The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,072 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: 1,594 out of 2072
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2072
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2072
2072 music reviews
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    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Return To Cookie Mountain
    It’s more experimental yet catchier, more introspective yet more assertive, by turns gloomier and funnier, and above all richer in both sound and implication. “Return to Cookie Mountain” is simply one of this year’s best albums.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Call Me If You Get Lost
    A tauntingly good hip-hop album, or a rewiring of pop DNA: “Call Me if You Get Lost” has it both ways. ... Intersections of cocksureness and anxiety are this album at its best. (Fittingly, the title “Call Me if You Get Lost” reads either as a statement of generosity or a plea, depending on your lens.) Songs like the less emotionally ambiguous “Sweet / I Thought You Wanted to Dance” are generally less impactful — Tyler thrives on discord.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Run the Jewels 3
    This new album is the most successful of the lot--calmer but not remotely calm, more emotional but not at all tender.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Big Time
    Superb. ... “Big Time” (which she recorded in Topanga, Calif., with the producer Jonathan Wilson) is charged with a continuous current of weighty, transformative and bracingly cleareyed emotion.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Your Turn
    It’s a cranky record that gets exciting entirely on its own schedule.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ancestral Recall
    While it may not be his most immediately affecting album (that remains “Yesterday You Said Tomorrow,” from 2010), it offers the kind of slow-burning immersion that most of his recent records have only gestured at.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Destroyer's Rubies
    It feels like an event: grand, sumptuous, sometimes seductive.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Magdalene
    Despite the album title, religion barely figures on “Magdalene.” FKA twigs seeks a person to believe in, not a creed. In these songs, that would be vocation enough, a chance to find transcendence by giving everything. It’s the faith of so many pop songs: the glory of love.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    YHLQMDLG
    The strikingly good “YHLQMDLG” (which stands for “Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana,” translation “I Do Whatever I Want”) moves in a different direction, looking deep inside the genre’s long history and proposing that there is enough information in the past on which to build a whole worldview.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From A Basement On The Hill
    The low-fi yet meticulous arrangements only add to the sense of isolation and the poignancy of the songs. [18 Oct 2004]
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    From Kinshasa
    The soukous guitars are still there, now and then, but solitary post-punk guitar lines also hang in the air, and they share a spooky, precarious soundscape that changes with each track: heaving with distorted bass, warped by the echoes and shifting reverb of a psychedelic-dub production, invaded by noise.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In Rainbows
    Rhythmic layers crackle and coil, percussion spatters prettiness, and noise sometimes looms from murky corners....Radiohead has also reclaimed its tunefulness. Its new songs take care to string long-lined melodies across the rigorous counterpoint.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lonerism
    Tame Impala saves itself from mere revivalism with 21st-century self-consciousness and, tucked amid the swirl and buzz, touching confessions of insecurity.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monoliths & Dimensions
    Words are secondary for Sunn O))), a k a Greg Anderson on bass and Stephen O’Malley on guitar, who long ago made thunderous resonant sounds their stock in trade. What’s striking about this new release is its wealth of additional textures: woodwinds, brass, strings, male and female choirs.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Haiti Direct: Big Band, Mini Jazz & Twoubadou Sounds, 1960-1978
    The groundbreaking compilation Haiti Direct gathers 27 tracks from those decades: big bands with jubilant horn sections (including the one led by the compas pioneer Nemours Jean Baptiste); “mini jazz” bands that replaced horn sections with guitars; rock bands with a psychedelic streak; small twoubadou (troubadour) groups and more.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Orquídeas
    It’s an album of breezy confidence and sly ingenuity, easily moving among futuristic electronics, 1990s nostalgia and Latin roots. .... Lavishly layered vocals nestle among glimmering electronic sounds and programmed beats, and on “Orquídeas,” her voice sounds completely untethered by gravity.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dawn FM
    “Dawn FM,” his fifth major-label album, is sleek and vigorous and also, again, a light reimagining of what big-tent music might sound like now, in an era when most global stars have abandoned the concept.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fishscale
    This album doesn't match the weird, woozy brilliance of "Supreme Clientele," from 2000, and there are a few too many guest verses from rappers who don't come close to upstaging their host. Still, this might surpass his 2004 CD, "The Pretty Toney Album," though it's too early to tell: when you get a new Ghostface Killah album, the only reasonable reaction is to get lost in it. [27 Mar 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    College Dropout
    2004's first great hip-hop album. [9 Feb 2004]
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blackstar
    It’s at once emotive and cryptic, structured and spontaneous and, above all, willful, refusing to cater to the expectations of radio stations or fans.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Something More Than Free
    The best of them glow with bittersweet empathy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    M B V
    This is vivid music, with color and texture and perhaps taste.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Woman
    The music toys with nostalgia, with the reassuring dependability of structure and instrumental arrangements.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In These Silent Days
    “In These Silent Days” consolidates Carlile’s strengths: musical, writerly, maternal, political.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The 7th Hand
    Another collection of all originals, it is just as unrelenting as “Omega.”
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blonde
    Blonde is dewy, radiant and easeful, with an approach to incantatory soul that evolves moment to moment. It’s feverish but unhurried, a slowly smoldering set that’s emphatic about loneliness.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Grohl Sessions, Vol. 1 [EP]
    Mr. Brown’s voice, which lacks power and nuance, and lays even flatter the goopier the lyric. That liability becomes even clearer as the musicianship around him elevates, not just by his band members, but also guests, like Mr. Grohl on drums, or Oteil Burbridge (of the reconstituted Allman Brothers Band) on bass. But the gifts Mr. Brown receives here are plenty, and he has spun gold from far less.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Town And The City
    Los Lobos has swerved away from the upbeat music it plays on the jam-band circuit, harking back to its quietly startling 1992 album, “Kiko.” [25 Sep 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Slow Me Down
    What elevates these beyond mere plaints is Ms. Evans’s robust and sweet voice. She sings with power, grace and dignity.
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