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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    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You're Nothing
    Iceage has only improved on its formula of turbulent energy and disaffected poetry, managing still to sound youthful, even juvenile--not such a stretch, age-wise--while reaching toward new ambitions.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Praise & Blame
    This studly Welsh baritone, now 70, certainly has the voice to make a lean, tough country gospel album.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wedding
    "The Wedding" has some misfires, but vulnerability makes a promising new territory for Oneida. [23 May 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Begin To Hope
    The songs are pretty on first listening, and some of Ms. Spektor's straightforward love songs, like "Fidelity" and "Field Below," reveal a gorgeously unguarded yearning. But she doesn't hide her quirks elsewhere.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything in Between
    Yet while the songs are somewhat more conventional, each one nevertheless invents a different combination of melody and irritant. The album isn't a retreat from noise--it's an expansion elsewhere.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reflektor
    Some of the tracks go on longer than necessary, but it’s an excess of generosity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Two Men With The Blues
    Armstrong’s example created the conditions for this to happen, and the record is an almost classical example of his old game: eluding American stereotypes of country, city, blues, jazz, race, class, humor and sadness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Prog
    This album confirms established Bad Plus ideals: directness, cohesiveness and a headlong approach to everything, including delicate emotional candor. [7 May 2007]
    • The New York Times
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You Should Be Here
    Kehlani’s second self-released album, there’s a calm swagger that underpins even the most anguished of these songs. She easily channels the attitude and swing of mid-1990s R&B girl groups.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.
    Del Rey, at her best, has a finger not just on the pulse, but somewhere beneath the flesh. And she is occasionally at her best here. “Ocean Blvd” is Del Rey’s strongest and most daring album since “Rockwell,” though it’s also marked by uneven pacing and occasional overindulgence.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Krazy Life
    YG has grown mightily as a rapper, and because DJ Mustard, who produced more than half of the album, has found a way to make his sketches theatrical without sacrificing their urgency.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything is Love
    With their new album as the Carters, Jay-Z (born Shawn Carter) and Beyoncé are once again a united force, celebrating their success on every front: artistic, financial, marital, erotic, historic. ... This is more familiar, less vulnerable and less exploratory territory than the zones where Beyoncé and Jay-Z ventured on “Lemonade” and “4:44.”
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend
    Fears and sorrows hold a radiant gleam on All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend, the rapturous debut album by the 19-year-old Norwegian singer and songwriter Aurora.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Assume Form
    Like the rest of Blake’s albums, Assume Form opens into haunted, rewarding depths. All that’s missing is one luminous, fully focused pop chorus, like “Retrograde” on Blake’s 2013 “Overgrown” or “My Willing Heart” on his 2016 “The Colour in Anything.”
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Con
    Somehow The Con is even more obsessive sounding than Tegan and Sara’s earlier work, and it’s probably even better; it could well be one of the year’s best albums.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I've Been to Many Places
    Hearing him on a record like this has become the quickest and truest way to take his measure.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I, I
    Each song on “i,i” is an intricate, labyrinthine, multilayered construction. But the marvel of Bon Iver is how fragile and conditional each song seems; not monumental but precarious and permeable, susceptible to chance or whim or fate. All the planning creates music that feels as impermanent, and illuminating, as a sunbeam.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Black Swan
    Here and there this record finds its comfortable center. [16 Oct 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here's My Song You Can Have It... I Don't Want It Anymore/Yours 4-Ever
    Mr. Dunger's relentless introspection isn't for every mood; it could certainly be tough on a romance. But "Here's My Song" is just the album for a good wallow in yearning and obsession. [13 Mar 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Electric Brick Wall
    Electric Brick Wall, even more than the band’s last record, “Rad Times Xpress IV,” coheres into songs with good form.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ya-Ka-May
    Galactic’s cyber-savvy New Orleans funk remembers the past but stays hardheaded about the future.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Small Town Heroes
    The album adds up to a scrapbook of wandering and loss, drawing what consolations it can from music.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Soul Food
    It’s a catalog of strengths, a romp through sacred steel music, blues and Southern soul that often sounds as if it could have been recorded in heated performance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    8: Kindred Spirits Live at the Lobero
    Enchanting. ... It’s liquid, fast-moving and rerouting. Into it he mixes the soul-opening honk of Albert Ayler, full of enough breath to evoke a door blowing wide open; the winding intensity of John Coltrane; and the troubled placidity of Lester Young. And somehow, he never seems to need any more volume than Young did to get his point across.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power
    Even when Halsey returns to first-person through most of the album, their lyrics are less confessional, more general, as if they have stepped back from immediate conflicts.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Retrash
    Oozing Wound is plain, taut, dumb thrash metal, which is to say, it’s firm, and aggressive, and heavy on logic and structure.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cascade
    The standard comment about Mr. Basinski’s work is that its evocation of decay grips your emotions and reduces you to jelly, though I don’t get that so much from Cascade.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Center Won't Hold
    Too many of the new songs sound diligent and derivative, as if Sleater-Kinney were working through a pop apprenticeship. It’s good to know that the group doesn’t want to repeat itself, that the band is also out to master 21st-century digital tools. But on “The Center Won’t Hold,” Sleater-Kinney hasn’t found its version 2.0.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Album
    Album is one of the year’s most bracing pop releases, and one of the best, a devastatingly fresh reframing of the pop songbook.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Now Here Is Nowhere
    There are moments when the Secret Machines imitate their influences a little too closely, and at times the brothers' voices aren't as imposing as the arrangements. But for most of "Now Here Is Nowhere," the Secret Machines make music that matches the scale of their ambitions.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Breaks in the Armor
    Previous Crooked Fingers albums have been more elaborately orchestrated, fortifying themselves; this one, even when cushioned by Liz Durrett's backup vocals, makes a wary peace with its own sense of isolation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unglamorous
    The sound is noticeably sweeter, with strings and synthesizers, and so are the lyrics.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I'll Sleep When You're Dead
    “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead” feels simultaneously futuristic, anachronistic and of the moment.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love, Damini
    The music draws pleasure from every strategic detail: from the weave of sampled and echoing backup vocals in “Different Size,” from the percussive syllables that break up the title and refrain of “Kilometre,” from reversed guitar tones and distant reggae horns in “Jagele,” from the saxophone curlicues that answer his voice in “Common Person.”
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lazaretto
    Sometimes it’s tightly argumentative, weirdly superstructured, assertive in not wanting to be understood too easily. Sometimes it relaxes into pre-existing Americana hyphenates--blues-rock, country-rock, energies closer to what certain adult listeners hold up as “real music.” The less real Mr. White is, the better he sounds.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Visions
    Easily Ms. Boucher's best work and one of the most impressive albums of the year so far.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thunderbitch
    It’s old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll that is never studied or antiquarian; Thunderbitch still feels the zap.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ascent
    His extended solos during one or two-chord vamps - particularly on "Close to the Sky," "Waswasa" and "Even if You Knew," in that order of quality - are scrabbling, circular, slightly heroic, pulmonary with wah-wah and squalid with distortion. They're exciting, but they're also good for the head: they shove you into long-form listening mode.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Death Is This Communion
    The deeper you go into the record, the more reassured you become that these musicians know what they’re great at.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Party Intellectuals
    The musicianship is intense regardless of the subtext, with all three players hurling themselves into their effort. They have an equally convincing way with bruising thrash punk, one-chord-vamp heroics and brooding atmospherics.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghosts VI: Locusts
    Reznor and Ross revisit some of their most distinctive sonic vocabulary on the new albums. ... “Ghosts VI: Locusts” thrusts the anxiety upfront. Tracks tick and pulse with the tensest kind of minimalistic repetition, and when piano and bell tones appear, they’re usually brittle, not cozy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Oh My God, Charlie Darwin
    The Low Anthem still needs to devise its own uptempo approach. But the quieter the music gets, in an elegy like 'To Ohio' or a conditional reassurance like '(Don’t) Tremble,' the more its music inhabits its own otherworldly place, where ghosts and angels hover just out of view.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Happy New Year
    The album is a perfect introduction for latecomers to this essential New York band.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    M.A.D.E.
    No one can accuse Scarface of overstuffing this CD: it lasts barely 40 minutes, just long enough to provide a satisfying dose of stories and boasts, delivered in a rich, bluesy voice that often makes him seem even older than he is.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Coral Sea
    A year later Mr. Shields turned The Coral Sea into an evolving, reverberating, nearly unbroken wash of sound, as boundless and mutable as the ocean itself.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Antifogmatic
    Punch Brothers tuck their instrumental prowess into songs, behind or between the arching melodies carried by Mr. Thile's high, aching voice. And he brings something unexpected to the pickin' party: angst, which in these songs often happens to revolve around the dangerous lure of available women.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Confessions On A Dance Floor
    But she's not attempting a simple 80's revival; for all the vaguely familiar hooks, there are also sustained, wistful overlays of strings and acoustic guitar that enfold the music like a haze of indistinct memory. [14 Nov 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Golden Sings That Have Been Sung
    On some level his songs are all age-old tales, but put together in his own exacting way, which makes them new.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big Baby D.R.A.M.
    His excellent full-length debut album, Big Baby D.R.A.M., is joyous, clever and moves in surprising directions.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Animal Years
    Through previous albums, his love songs and narratives have grown ever more phantasmagorical, and now he's writing oracular meditations. Love and war, faith and music, restlessness and a longing for home pervade his new songs, which might turn pretentious if they weren't so grounded in folky melody. [10 Apr 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Antics
    In the end, unfortunately, "Antics" is fairly uneven. [19 Sep 2004]
    • The New York Times
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Further Adventures Of Lord Quas
    It's even more disjointed and unpredictable than its predecessor. [19 May 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tromatic Reflexxions
    The album is brilliant on its own terms: a party record with no fixed strategy, one that wiggles out of all responsibilities to the partier.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    More Life [Mixtape]
    A nuanced collection of 22 new songs that recall various stages of Drake’s own development, as well as a tour of other styles and artists that he’s partial to. It is both craven and elegant.
    • 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
    Wavering Radiant
    The output of Isis, a Los Angeles band often filed under the subcategory of post-metal, upholds a deliberative truce between brute physicality and moody rumination. Wavering Radiant, the group’s impressive new album, satisfies both sides in a way that suggests a balance of prior achievements.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wenu Wenu
    The beat is strong; the music is fused enough.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alegranza
    The repetition of the loops turns from mechanical to hypnotic to hallucinatory to ecstatic as the songs barrel along.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lenses Alien
    A leaner album that manages to feel rattling and unruly, even if it's less of a surprise.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In Advance Of The Broken Arm
    The year’s most exciting rock ’n’ roll album. [26 Feb 2007]
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Son
    On "Son" she shows off a new confidence, even a willfulness, as she sets free her voice and her sonic wit. [29 May 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 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."
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chromatica
    It has some sparkling vocal moments. It reminds us how easily Lady Gaga, 34, can coax the world onto the dance floor. But it feels overwhelmingly safe. ... “Chromatica” is also a mixed bag.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Am Very Far
    While the rich palette and varied arrangements are welcome, they also put load-bearing pressure on Mr. Sheff's songs, which feel intended more for evasive maneuvers.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nothing's Real
    There’s something knowing and clever, but never gratingly so, in the way she’s balancing ideas of newness and collective memory.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Band of Brothers
    Mr. Cannon’s restrained but ever-supportive production uses Nashville session players and the harmonica player Mickey Raphael from Mr. Nelson’s band, in his perpetual dialogue with Mr. Nelson’s vocals, while Mr. Nelson’s succinct lead guitar turns up regularly.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Testimony
    Most of this album moves with slowness and throbbing deliberation that focuses the ear and adds urgency to Mr. Alsina’s confessions. It’s also poignant for its intimacy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Life
    Reinvention isn’t exciting unless there’s something existing to reinvent. A record like this--with grown-up passions and accountable moods, stirring key modulations, gauzy slow jams and hyper-mainstream ballads--maintains the tradition.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cody
    [Producer Rob Schnapf has] recentered the band’s urgency from its head-rush musical intensity to Mr. Johnson’s voice, which is clearer and more melodically driven than before. The songs have more structure, too.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Coexist
    A wonderful experiment in the power of absence.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Retriever
    Chiming 1960's folk-rock and Beatles-tinged melodies can't quite pull Ron Sexsmith out of the moderate despair that suffuses his songs.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Before The World Was Big
    These songs, written and sung with more subtlety since the group’s first EP from late last year.... It almost doesn’t matter what they’re singing about. The sound of their voices together contains it all.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cripple Crow
    Taking the onus off his guitar playing dilutes Mr. Banhart's talent, and sometimes "Cripple Crow" makes of him what some people perhaps want him to be: a simulacrum of an obscure 1960's musician, a maker of albums that were so rare they never existed. [12 Sep 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hellfire
    Humanity isn’t exactly humane in the songs on “Hellfire,” the caustic, exhilarating third album — a masterpiece — by the English band black midi. Each song on “Hellfire” is a whirlwind of virtuosity and structure, an idiom-hopping decathlon of meter shifts, barbed harmonies and arrangements that can veer anywhere at any moment.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Backspacer
    It’s a set of 11 concise songs in 37 minutes that are mostly fast, loud, sinewy and live sounding.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hip Hop Is Dead
    Here’s the thing about Nas’s old-fashioned approach to hip-hop: It still works.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Teens of Style
    The music isn’t anywhere near pop-radio gloss. As Mr. Toledo sings about alienation, frustration, suicidal despair and, in “Times to Die,” about theological disputes and getting his demos heard, he’s still every bit the lone outsider. He’s lucky that he exorcises his troubles in the studio--or maybe we are.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    White Bread Black Beer
    [His] best work in 20 years. [25 Jul 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Middle Cyclone
    Instead of fixed verses or choruses there are two-chord patterns that run as long as Ms. Case wants, or as short; they might add or subtract a beat, suddenly switch chords or support an entirely new tune in mid-song. Subliminally that rhapsodic approach keeps the songs off balance and suspenseful, ready for every possibility of disaster or exaltation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American VI: Ain't No Grave
    Not all of American VI has such nerve, which was more common on the earliest releases in the series.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    II
    It's a handsome downer of a record. [15 May 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Psychedelic Pill
    Psychedelic Pill doesn't try to ingratiate itself with new fans. It's a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, and one worth taking.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    He Is #1
    The guitars don't stay in tune, but the voices do. They're remarkably steady and resolute, filled with spirit.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hero Brother
    Hero Brother stands very much alone as an artistic statement, calmly ravishing and emotionally centered.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heartbreak Pass
    There’s a lot of thought behind the offhand delivery, from the wry aphorisms of the lyrics to the structure of the album, a rambling decrescendo from rowdy to folky to nearly private.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Nothing Was the Same
    None of [the guest vocals] disrupt Drake’s effortless triumph over mainstream rap excess.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Miss Anthropocene
    Grimes doesn’t make her songs depend on the words. The nervous energy, dread, anxiety, death wish and poppy nihilism are also in the sound of her music. Throughout “Miss Anthropocene,” personal and societal disasters seem imminent.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Drum's Not Dead
    Pretentious? Absolutely. But the music can also be genuinely eerie. [27 Mar 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Show Your Bones
    "Show Your Bones" doesn't confide much, but it's a picture of a band that's not quite sure what to do next. [27 Mar 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Melody's Echo Chamber
    As Ms. Prochet's lyrics melt into the hiss and buzz, her lilting tunes come through. Amid the derangement, it's still French pop.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shook
    Throughout the album, Algiers lashes out at injustice, exults in its sonic mastery and insists on the life forces of solidarity and physical impact. But it refuses to promise any consolation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Warning
    Imagine the Postal Service, but far more danceable and quirkily experimental.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Losing Sleep
    With or without well-known collaborators, his old hard-nosed concision comes through.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Reminder
    “The Reminder” is a modestly scaled but quietly profound pop gem: sometimes intimate, sometimes exuberant, filled with love songs and hints of mystery. [15 Apr 2007]
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