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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Break Stuff
    The band’s refractive language makes sense of whatever material it plays. You don’t hear the record and seize on its sense of rupture or argument. Instead, it sounds whole.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bad Plus Joshua Redman
    As a chemistry experiment, the album is a knockout.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    10 Years Solo Live [Box Set]
    We’re off and away by then, following a mind awhirl in creative reverie. Mr. Mehldau--tracing connections, making digressions, but never quite forsaking the original framework--sounds both grounded and almost boundless.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tropix
    [A] stylistically varied, intricately detailed, slyly coherent fourth album.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kin Sonic
    For all the seriousness of the songs, Jupiter & Okwess make sure to keep the party going.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Petals for Armor
    Many of these songs sparkle with insight and the daring of a shape-shifting vocalist, but a handful assume too readily that maturity and seriousness are only achieved through dour restraint. Still, as she and her band proved on Paramore’s excellent 2017 record “After Laughter,” Williams was already a pro at packing complex emotions and perceptive wisdom into bright, technicolor pop-rock songs.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh
    It’s filled with spacey, leisurely songs about desire, longing, betrayal and letting go. The album plays as one long tease on the way to its last song: the 10-minute, three-part “Out My Mind, Just in Time,” which is even more protracted.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One Kind Favor
    The ache, the anger, the elegance and the edge of Mr. King’s blues are undiminished and authentic.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nostalgia, Ultra.
    Given how slick and intuitive this album is--full of astral soul that owes debts to Terence Trent D'Arby, Pharrell Williams, even Drake--it's more likely that someone will lose his job than that Frank Ocean will lose his record deal over this kerfuffle.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Live at the Cellar Door
    Live at the Cellar Door--the latest rough diamond from his archives is from a booking in Washington, and it has the coiled tension of its time.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clark
    It’s an album that plays as an album, not a D.J. set.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cruel Country
    On “Cruel Country” Wilco offers no grand lesson or master plan, only observations, feelings and enigmas. Many of the album’s best moments are wordless ones.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bright Mississippi
    It’s a producer’s record. And it works, possibly because Mr. Toussaint is no pushover.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harry's House
    “Harry’s House” is a light, fun, summery pop record, but there is a gaping void as its center; by its end, the listener is inclined to feel more intimately acquainted with the objects of his affections than the internal world of the titular character himself.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Food & Liquor
    There are few weak tracks on this beautifully quiet album, but there is no truly irresistible beat either. [18 Sep 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Real Animal
    The particulars of Mr. Escovedo’s autobiography on this album — his wanderings to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin--may not matter much to those not already following his music. But the songs also tell a larger story: of reckless youth and unrepentant maturity, of time’s ravages and insights.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Old
    With all these styles packed in tight, Old ends up being a maybe-inadvertent career retrospective for Mr. Brown, echoing his speedy and jagged evolution over the past few years.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Hate Music
    They’re love songs about persistence, and that’s embedded in the sound of the record; you don’t need a lyric sheet to hear it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Game Theory
    Black Thought... sounds more focused than he did on the Roots’ last album, “The Tipping Point,” and more engaged than on the one before it, “Phrenology.” But because he’s not the kind of rapper to modulate his emotional pitch, his intensity can level off into monotony.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Faith in Strangers
    On his new record, Faith in Strangers, the details are different but the achievement is similar.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tempest
    He sings forcefully, in a raspy, phlegmy bark that's not exactly melodic and by no means welcoming. Battered and unforgiving, he's still Bob Dylan, answerable to no one but himself.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Piano & A Microphone 1983
    While the session is informal--he sniffles now and then, and at times something rattles in the piano--the performance is not sloppy for a moment. The one-take, real-time vocals are exquisite. .. He shifts musical styles and vocal personae at whim--melancholy, playful, devout, flirtatious--yet it’s all Prince. ... It’s a glimpse of a notoriously private artist doing his mysterious work.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blunderbuss
    Few songs on "Blunderbuss" truly knock the wind out of you, as the White Stripes could - even with riffs that were fragmentary, simple or borrowed. This is a songwriter's record, and a kind of orchestrator's record; there's also a new overall vehemence in the lyrics, hammering on dishonesty, jealousy, immorality.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love
    It’s an album of connoisseurship, revealing the inspired details tucked into so many Beatles songs.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Until the Quiet Comes
    The album's aesthetic is elastic and permeable, and yet strong enough to hold its shape.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amygdala
    [A] sleek and immersive new album.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pain Killer
    Streamlining its roots-minded harmonies and delivering them with new, lean muscle, making for its best album yet, one of the signature country releases of the year.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harlan & Alondra
    Like YG’s songs, Buddy’s music is full of small homages to the Los Angeles sounds of yesteryear. But while YG is polishing one idea until it shines blindingly, Buddy is crossing generations, building new paths.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Still Brazy
    Still Brazy is an artisanal, proletarian Los Angeles gangster rap record, less tribute to the sound’s golden age than a full-throated and wholly absorbed recitation.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2
    As the hip-hop mainstream shouts and booms its way into the 21st century, Beastie Boys are happy temporal outsiders, partying in their never-ending 1980s.
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