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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    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Spirit Fiction
    His most complete artistic statement, and one of his most self-possessed.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Who's Your New Professor
    Quietly ambitious. [13 Mar 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Christmas Everywhere
    Rodney Crowell’s Christmas Everywhere is good-natured and wry, an album about how adults struggle to process a holiday oriented toward children. ... Throughout most of this album, Crowell is having fun--singing with arched eyebrow and tongue firmly in cheek.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cassadaga
    He is clearly searching for a more mature style. But the musical and rhetorical convolutions of “Cassadaga” are no substitute, yet, for the way he used to blurt things out. [9 Apr 2007]
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Special
    When it works, it works. And when it doesn’t, well … you get a song like overzealous-ally anthem “Everybody’s Gay,” which aims for Paradise Garage euphoria but lands closer to Target’s collection of Pride month apparel. The energy of the opening track, “The Sign,” somehow manages to be both relentless and listless.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Rope
    The new LP has more oomph and darkness than the band’s self-produced 2021 LP “Path of Wellness” and more emotional resonance than its mechanical 2019 effort “The Center Won’t Hold.” But even in its wildest moments, when compared to the band’s mightiest work, “Little Rope” sounds unfortunately diminished and curiously restrained.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free
    On Set ’Em Wild, Set ’Em Free, the band has produced something practical, with less clutter, and many times better.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chaos And Creation In The Backyard
    Sir Paul has always been an instinctive songwriter, and he sounds as surprised by these songs as his listeners may be. [12 Sep 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dark Sky Island
    The lyrics often mention homecomings; the music is a warm bath.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Wow
    For all that the Kills owe to P. J. Harvey, they also have angles of their own. [13 Mar 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Colour In Anything
    "The Colour in Anything" grows self-pitying, almost maudlin, in ways Mr. Blake has managed to avoid in the past simply by using more elusive lyrical metaphors. It is also unreasonably long: a little over an hour and a quarter.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Different Ship
    The album discreetly shows off the band's meticulous virtuosity.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Stimulus Package
    Made with Jake One, a producer of classic-soul proclivity and G-Unit pedigree, it’s a sumptuous vessel with room for redundancy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Trouble In Dreams
    Dan Bejar, who records as Destroyer when he’s not with the New Pornographers or his other projects, might have been perfectly suited for a career in pretty soft rock, mid-1970s style. The beginning of Destroyer’s eighth album, Trouble in Dreams (Merge), sounds like that’s what he decided to do, just strumming an acoustic guitar while electric guitars trace delicate leads.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Part II: The New December
    The album takes decoding, but it's got enough lilt, rhythm and sonic slapstick to make the job fun.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Honeymoon
    She’s been angry, and then bored of being angry, but now she’s just bored, and her boredom is entrancing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
    The results are enthralling, even when they seem to be thrashing at coherence. [19 Mar 2007]
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Toujours
    Some of Sabina’s songs have a more enigmatic side, an undercurrent of restlessness and displacement.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Haden Triplets
    The album’s center of gravity, always, is the Hadens’ vocal blend, which isn’t seamless or airless but rather a series of alert, intuitive micro-negotiations in the realm of intonation and timbre. At times you notice how much is actually happening, moment to moment, in that blend.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bloom
    Beach House's fourth and most sumptuous album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    II
    On its primally satisfying second album, II, it plays with punk attitude, hardcore discipline and construction-site volume. That all adds up to a glorious rumble, and a fetishistic one as well.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here's To Taking It Easy
    Yet his voice still ambles all around the beat, and the production is calculatedly bleary, with horns, guitars and piano all entangled, as if two or three bands are playing the same song. Phosphorescent's perpetually woozy aesthetic is intact.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tremors
    The promise of Sohn’s debut album is that he has still more ideas hiding in the shadows.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bish Bosch
    The album can be heavy going, with or without a dictionary, but its sheer, lapidary obsessiveness provides its own rewards.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In Love & War
    Amerie’s raw voice, blunt lyrics and rhythmic ingenuity make “In Love & War” a designer knockoff that at times rivals the original.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Blessing And A Curse
    This album feels smaller and more casual than some of its predecessors. [17 Apr 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Momofuku
    It’s effortfully tossed off; it’s a middling record battling against his built-in high standards.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time On Earth
    With Matt Sherrod on drums, Crowded House sounds like its old self (and like Mr. Finn’s solo efforts).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Is Is [EP]
    Karen O seizes every chorus with her best feral yowl, while her partners, the guitarist Nick Zinner and the drummer Brian Chase, sound as tautly focused as ever.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Waterfall
    All those lyrics about openness, about flow, about mind-body dualism--they suit this band perfectly, along with cavernous reverb and heavy-foot midrange tempos.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Multi-Love
    The music is furtively detailed; it’s full of asymmetrical melodies and harmonic detours, bits of countermelody and instrumental interludes. Behind the cheesy facades, Mr. Nielson’s latest batch of songs deals with a complicated roundelay of heartache, androgyny, drugs, decadence and regret.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Next Thing
    Ms. Kline’s songs don’t last long, and neither does her imagery, but she can be exceptional at capturing how quickly frail things can break, taking devastating turns in just a couple of lines.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    That's Harakiri
    From beginning to end, it moves from tense sound collages toward polyrhythmic music that can be danced to--but the progression isn’t explicit, and neither is anything else.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fast Food
    Fast Food, is full of accusatory songs about love, often addressed to “you.” They spare no one.... Yet as bleak as things get, she refuses to retreat.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    More Fish
    He’s worth your $13.98 even when he’s only offering a grab bag like this one. [11 Dec 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lust for Life
    Lust for Life is her most expansive album; it has 16 songs, stretching nearly 72 minutes. It also, in rare moments, hints at a wink behind Ms. Del Rey’s somber lullabies.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too
    While the moments she sings about are awkward, the settings are not.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crystal Castles [2010]
    Mr. Kath imbues the album with a touch of continuity--surely not the easiest task, given tracks like “Doe Deer,” a corrosive blast of mania, and “Fainting Spells,” which declares its own intended side effect.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Plastic Beach
    This is a dull album, revealing how over the space of three records, Mr. Albarn and Mr. Hewlett have moved from wacky conceptualists to self-satisfied dilettantes.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ash Wednesday
    A remarkably beautiful elegy. [26 Feb 2007]
    • The New York Times
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Walk Around the Moon
    The band’s founding rhythm section — Carter Beauford on drums and Stefan Lessard on bass — still keeps the songs nimble, no matter how burdened Matthews’s thoughts can become.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Thing Called Divine Fits
    It's a record full of poses and acts, but there's a secret work ethic under all this; the band mates seem to believe in indie-rock maybe a little more than they need to.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Will
    [Will] may be Ms. Barwick’s most conventionally light, soothing record, and is sometimes a little inert as a result.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lucky
    While Nada Surf is only a trio, in the studio it stacks up guitars and vocals, multiplying Mr. Caws’s thin voice into a dreamy or determined chorale.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trees Outside The Academy
    It’s all very organized, almost bucolic; there are only a few blasts of noise.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Broke With Expensive Taste
    Most of all, she understands rhythms--house, trap, soul, techno, Latin--and she slings rhymes and melodies that fully engage them.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King
    Memorable refrains, hard beats, elegant rhymes: this album succeeds mainly by sticking to a simple but effective formula. [3 Apr 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    V
    The balance of good cheer and dark clouds is partly in the arrangements--V comprises exceedingly bright songs verging on true pop-punk. It’s probably the cleanest-sounding Wavves album to date.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    "Awaken, My Love!"
    It’s at once a homage and a parody, equally aware of that era’s excesses and its glories, of the way that the most memorable 1970s R&B merged sensuality, activism, humor, toughness, outlandishness, futurism, soul roots, wild eccentricity and utopian community spirit. That’s an extremely high bar, but at its best, “Awaken, My Love!” recalls many of those virtues.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Origami Harvest
    The result is a tangled portrait of anxieties, one that adheres to its own standards of beauty, taking no particular tradition for granted.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    By Any Means [Mixtape]
    This mixtape--his third strong one in the last year or so--features some of his most accessible material, songs that pair the savage darkness of mid-1990s West Coast gangster rap with huge, bombastic choruses, as if the one thing that excites him is the chance to be widely heard.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Tree of Forgiveness
    While at 71 his voice is gruffer and scratchier than ever, the album is unapologetic about it; vocals are recorded close-up over sparse arrangements, with melodies that relax into cozy countryish territory and sometimes stray toward speech. Mr. Prine’s songs, as they have since his 1971 debut album, can sound both carefully chiseled and playfully off-the-cuff.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Messy
    It reaffirms what she’s been doing right; it also claims new possibilities.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dirty Projectors
    Dirty Projectors finds ways to be both straightforward and strange.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    New Again
    Such obvious imitation [of U2] isn’t good strategy; it diminishes well-made songs. Taking Back Sunday is better off merging its old blurted troubles with its new attention to detail.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sylvan Esso
    Mr. Sanborn’s programming and production ground these songs in a range of textures, borrowing from techno, electro-pop and dubstep. He’s sensitive to the needs of the vocals, and supple with his touch.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alicia
    Keys reclaims most of her usual composure on “Alicia,” but it’s often tinged with ambivalence, even in love songs. The music often hollows itself out around her, opening deep bass chasms or surrounding sparse instrumentation with echoey voids.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Cool
    Lupe Fiasco and his producers--mostly Soundtrakk--have clarified the lyrics and brought out the hooks. The result is a three-act allegory that’s also one of the year’s best hip-hop albums.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Attention Deficit
    The album is confident and catchy, with some telling moments. It’s also a measure of how limited Wale and his label think their hip-hop mainstream is.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blood Oaths of the New Blues
    The songs take their time but never ramble, as Mr. Toth faces his existential conundrums with something like equanimity.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There's a Riot Going On
    They deliver their apprehensions as gently as they can, turning reckonings into reveries.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Legendary Christmas
    Moments of surprise pepper John Legend’s austere first holiday album, A Legendary Christmas. There are the savvy song choices, including rarities like Marvin Gaye’s pulpy “Purple Snowflakes.”
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fool
    Warpaint's songs are pensive and elegiac, transmuting the jabs of yesteryear into folky incantations.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revenue Retrievin': Day Shift
    These are nimble, versatile albums, though collectively the “Revenue Retrievin’ ” dyad is a more successful act of point-proving than execution.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gamel
    It’s rugged, inspired, original music.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marble Son
    Guitars and keyboards take varying paths through each song, gathering for dynamic swells that grow overwhelming, and overlapping in ways that only appear to be serendipitous. There's nothing neo- about this band's psychedelia.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Living With War
    "Living With War" -- irate, passionate, tuneful, thoughtful and obstinate -- is definitely worth a click.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love This Giant
    One of the most striking facts about this record is that it doesn't sound definitively like the work of one or the other, though occasionally you will catch a whiff of something one or the other has created in the past.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nabuma Rubberband
    Little Dragon has traded its austere electronic blueprints for 3-D renderings, making its music more approachable but no less eccentric.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lamp Lit Prose
    Lamp Lit Prose is his shiniest, airiest, even catchiest set of songs. The new record exchanges the jarring, glitchy electronic intrusions and arid trap percussion he used on “Dirty Projectors” for the springy guitar lines of older Dirty Projectors albums, bringing out their warmest tones.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Watching Dead Empires in Decay
    He leans toward ominous possibilities: creaks and thuds, clanks and scrapes and sounds that are more like pressure zones than notes; at times an elegiac string section or a slow thread of melody looms.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love And Its Opposite
    In Ewan Pearson’s thoughtfully modest production, the songs are played by small groups, usually just three or four musicians recorded cleanly, as unglossy and intimate as Ms. Thorn’s songs.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shame, Shame
    Dr. Dog gives its songs a casual, homely surface; it has perfected the imperfections that make indie-rock approachable.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What Matters Most
    Some of her high notes may have slipped away, but the body of her instrument has ripened. The overall tone is fairly subdued.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Way Down Low
    Ms. Edmonson presents a vision of her art that's almost steely in its resolve, with an equal foothold in jazz, cabaret and vintage cosmopolitanism pop.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New
    The songs are full of contrasts. It’s easy to imagine Mr. McCartney gathering his favorite phrases from assorted works in progress and challenging himself to pull the miscellanies together.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dumb Flesh
    He’s giving you something you might find familiar or even commercial by its basic outlines. But he’s still got ways to make it uncanny: close, loud and abrupt.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    If I Could Make It Go Quiet
    Ulven’s vocals are rendered dreamily, almost inspirationally, over guitars that slash and throb in the manner of loud 1990s indie rock. Her boldness and defiance is taking on new shades.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Tunes
    Several tracks feature Mr. Toussaint alone at the piano, and they’re reminders of the regional traditions he elegantly upheld.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hypnotic Eye
    As romance, ethics, community and the economy collapse, Mr. Petty and the Heartbreakers offer two old-fashioned bulwarks: the solidarity of the band and the sinewy construction of the songs.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Days
    On this album Real Estate has lifted its sound out of the haze and, by extension, out of the pool of its peers.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blood From Stars
    If Mr. Henry wants to suggest a less phlegmatic Tom Waits, as often seems the case here, he could stand to loosen up further. His lyrics can feel too artful, too self-conscious.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Seeds from the Underground
    The better of these compositions suggest the pithy durability and deceptive simplicity of folk songs.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World
    On the whole, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World strikes a note of pop concision and maturity, building on what worked on “The King Is Dead.”
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    E-MO-TION
    Emotion is full of pure cotton candy--delicious, distractingly sweet and filling, with a mildly suspicious aftertaste.... [The album is] full of excellent songs that seem to give up about two-thirds of the way through.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Revelation, Pt. 2: The Fruit of Life
    More often than not, Mr. Marley lives up to the ambition that his last name demands of him. With any luck, his next album will have fewer guests and more of the introspection and steadfastness he reveals in “It’s Alright,” a hymnlike ballad that he sings on his own.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation
    He finds magic in the absurd and the minute. It is a style almost impossible to emulate. That it sounds natural over Dan the Automator’s production is a real feat.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pond Scum
    Covering an eight-year span, they share a hushed and crackly intensity, often with little more than voice and acoustic guitar.
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