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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    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Herein Wild
    Ms. Rose’s pop confections aren’t simple escapes.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mechanical Bull
    The best parts of Mechanical Bull, its sixth album, come when that exhaustion seeps into the songwriting and playing.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Factory Floor
    With repetition and fractures, tiny noises amid stark silences, Factory Floor generates extraordinary propulsion in its dark, empty spaces.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beautiful Africa
    The Malian singer Rokia Traoré has a gentle voice with a steely core, one that’s revealed more clearly than ever on Beautiful Africa.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Defend Yourself
    Insecurity, guilt, confusion and doggedness--set to winsome melodies or gnarled guitar chords and run through battered equipment--were the makings of some of the best indie-rock of the early 1990s. On Defend Yourself, Sebadoh’s first studio album since 1999, Lou Barlow still has them all.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Repave
    Volcano Choir puts Mr. Vernon’s voice and words up front and builds something like songs around them, often with crescendos marching toward full-scale choruses--enough to make the often inscrutable lyrics sound passionate enough to be worth puzzling out.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Bones of What You Believe
    The synthesizers gleam with artificial precision; so, at first, do the vocals, chopped into perfectly pitched samples over a majestic beat and swirling major chords. But then a human factor kicks in.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kiss Land
    Kiss Land is pulpy, mournful, pungent, unnerving.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    True
    Don’t see True as the album in which dance music imports the sounds of the American heartland into the club in hopes of digging up new audiences, or even new ideas; see it as the one in which country takes its place front and center in global pop.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dream River
    You sense that he’s walked past those doors, revising his ideas, waiting, looking for something. He’s found it. Listen through his astonishing new album, Dream River, and you will hear, lined up neatly, his trademarks.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    MGMT
    Something’s always looming and buzzing--or burbling, or clattering, or tapping, or ratcheting, or blipping, or quavering--near the foreground throughout MGMT’s third album, MGMT. It makes the album both testing and, eventually, rewarding.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fuse
    The words are working hard here, and the music is, too, but Mr. Urban is gliding through, barely quaking at all.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tookah
    [An] extremely poised new album.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    AM
    The songs are still sullen, smart and cleverly constructed. But too often on AM, Arctic Monkeys sound less like amalgamators than like imitators.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nobody Knows
    It’s possible to like this record in theory while imagining one that’s 50 percent more enjoyable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yours Truly
    [A] surprisingly strong album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pain Is Beauty
    Her fourth album in three years, confirms her steadiness as a singer-songwriter of gothic intention, drawn to romantic fatalism and beautiful ruin.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Colored Sands
    The album has stability, consistency. But too much of it.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
    The melodies are forthright, the arrangements are hand played, and Ms. Case’s voice is open and robust, with the richness of prime Linda Ronstadt and Patsy Cline.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Hate Music
    They’re love songs about persistence, and that’s embedded in the sound of the record; you don’t need a lyric sheet to hear it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Made Up Mind
    Made Up Mind is another strong effort from the group headed by Ms. Tedeschi and her husband, the virtuoso blues guitarist Derek Trucks, though not quite as enlivening as its 2011 debut, “Revelator.”
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hero Brother
    Hero Brother stands very much alone as an artistic statement, calmly ravishing and emotionally centered.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rebellious Soul
    K. Michelle’s aiming for the sweaty pathos of Mary J. Blige, and sometimes, as on “Sometimes” and “Damn,” she comes close. What she’s missing is restraint.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Perpetual Surrender
    Following through on both the gleaming productions of 1980s pop and the evocative murk of the short-lived trendlet called witch house, Diana creates larger-than-life soundscapes where private musings can flourish.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rhythm & Blues
    Whether he’s singing about his mother’s advice or the eternal blues staple, woman trouble, Mr. Guy hits home.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paracosm
    Paracosm sounds warmer, more enveloping; precisely because it’s so much more spacious, it’s cozier.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghil
    You’re not hearing traditional technique, but you are hearing an excellent musician’s physical and emotional connection to her instrument. You’re inside the connection, basically. These are real noisy love songs.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Excuse My French
    Every word hits hard. The quicker beat turns his lethargy into something of a strategy, and he sounds like no one but himself.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jinx
    The album is slightly parched in places, especially when Mr. Durkan seems to be singing with his eyes rolled, but mostly the juxtaposition of gloom and urgency holds firm.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Don't Look Down
    For Ms. Grey, angst, melody and a hip-hop backbone are a promising combination.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trials & Tribulations
    The end-zone dance that is “Bugatti” is far more in keeping with hip-hop’s prevailing mood, and half of this album tries to match it but falls short. But most of the rest of Trials & Tribulations is far darker and more reflective.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Embracism
    For each solid purchase on a strong lyric there’s a mess somewhere else; for nearly every powerful accretion of sound there’s a nearly unbearable one. The record’s volatility both saves and mars it.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lickety Split
    The guitar work is explosive and vibrant, and Mr. Randolph’s band is accustomed to turning a congregation into a howling audience (and vice versa). At times it’s easy to forget that this isn’t a live recording, which seems like the point.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blessed Unrest
    The Blessed Unrest is all shoulder-drooping heft, and her musical choices are vexing.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Amelita
    Its sound runs decisively breezy-modern.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fashionably Late
    Throughout the album, there is chaos.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ciara
    Her fifth, is one of the most convincing R&B albums of the year, even if it does a very thin job of being convincing about Ciara herself.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Me Moan
    The songs on Mr. Gibson’s second album, Me Moan, are dark and often elusive.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    SongVersation
    She keeps her sentiments tuneful and directs most of the self-help advice at herself, staying sisterly rather than preachy.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Color Map of the Sun
    The tracks, mostly in minor keys, are bass heavy, unhurried and unexpectedly thoughtful. Sonically as well as verbally, they set aside hip-hop swagger to contemplate how the present reconfigures the past.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ceremony
    The record is awkward and seriously pretentious at times, but you can’t miss the heat of its ambition.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Immunity
    The first four songs are striking, stirringly beautiful techno numbers.... The album’s second half emphasizes ambience and texture, making for songs that are slow, contemplative and nourishing.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Spirityouall
    An album that’s simultaneously playful, down-home, innovative and devotional.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All of Them Witches
    The guitar playing is explosive but focused, and the cohesion within the band is unshakable. However dense or spaced out this music gets, there’s no question that it sounds alive.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One True Vine
    As a whole, One True Vine is as introspective and diffident as a gospel album can be.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yeezus
    No one is expecting Mr. West to turn into a latter-day Public Enemy, making political statements as a full-time mission. He, and we, are rightly fascinated by the limelight, by the culture of consumption and by Mr. West’s endlessly contradictory reactions to all that attention. But now that he’s transfigured his music, his words await an upgrade to match.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Apocalypse
    Apocalypse is bolder and clearer, less blissed-out and more grippingly immediate than [2011's The Golden Age of Apocalypse].
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghost Brothers of Darkland County [OST]
    Those songs rise above the story line, but probably wouldn’t have existed without characters to sing them--reason enough for a rock songwriter to venture into a musical.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ...Like Clockwork
    Mr. Homme’s new songs are as strong as anything in that extensive catalog.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trouble Will Find Me
    This time, the National utterly refuses to buttonhole listeners; the music calmly awaits attention, but amply repays it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Abandon [EP]
    Boy, those throbs are deep; boy, those screams are wrenching; boy, those patterns are sustained.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Prisoner of Conscious
    At the heart of all is Talib Kweli’s impressively nimble rapping, with its rat-a-tat cadence and intricate rhyme-play.... But this album also falls prey to facile cosmopolitanism.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Demi
    [An] often impressive fourth album.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Your Turn
    It’s a cranky record that gets exciting entirely on its own schedule.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Re-Mit
    The songs on Re-Mit, his 30th studio album with his band the Fall, resemble a row of unevenly smashed windows, or patches of broken concrete in a street--unsightly ruptures within a familiar context, potentially more shapely and interesting the closer you look, but perhaps not.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Functional Arrhythmias
    This is tangled funk with a higher calling, furious mainly in its focus.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Time
    The Time album always sounds neater and cozier than the songs it echoes. Yet behind the album’s considerable calculation, there’s a glimpse of a kindly heart.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Silence Yourself
    This four-woman English band has rekindled the post-punk of the late 1970s, with music that’s stark and overpowering.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Life on a Rock
    The results are mostly dismal, making for the sort of album that reinforces faith in big, lumbering institutions that understand starmaking.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jama Ko
    Ngoni Ba was already remarkable for its plucked, pointillist modal grooves, and on Jama Ko, its passionate defense of Malian culture makes the music even sharper.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Haw
    The songs ponder mortality and devotion, love and family, searching for peace of mind and finding it, no doubt temporarily, in the folky benediction of “What Shall Be (Shall Be Enough).”
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghost on Ghost
    The arrangements are bold but often misplaced, cluttering and distracting from the songs instead of illuminating them; the characters get lost in their costumes.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sing to the Moon
    Her songs move from yearning and questioning to seizing an insight and turning it into an incantation.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    #willpower
    He is not ashamed to bleat out inane proclamations and this album benefits from his shamelessness. It’s frequently catchy and almost always compellingly energetic.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Reincarnated
    It ranks at or near the top of vexing choices made by once-platinum artists, full of lazy, half-baked pablum that does more harm to Snoop Lion than good for others.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She
    The songs ponder affection and honesty, desire and independence, rightly confident that their modesty makes them all the more approachable.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bankrupt!
    The wry premise behind "SOS in Bel Air"--distress signals emitting from privileged enclaves--could easily be applied to the album.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Terror
    It’s a take-it-or-leave-it album that’s willing to be inert or annoying. But its obsessiveness brings its own rewards.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shaking the Habitual
    This music has deep weirdness but incredible will and charisma.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paramore
    [Guitarist Taylor] York is Ms. Williams’s collaborator throughout most of Paramore, and they have pushed the band beyond pop-punk without abandoning momentum or the big, catchy chorus.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pioneer
    A sense of loss keeps these polished songs from being too sweet.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nomad
    [Dan Auerbach] helped Bombino make a spacious, centered record, one that stretches to appeal to Western listeners--like the nomads, known for their circular dancing, who temporarily inhabit the fields of Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tenn., every June--without strain or clutter or hipness overload.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amygdala
    [A] sleek and immersive new album.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Victim of Love
    The new album is a little less pointed [than his debut], and a good deal less surprising. But Mr. Bradley, once again wailing against the convincing grit of the Menahan Street Band, sounds bolstered by all the touring he has done over the last two years.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Native
    The craftsmanship is painstaking and impressive: layer upon layer of glossy keyboards, reverberant guitars and choirlike backing vocals (although Mr. Tedder applies too much obvious Auto-Tune to his leads). But these crystal-palace productions are proud showcases for unctuous, sometimes oddly morbid lyrics.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wyoming
    This duo’s dark, lonely, roots-minded indie rock is affecting, all the more for its sparseness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Recover [EP]
    Chvrches makes prickly early-’80s synth-pop that recalls fellow revivalists Robyn and La Roux.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being II
    It’s less manic, less experimental, less unpredictable and, oddly, less consistent.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like a Rose
    There’s not likely to be a more earthy feeling and backward-sounding country album released on a major label this year.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Same Trailer Different Park
    Ms. Musgraves has a sweet character to her sound, which allows her to deliver a cynic’s wisdom in the voice of an inquisitive child.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Muchacho
    The scriptural cadence and mythic gravity of Mr. Houck’s lyrics, here and elsewhere, manage not to overburden his emotional payload.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Invisible Way
    Its 10th full-length album in two decades as a band, the band pulls back from that intensity but adds layers of depth and surprise.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Waiting for Something to Happen
    In songs about getting swept up by infatuation the music sounds like a suddenly shared, irresistible impulse.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Images du Futur
    Ben Shemie sings admonitions--“These same visions/It takes years for things to change”--that could be comments on the band’s fascination with modular structure or just testimony to its calm obstinacy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Welcome Oblivion
    There’s a distinct band lurking here and there, although it may never escape Nine Inch Nails’ shadow.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wondrous Bughouse
    He’s mulling over cosmic, metaphysical thoughts: about time and space, good and evil, love and death, all in music that certifies every uncertainty.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What About Now
    What About Now suggests a few paths for progress, and an ambivalence about committing to any one of them, all under a comfort-zone haze of undifferentiated, low-ambition, lightly rootsy hard rock.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Love Surreal
    With lush, glimmering keyboards and electronics, lean indie-rock guitars or Robert Glasper’s limpid jazz piano the songs tease and insinuate. Their meanderings lead somewhere.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amok
    The songs don’t prize catchiness; they’re too busy tweaking and interweaving, toying with texture and momentum.... Yet at the same time, there’s sheer exhilaration in the profusion of rhythms.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Highway
    Her music is roots-rock with an Appalachian foundation, in arrangements that rise alongside her forthright alto or let it hold its own nearly unaccompanied.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Total Folklore
    The key is that the melodies are hearty ones in cheerful major keys. They could almost be Celtic pipe tunes, if they weren’t set on stun. It’s a merry onslaught.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wonderful, Glorious
    It’s less confessional, less bleakly vulnerable than he has been on past albums.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cross Culture
    Mr. Lovano is taking a step back from the material of jazz and looking at its motivating forces; implicitly, he’s asking why we make it in the first place. As long as the question lingers in your head, the album works. When the music slackens, and the tension dissipates, the question goes away.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vexovoid
    It doesn’t sound as if the songs were inventing their own structures and falling apart in the process.
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