The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Musostics
    Behind the cerebral diversions, there's a sense of play and a certain wistfulness, as if the Beach Boys had gotten Ph.D.'s in game theory.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mysterious Phonk: The Chronicles of Spaceghostpurrp
    An air of menace and depression hangs over this album, embodied in SpaceGhostPurrp's stream-of-consciousness raps, leaning on sneering boasts and mantralike chants. This single-mindedness can be invigorating.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    2:54
    [The album] seems to prefer operating under a steady churn of gloom. But there's real muscle here, both in the singing, which is rendered wide and fat, an ooze of its own; and also in the guitar playing, which is hefty and dark.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cherry Thing
    What's intended to be raw can sound smug. In "Dirt" the Thing pushes past the tenderness that lives in that song to get to aggressive, stylized and finally anonymous squalling. Its loud catharsis rolls over her quieter one, and it's not the only time that happens on this record.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Banga
    At 65 [Smith] presents herself unburdened by age. She identifies on this album with voyagers, adventurers and her fellow artists; she's still determined to explore.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Triple F Life: Friends, Fans and Family
    [Triple F Life] isn't quite as striking as his debut but preserves much of its appealing mayhem.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lion the Beast the Beat
    The Lion the Beast the Beat is the fourth, and by far best, studio album by this band, which has finally allowed itself to try new poses and found give where previously there'd been only stiffness.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Our Version of Events
    What's magical about this album is how Ms. Sande's stance remains unmistakable regardless of what the backdrop is. It's not a flawless album, but rather one with a number of flawless moments.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Seeds from the Underground
    The better of these compositions suggest the pithy durability and deceptive simplicity of folk songs.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thirty Miles West
    He doesn't sound like he's trying to chase after Nashville's contemporary norm, which is admirable. But his confidence often scans as complacency.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    That's Why God Made the Radio
    Vocal harmonies abound, burnished to modern studio precision.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ufabulum
    It's still dance music, for those who can dance through a barrage.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Predict a Graceful Expulsion
    As the words mourn and pray, the music promises redemption.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Go! Pop! Bang!
    The Baltimore-style synthesizer jabs are less of a novelty, though they still pump up the songs.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Valtari
    It's as if the band's old pure musical sanctuary has been overgrown and started to crumble, with different light and air glinting through the cracks.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Absence
    [A] spellbinding third studio album.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Body Wins
    There's no unmixed sweetness on this album, only partly healed scars.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Born and Raised
    Maybe Mr. Mayer didn't really set out to make his version of a Ryan Adams album, but it suits him at this moment.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    R.I.P.
    R.I.P. (Honest Jon's) is the most mysterious of the Actress records yet, and the one most suggestive of dream states.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Our Reasons
    With All Our Reasons, there's clear potential for another sustained relationship, and a tantalizingly high bar to clear.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bloom
    Beach House's fourth and most sumptuous album.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Biokinetics [Reissue]
    Nearly every sound in these tracks has amorphous parameters: an indeterminate pitch, a gradual attack and decay, the sensation of being heard from a distance, or perhaps underwater.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Different Ship
    The album discreetly shows off the band's meticulous virtuosity.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    OFF!
    The Off! songs are tighter and often shorter; this record reflects fast, concentrated work.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mirel Wagner
    Whether or not it's shtick--time will tell--it's a spooky, fully realized one.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    awE naturalE
    Their vocals are overshadowed by the hypnotic momentum of their grooves: dense and swampy, with thick jazz harmonies and, often, rhythms that lurch and skip, demanding alertness because they keep things off balance.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blown Away
    While the album starts bold and mechanically impressive, it gets progressively quieter over the course of its first half, as if she were taking a break from fire-breathing... [Yet] relaxation is not her milieu.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Older Than My Old Man Now
    The autobiographical Older Than My Old Man Now is a gleefully morbid summing up of his life in which he ponders childhood, family history, aging and death with an attitude of incredulity that he should be 65 and turning out songs like "My Meds" and "I Remember Sex."
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blunderbuss
    Few songs on "Blunderbuss" truly knock the wind out of you, as the White Stripes could - even with riffs that were fragmentary, simple or borrowed. This is a songwriter's record, and a kind of orchestrator's record; there's also a new overall vehemence in the lyrics, hammering on dishonesty, jealousy, immorality.
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Is a Four Letter Word
    Filled with platitudes and, eventually, psychobabble, dippy even by Mr. Mraz's standards.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nothing to Do
    It's raggedy and satisfying, unconcerned with anything beyond its very elemental attitudes and poses.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tuskegee
    A sleek, sure-footed new country duets album by Lionel Richie.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sweet Heart Sweet Light
    It's grandiose--slouchy, broody, mock-churchy, self-pitying.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Boys & Girls
    Compared to computer-tuned radio pop, or even the big-time pop-soul of a genuine singer like Adele, the Alabama Shakes sound raw-boned and proudly unprocessed.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Changed
    Even though there are hints here of the ambitious melancholy that's become this group's trademark (for instance "Hurry Baby,") what stands out are the new moods, on songs like the jumpy "She's Leaving," which cloaks hurt in a sparkly package.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seeds
    Ms. Muldrow has been making records for six years, and Seeds (SomeOthaShip Connect), the newest, produced by Madlib, is the strongest yet.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sentenced to Life
    Everything it has done, including the EP "Razor to Oblivion" and the album "Heavy Breathing," has been better than good. But Sentenced to Life (Southern Lord), its second album, reaches a new level of--how else to say it?--professionalism.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    MDNA
    It's a bipolar collection that pumps out effervescent electronic pop before making way for a contentious personal agenda.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The MF Life
    Though this album lacks some of the intensity of her debut, "The Bridge," which hit hard with done-wrong vintage-soul updates, it still showcases Ms. Fiona ably.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Church That Fits Our Needs
    Mr. Picker fills these songs with uncomfortable imagery, reliving his mother's pain and imagining her golden transfiguration.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ode
    Most of the trio's hallmarks are here: resonant lyricism, floating locomotion, a harmonic approach that brings depth to simple structures and sleekness to the more complex ones.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Father Creeper
    A nervy urgency courses through all of the album's experimental tangents.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    SSSS
    Ssss is a modest, genially impersonal effort: 10 instrumental tracks that don't flaunt their authorship.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables
    This is country music for nostalgists and liberals, for a listener who most likely expresses shock at what mainstream country music has become, but who likes dogma delivered in a rural package.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wrecking Ball
    It's got plenty of ups and downs.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    One Second of Love
    She's found a strong, vibrato-less voice that's confident but imperfect in funny ways.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All of Me
    [A] comfortable, small and sometimes vague album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Toward the Low Sun
    Nothing here is neat, but much is very beautiful, expressed in the band's own language, this time with the occasional organ, piano, fuzz-toned violin and free-jazz drumming.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Careless World: Rise of the Last King
    Even though he remains a cipher, his surroundings are lush.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carnivale Electricos
    The Carnival spirit of wide-open possibility comes through.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Visions
    Easily Ms. Boucher's best work and one of the most impressive albums of the year so far.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    With Love
    The singing is bolder and more outgoing than on her previous albums.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paralytic Stalks
    Convoluted as his words and ideas are, they're surprisingly singable, in all their mad profusion.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon)
    Air's music for it [the Méliès film], whether rhythmic or choral, static or episodic, minimalist or anthemic, is slight and smooth as glass.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Who's Feeling Young Now?
    Mr. Thile on mandolin, Noam Pikelny on banjo, Gabe Witcher on fiddle, Chris Eldridge on guitar and Paul Kowert on bass--have shifted the emphasis from instrumental wizardry to playful storytelling on this album, their third.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kisses on the Bottom
    The music ... floats over you like a light mist on a cool spring morning in an English garden as the sun glints through the haze.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Always Want
    Every track, gentle or harsh, leaves Ms. Woodroofe's voice exposed in all its doleful intimacy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rich Forever
    With clusters of meaty verses and throbbing, moody production, Rich Forever is almost on par with his last two solo albums, "Deeper Than Rap" and "Teflon Don" (Maybach Music/Slip-N-Slide/Def Jam), both great.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Making Mirrors
    The album merges catchy gizmo-loving pop constructions with a stalwartly depressive mindset.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Les Voyages de l'ame
    Alcest's new record,Les Voyages de l'Âme is the best example yet of what it can do.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Emotional Traffic
    Mr. McGraw has never sounded this casual. It doesn't suit him.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clear Heart Full Eyes
    Instead of howling about misspent youth against huge, churning guitar riffs, he ruminates on the wages of adulthood, musically enveloped in a cosmic, plaintive version of Americana.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cyrk
    Stay with these songs a little while, and see where they go. Some come close to saying very little and end up saying more than you expect.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Voyageur
    Sounds lusher, more dramatic and sometimes riskier than Ms. Edwards's early albums. In places, this record is drowsily beautiful, almost wearily so.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fallen Empires
    What makes this all feel reasonably unforced is the abiding earnestness in the songwriting.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Purple Naked Ladies
    While the production is woozy, stop-start delirious and off kilter, the lyrics, sung by Syd in an appealing, unpolished style, are cutting.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sepalcure
    This winning album ... is mannered but also vibrant.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stage Whisper
    Her singing is collected and on pitch, whether she's working with a whispery hush or a lemon-tart croon.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Let's Go Eat the Factory
    Mr. Sprout's songwriting helps raise the average. Guided by Voices has a reputation to uphold, and much of the time it does.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Betty Wright: The Movie
    She hasn't lost a bit of her gospelly grain, flirtatious cooing or hortatory fervor.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Undun
    The album is complete in itself. It's just 39 minutes, made brief to be listened to as a whole.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    TM:103 Hustlerz Ambition
    All in all it's a step forward for Young Jeezy, even if everyone around him is walking much faster.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Welcome Reality
    Welcome Reality pulls dubstep toward the arena-pop spotlight without leaving its shadows behind.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges
    It's the solo work that's so impressive: simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Back to Love
    He sounds marvelous.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mac and Devin Go to High School [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    It makes for pleasant-sounding, unmemorable listening, driven primarily by the production, which is largely slow and bubbly.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Come Through for You
    The album stays kindly, polished and simpering all the way through, with only one surprise.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Well-Done
    It's tougher, and stricter, and highlights the dexterity in Action Bronson's rhymes by emphasizing the breaking points.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Very She & Him Christmas
    She & Him, the duo of Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward, maintains its early-1960s retro cool on its Christmas album.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Christmas
    Mr. Buble's sparkly sincerity commands the spotlight at every turn, but he plays well with others, too.
    • 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
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love After War
    Throughout his cheerful jumble of a fifth album, Love After War, he pushes both of those buttons [tight execution and a suspension of disbelief], asking you to admire his tasteful slickness without delving much deeper than the surface.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    rEvolver
    He mainly revisits old tropes without a wink.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lioness: Hidden Treasures
    "Lioness" is just the scraps of what might have been.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Komba
    Buraka Som Sistema and its guests (including the Portuguese singer Sara Tavares, the Colombian band Bomba Estéreo and the Nigerian-English rapper Afrikan Boy) top them with sly, deadpan, polyglot vocals that cockily assume you'll be dancing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Replica
    The voices on Oneohtrix Point Never's new album, Replica , were sampled from 1980s television commercials, an amusing sidelight for an album that is anything but crass and insistent (despite a track called "Power of Persuasion").
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Immortal
    The new versions can be garish (pseudo-tribal drums and jungle noises in "Ben"?) or touching.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Parallax
    Its songs strum and muse, with Mr. Cox's instruments and voices often doubled and slightly staggered, to dizzying stereo effect.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    El Rego et Ses Commandos
    The constant is El Rego's singing, by turns rough or suave, often echoed in call and response by Ses Commandos, his steadfast band.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What Were You Hoping For?
    This is a messy album, sometimes thrillingly so, a mélange of psychedelic rock, punk energy and R&B desperation.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paradise
    Paradise is this group's second strong album in a row (including its 2009 debut "Yeah So"), but the first on which it explores tension.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Talk That Talk
    Rihanna's version of this sound [dance music] dates to the club music of the early 1990s, an era in which she would have shined. The best songs on this lively and often great album sound synth-perfect for that time.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Take Care
    That Take Care is an almost complete success is no small feat, especially given that it's an accomplishment of form more than of content, content having been handled assuredly on the last two Drake releases
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Coco Beware
    The deliberate soft focus lends depth and an air of mystery to what might have been cool-headed, straightforward indie-rock; there are echoes of the Feelies, the Strokes and, somewhere in the distance, the Beach Boys.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ersatz G.B.
    The mess can be tense and charmed, or just dull. Ersatz G. B. is too often dull.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hello Sadness
    All those words compete for room uncomfortably sometimes.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ceremonials
    In making the songs so monumental, Florence and the Machine have also made them impersonal.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Weather
    Weather is her most consistently strong album in some time, a product of vision and discipline.
Page: