps, junky computerized samples, tuneful near-pop songs with awkwardly overstuffed production, thudding cliches and, in tantalizing fragments, glimmers of her unsettling insight into character flaws, including her own.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964
    There are minor variations, like key changes and picking patterns, but nothing as radical as the ways he would transform the songs in later years.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being
    While diversity is Lil Wayne's strength, it's a lack of commitment of a different sort that hamstrings this album. Too often Lil Wayne lapses into predictable flow structures, quick ideas paired with built-in rejoinders.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    $O$
    $O$ may be as much Die Antwoord as the world needs. Except for "In Your Face," the newer songs already sound forced. But Die Antwoord's initial blasts deserved all their mouse clicks.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bullets in the Gun
    Bullets in the Gun is his most scattershot album to date, a jumble of attitudes and tactics. Much of the time Mr. Keith, who has been one of the most underappreciated vocal stylists in country music, is singing without conviction on songs that are mere archetypes and lack any of his signature gestures.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marnie Stern
    She's at her most compelling when she loosens that clench, as on "Cinco de Mayo," another opus conceived out of funereal sadness.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Infinite Love
    The music is always heading somewhere promising; the guitars ping, swoop, peal and buzz.
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