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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    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Midnights
    Overly familiar sounding and spotty. ... “Midnights” feels like a concession to an older, safer idea of Swift, full of songs that are capable and comfortable but often insufficient. ... Some of the lyrics can be lackluster and bluntly imagistic, with little of the detail that made Swift one of the signature pop songwriters of the 21st century. ... “Midnights” by and large feels like a fuzzy Xerox of old accomplishments.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Benji
    Benji is strong, cultish stuff, full of its own stink, full of stories about death and much, much smaller things; the stanzas are long and the yarns circular.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Drift
    "The Drift" sets out only to follow its own obsessions; it's both lush and austere, utterly personal and often Delphic in its impenetrability.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Semper Femina
    Ms. Marling doesn’t cast herself as heroine or victim, angel or avenger. She does something trickier, and perhaps braver. Clear-eyed, calmly determined and invitingly tuneful, she captures each situation in all its ambiguity.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Old LP
    The music is denser and more intricate, conjuring symphonic grandeur alongside overdriven noise. The jokes are gone; the stakes feel higher. But the band’s underlying moxie hasn’t changed.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smother
    In songs suffused with need and vulnerability, the music leaves itself open, waiting to be approached.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Have One On Me
    There’s good reason for both the length of the album and its occasional lavish moments. Ms. Newsom has discovered how to open up her music: to let it whisper and swell, to be swept into the purely musical pleasures of an ingenious arrangement or to let simplicity and silence speak for her.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Good News
    “Good News” proves Megan’s prodigious talent, but it also suggests that, with a bit more digging, this gem could emit an even more prismatic shine.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Classic Objects
    The new album presents Hval at her most approachable, with upbeat tunes and consonant sounds, both acoustic and electronic.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Omoiyari
    The music reveled in elaborately understated analog production, full of acoustic intricacies and subtle layerings of voices and instruments, hand played yet exquisitely polished.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Muchacho
    The scriptural cadence and mythic gravity of Mr. Houck’s lyrics, here and elsewhere, manage not to overburden his emotional payload.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blackheart
    Ms. Richard makes slow, deliberate movements; sometimes they undersell her talent, but just as often they showcase a different side of it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chemistry Of Common Life
    So this album--its best, and indicative of a band that can keep climbing--contains two great punk songs: 'Days of Last,' with an echoed guitar line, and 'Crooked Head,' based on a 12-beat drum rhythm.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jasper County
    This album doesn't always play to her strengths. [13 Sep 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blinking Lights And Other Revelations
    Although rhythm sections, strings, horns and overdubbed sha-la-la's do turn up, "Blinking Lights and Other Revelations" sounds most often like a man alone, coming to terms with himself and trying to muddle through. [2 May 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pure Comedy
    The music stays cozy, supportive and unobtrusively inventive, placing luminous details behind Mr. Tillman’s sympathetic, ever melodic voice.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Big Inner
    A dramatic pop-gospel record that hits extremes of the mood spectrum: very easygoing and very obsessive.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fossora
    “Fossora” doesn’t aim to be a crowd-pleaser. It’s hard to imagine these studio phantasms onstage (though Björk may well find a way). But Björk’s interior worlds are vast.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revolution
    She still needs every ounce of her pluck on an album with a gloss-to-grit ratio more or less congruent with mainstream country norms. But with her keenly stalwart voice, she’s the picture of self-possession, secure enough to admit to the occasional misgiving.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Multitudes
    “Multitudes” is Feist’s sixth studio album, and it embraces both delicacy and impact. It’s at once her most intimate-sounding and her most ambitious set of songs.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
    Backed by ragged, loud guitar work and production that is full but not slick, Ms. Lambert sounds like a brash rabble-rouser, an emotionally insightful spark plug. [29 Apr 2007]
    • The New York Times
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Montero
    Lil Nas X has little interest in deconstructing the conventional structures of a pop song or the traditional narrative arc of an album: He clearly wants these songs of queer yearning to be legible to the mainstream. Working mostly with the production duo Take A Daytrip — who favor melodic hooks and bright, flashy sounds — “Montero” funnels the more fluid and outré aesthetics of SoundCloud rap into familiar pop-musical shapes.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Harrow and the Harvest
    There is nothing that is new here at all, except ambient evidence of further slow refinement.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Beyoncé
    The songs are alert to the current sound of clubs and radio, but not trapped by it; the refrains are terse and direct, but what happens between them isn’t formulaic. And while Beyoncé constructed the songs with a phalanx of collaborators, they all know better than to eclipse her creamy, soulful voice.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Emeritus
    It is also among his breeziest, with just a touch of nimbleness animating his reliably sleepy growl over surprisingly exuberant production.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clearing the Path to Ascend
    It’s a stealth band, working on the rack of riff and repetition, moving slowly toward loud, intense, orange-sky beauty.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    evermore
    The sonic details of “Evermore” are radiant and meticulous; the songwriting is poised and careful. It’s an album to respect. But with all its constructions and conceits, it also keeps a certain emotional distance.
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