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
    • 70 Critic Score
    High
    The standard narrative is that a band’s second record reflects experience, wisdom or moderation, and High has a bit of that in a larger and more managed sound.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Four the Record
    Normally, she's emphatic in the right places, but this album also includes some of Ms. Lambert's least committed singing.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Farm to Table
    Nothing goes unmixed in Strange’s songs. His productions metamorphose as they unfold, restlessly shifting among idioms; his lyrics refuse easy comforts.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wall of Eyes
    With its new LP, the Smile makes itself increasingly elusive. It’s now a band intent on destabilizing structures and dissolving expectations. .... They’re not about hooks or choruses. Melodies recur while arrangements change radically around them; songs suddenly leap into entirely new territory. .... Throughout the album, the Smile’s music feels molten and improvisatory, though it’s clearly premeditated.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carboniferous
    The molten riffs and pummeling fills heard here in such abundance aren’t just tokens of style. They’re part of a persistent push for self-definition.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    We Are King
    It’s a musicians’ album, going deeper into the strategies of a strain of R&B that might begin with Stevie Wonder’s “Music of My Mind” (1972) and continue through Patrice Rushen’s “Straight From the Heart” (1982), as well as any number of Prince ballads and Luther Vandross party songs.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Clarity
    The outstanding “Clarity” is her first full-length album, full of songs that are stitched so tightly and varnished so brightly that they cease to be mere pastiche and transcend into something utterly new.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lianne La Havas
    The songs illuminate passion, impulsiveness, ambivalence and uncertainty, yet the structures La Havas created are lucid and poised. While matters of the heart may be out of control, her fingers and voice are impeccable.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Behind The Melody
    More often, though, Mr. DeVaughn borrows judiciously from Prince, Marvin Gaye and others, relying on his voice to keep the songs on track. Even when he’s promising to “shut the club down,” his delivery promises something calmer and sweeter than a wild night out.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Luck In The Valley
    An album of modest scope but deep conviction, it registers more as a next step than a final gesture.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Gangster
    This equivocation--a rapper inspired by a movie about a gangster, trying simultaneously to distance himself from rappers, actors and the gangster in question--sums up the album's greatest strength and greatest weakness. Jay-Z is too discerning to ignore the contradictions in his music, even when he's trying to play the role of a coldblooded killer.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Homesongs
    He uses a roomful of instruments and toys to turn the album into a homemade pop symphony.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Spirityouall
    An album that’s simultaneously playful, down-home, innovative and devotional.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Collapsed in Sunbeams
    As on Parks’s EPs, the music on her album is restrained but far from austere. She coos the melodies over low-slung hip-hop beats and guitars that can tangle like indie-rock or syncopate like funk. ... Meanwhile, her vocals arrive in layers of unison and harmony and from all directions in the mix, conjuring both solidarity and spaciousness. Her music inhabits a private sphere, but not an isolated one.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    America's National Parks
    On this excerpt of the suite’s overture, “New Orleans: The National Culture Park USA 1718,” you hear the deep focus in their [Anthony Davis and Smith's] rapport; it’s an accurate reflection of the mood sustained throughout the work.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Up
    The calm rhymes juggle thoughts of black identity, paranoia, lust and possibility. Yes, hip-hop still has an audacious progressive fringe.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Toumani & Sidiki
    Pensive or hyperactive, the duets are always gorgeous.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hive Mind
    Hive Mind falls ever so slightly short of “Ego Death,” though it’s still superb. The songs are a little more generalized, less specific; the music feels just a little more deliberate, though it’s still full of surprises.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Royal Toast
    Structure and liberty are both so integrated into the band playbook that they don't assume any kind of opposition. That's more commonplace than it used to be too, though this group still makes it feel special.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Boot And A Shoe
    There are hints of blues and gospel, but most of the songs could come from a rustic cabaret that is worried about waking the neighbors.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blood Mountain
    "Blood Mountain" is a strong record by a powerful band nearing an ideal of cohesion.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
    You probably won't hear a better CD all year long. [30 Jan 2006]
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American V: A Hundred Highways
    The music isn't afraid to call for tears, but it does so through understatement. Cash's voice is always exposed, whether it's full-toned or faltering, and most of the tracks are folky and reverent, placing measured finger-picking above churchy chords.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Watershed
    Watershed, the new Opeth album, broad enough to encompass death-metal pummeling as well as cello and English horn, is typically engrossing--symphonic, and in a way organic.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Red Hot + Rio 2
    Every collaboration sounds downright elated, and the cross-cultural derangement of tropicalia easily shines through these 21st-century revamps.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
    In some ways the album arrives as a continuation, not an introduction.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Epic
    Like Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak or her fellow Brooklynite Holly Miranda, Ms. Van Etten has an incandescent, moaning alto that can be fragile or vengeful.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crack The Skye
    Fantastic in every sense, the album is also girded with hard-fought musical and emotional maturity.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper
    In these songs, Panda Bear has lifted his voice above the instrumental swirl, just enough to reveal some worries about family, friends, purpose and mortality, and to move his music ever so slightly toward pop.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ...Like Clockwork
    Mr. Homme’s new songs are as strong as anything in that extensive catalog.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sepalcure
    This winning album ... is mannered but also vibrant.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stonechild
    Hoop has made her quietest, most contemplative studio album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bird & the Rifle
    The Bird & the Rifle is her 10th studio album in 17 years, and her most finely focused.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In Conflict
    A sustained chamber-synthpop reflection on the idea of romantic and sexual turmoil, the album is also a tangle of confessions and absolutions, artfully and bravely unresolved.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Singles
    The synth-pop skeletons here are alluring: Singles succeeds in accessing the unconscious pleasures associated with the cold percussion and computer melodies of the early-mid-1980s.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Metamorphosen
    Taking its lead from Mr. Marsalis, a saxophonist of obstinate candor, the band has become both looser and more imposingly self-assured. Metamorphosen, its new album, captures that dynamic almost perfectly
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blood Bunny
    On the robust and vividly plain-spoken “Blood Bunny,” Moriondo, now 18, is a pop-punk whiz, deftly hopping between musical approaches from spare to lushly produced, and emphasizing intimate, cut-to-the-bone lyrics.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Streams
    The atmosphere of this music is lighter and less haunted than some of Mr. Hecker’s past work; some parts of the new album, like “Music of the Air,” can be thrilling in its evocation of a seamless connection between the physical and the synthetic. It also, sometimes, seems more impersonal, as if the ideas have the edge over their physical manifestation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Broken Social Scene
    Broken Social Scene confuses integrity with indulgence, burying good songs under way too much studio tomfoolery. [10 Oct 2005]
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Woman I Am
    Ms. Pickler sees the humor in country music, and its pathos, and its pulpy core, and she sings it with whimsy and complication.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Warm Chris
    “Warm Chris” is an offbeat, infectious and ultimately liberating invitation to stop making sense.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Curse Your Branches
    His identity crisis, drinking binges and family tensions are chronicled in chunky, rootsy rockers that can be stately or foot-stomping--and can, perhaps, offer some resolution.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Weather
    Weather is her most consistently strong album in some time, a product of vision and discipline.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Favourite Worst Nightmare
    The new songs are more melodic and even more meticulous than before.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Back to Love
    He sounds marvelous.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Had a Dream That You Were Mine
    Persuasively moody. ... More than anything, it seems the simple byproduct of strong personalities enjoying the process of finding common ground.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Don't Lose This
    Mavis Staples and the producer of her recent albums, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, have now completed that album, Don’t Lose This (Anti-), adding some instruments and vocals, and it’s done right: lean, un-slick and focused on Pops’s vividly recorded guitar and determined voice, still finding the unexpected pause and turn.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Still the King: Celebrating the Music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
    Still the King genuflects little to Nashville’s reigning commercial center, but the artists on deck pull their weight.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Renaissance
    Some of this works wickedly--'Believe,' the D’Angelo track, is a keeper, as is 'Gettin’ Up,' a charismatic come-on--but there are just as many small missteps.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle
    The music is imaginative like a good dream--not the kind some of his older records intimated, the kind in which you’re walking but can’t move forward.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shadows in the Night
    Not every song thrives under Mr. Dylan’s treatment. “Some Enchanted Evening” is stiff, and “Why Try to Change Me Now” denies the song’s humor. But even when it falters, Shadows in the Night maintains its singular mood: lovesick, haunted, suspended between an inconsolable present and all the regrets of the past.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fade
    Together Mr. McEntire and Yo La Tengo have calmed and thickened the band's music.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    4:44
    He’s evolved from dazzling taunts to ruminations that are sometimes snappy and sometimes lumpy. When snappy, though, they’re exhilarating.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Dreaming Fields
    Some of the songs have been recorded by others, but Ms. Berg reclaims them with her clear, tremulous, centered voice and arrangements that are restrained but never spartan. She's her own producer, providing herself with space and resonant depth, making the sorrow and longing luminous.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vampire Weekend
    The sheer cleverness of every track is endearing. But it’s also brittle; these songs could use just a little more heart.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Map of the Soul: 7
    As a whole, the strong but not particularly unruly “7” is less sure-footed than “Love Yourself: Tear,” the group’s last full-length, from 2018, and the first K-pop album to debut atop the Billboard album chart.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    After Laughter
    She’s still a strong singer, especially on “Told You So,” but some of her essential grit is lost to the machines.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Doomin' Sun
    On Bachelor’s album, “Doomin’ Sun,” Kempner and Duterte brought out the best in each other. ... There’s nostalgic comfort in the ways Bachelor looks back to 1990s rock, and Duterte and Kempner project a heartwarming unity.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rough Travel For A Rare Thing [Live]
    You’re hearing an overall group, overall sound, an hourlong unity. It’s a great nightclub set--about a quarter of it taken from his record “A River Ain’t Too Much to Love,” with a few older Smog songs (“Bathysphere,” “Our Anniversary”)--by a bar band that happens to have Bill Callahan in it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    From Africa With Fury: Rise
    As the Afrobeat funk cross-hatches its syncopations and sets brasses against saxophones, the production captures the antiphonal clarity without sacrificing brawn.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Compton
    Musically, it’s ornate and grand-scaled, and somehow also deft.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Me
    Smartly and shrewdly, Empress Of provides the neatness of pop minus the reassurance.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana
    In the new songs, he works his way through familiar topics: wealth, parties, sex, fame, autonomy. And even in well-trodden sonic territory, he can create arresting songs. .... But as the album ticks and hums along, the songs that linger are the ones that break away from standard Latin trap.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    King Of Jeans
    There’s a blunt but effective wit at work here, pressed into the service of misanthropy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Dreaming Room
    Many of her songs seem ready-made for some kind of theatrical adaptation. They’re authentically dramatic, built on the swells of brass and strings and percussion, which might suddenly disappear behind some new peak of melody or meaning sung by Ms. Mvula.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Painted Ruins
    The band pushes its music further both inward and outward, toward the cryptic and toward the voluptuous. Its secrets and misgivings are gorgeously wrapped.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    These Days
    The four CD’s not only testify to his depth and range as a musician, but do so, as Mr. Gill has often done, through collaborations that smack more of mutual inspiration than of back-scratching or expediency. [15 Oct 2006]
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Father of the Bride
    The tracks are playfully, restlessly inventive.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Stage Names
    While this album isn’t as riveting as earlier Okkervil River CDs, there’s plenty to enjoy, and plenty of reason for hope.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here With Me
    Ms. Williams contributes most to the family tradition, though, when she shuts it out, staking out quiet, warm, insightful territory for herself.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    II Trill
    The tracks on II Trill are brawnier and slicker than before. The minor chords are pumped up with reverb and orchestral heft (though the horns and strings are synthesized), and the songs are full of pop vocal melodies, like the Jamaican singer Sean Kingston’s harmony choruses in 'That’s Gangsta.'
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    La Foret
    No question, it's not for everyone; it's both fey and aggressive. But it's quite real. [11 Jul 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke
    Much of the music feels transitory, like smoke escaping. But “Notes on Water,” the last part of the suite, wants to stick around.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rather Ripped
    It is a fully legitimate, clear and strong rock 'n' roll record in the band's own style. And it may really be the best one.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    True Love Cast Out All Evil
    Mr. Erickson's voice has grown tattered and scratchy. And Mr. Sheff's production acknowledges the '60s without pretending to be vintage.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's Blitz
    Fuller backdrops don’t inhibit Karen O at all. She still sounds unguarded and madcap, sometimes girlishly vulnerable, sometimes indomitable.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blank Project
    It’s a stark but warm-blooded product of avant-garde pop, just the sort of album you might have once hoped for from Ms. Cherry, whose singing is still limber and unlabored, earthy but cool.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Absolute Zero
    One more daring, rewarding turn in his catalog: 10 knotty, thoughtful yet rambunctious songs that juggle scientific concepts, history and human relationships.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    No Way There from Here
    [A] prim and wistful sixth full-length album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jarvis
    Some of the old tension is missing: Mr. Cocker isn’t straining to write pop hits. But all of the old spleen is intact.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zoy Zoy
    Zoy Zoy is more clearly recorded and no less hyperactive than Tal National’s 2013 “Kaani,” and its songs engage body, conscience and spirit.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wildcard
    “Wildcard” isn’t as intimate as her 2016 double album about her divorce, “The Weight of These Wings,” or as musically adventurous as its predecessor, “Platinum.” What it does have is some sharp songwriting.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Solo
    It's more serious than many, both in programming and in execution. But it doesn't quite make solo piano a stand-alone concept equal to what he does with groups.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    That Lonesome Song
    When he’s not thinking about the ruined marriage, he’s equally sullen about the state of country music. An open admirer of Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson, Mr. Johnson favors older styles. He sings more than one waltz and uses lean, subdued band arrangements that ooze pedal steel guitar into the empty spaces.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Where We Come From
    The music pushes dancehall toward pop, with slow-chorded synthesizer anthems produced by Dre Skull and snappy electro lines from Dubbel Dutch; even with Popcaan’s thick Jamaican accent, the plan is to make singalongs easy.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    This Land
    On This Land, his third major-label studio album, his songwriting has caught up with his playing. ... It has something to do with the power of contrariness: that is, Clark’s determination to deliver the raw, analog, spontaneous opposite of crisply quantized digital content. And it has a lot to do with America in 2019, where division, frustration and seething anger can use an outlet with the historical resonance and emotional depth of the blues.
    • 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.
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