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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    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Somewhere Under Wonderland
    Somewhere Under Wonderland teems with lyrics full of rambling travelogue and mystical gobbledygook. Mr. Duritz sings them confidently, in a voice that’s not as laden with meaning as he seems to think, and preserving his shambolic nature.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    V
    V is like a peppy new Nissan Altima: It won’t give you too many problems; it won’t attract stares; it probably won’t get stolen. Its parts are reliable, though none have the pulse of “Moves Like Jagger,” the 2011 hit that gave this group new life.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Manipulator
    There are 17 songs here, and after a while, they feel short on basic songwriting surprises: Built on narrow foundations, high on crude intuition, they keep running into walls.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch
    It’s cumbersome and overstuffed, even if some of its moments are keepers.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Get Hurt
    The music on Get Hurt is broader and more muscular. It feels like music made from the outside in, not the other way.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Whispers
    While Mr. Rosenberg can be affecting, the narrowness of his vision can be suffocating. Most of the time his lyrics are like teenager’s scribbled poems.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Early Riser
    These songs don’t have a great dynamic range, or produce very surprising events. They float past you, often made of three or four chords and a trickling, curious beat.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Someday World
    It’s an uneven album, with stretches that were probably more fun in the studio than on replay.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Xscape
    Xscape does polish up these old songs, even if it wipes away some of Jackson’s ideas, like the big-band tango Jackson invoked on the demo of “Blue Gangsta.” And Jackson’s voice--deliberately pushed up front in the mixes--is more vivid, and less processed-sounding, than it was on his later albums.... Yet it’s clear why Jackson shelved the songs on Xscape. They’re near misses, either not quite as striking as what he released or lesser examples of ideas he exploited better elsewhere.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Corazón
    In some tracks Corazón feels like a committee crossover project.... But Corazón also finds vibrant international connections.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The New Classic
    Student’s complete commitment to character and form compensate slightly for the unrelenting weirdness of this project.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Make My Head Sing...
    As a whole, the album is monochromatic, too single-minded about Ms. Mayfield’s new sound--and, at times, a little too determined to reverse-engineer Nirvana’s flanged guitar effects. And her laconic new lyrics don’t always offer the subtleties and paradoxes of her earlier songs.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Recess
    Recess arrives feeling more like a checked-off item on a bucket list.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lift Your Spirit
    Throughout the album, Mr. Blacc sings with the kind of earthy vitality that many studied neo-soul singers don’t have the voice to match. But too often, the production--most of it by DJ Khalil--is so thoroughly retro that Mr. Blacc only reminds a listener of whom he’s emulating.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Riser
    He’s deliberate in his choice of songwriters, including Shane McAnally and Josh Kear, who provide some of the better songs on this hit-or-miss album.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Voices In A Rented Room
    Both men put tender wheeze and murmur into their voices, but sing in unison or octaves as a default mode, which grows dull almost instantly.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Hopes
    The best of them--mostly the resigned or farseeing songs, the songs that have no hero and no story--rise above the odds. But a large portion of the record feels, let’s say, official.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Panties
    Songs like "Cookie," "Crazy Sex" and "Legs Shakin'" start off as promises of highly skilled sexual attentions, but end up as to-do lists.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life Love & Hope
    The songs come with soaring sentimental choruses, but brittle rhythmic foundations--you will miss Sib Hashian, Boston’s old drummer--as well as deeply grandiose or cornball keyboard parts.... Where Mr. Delp is absent, the singers Tommy DeCarlo or David Victor commit passable imitations, or Kimberley Dahme provides bland contrast.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    What The...
    It’s often only functional, crucially low on thrills; the riffs, over barely changing, stock-punk rhythm patterns, have no breathing space.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Britney Jean
    Ms. Spears and Will.i.am have turned to European disc jockeys who have found dance music’s lowest, least funky common denominator: the steady thump of four-on-the-floor. And they’ve settled for too many tepid tracks.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Baptized
    It [his voice] wants badly to roar but is given almost no opportunity to here apart from the savage “Traitor.” And so mostly, Mr. Daughtry is a caged animal on this album.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Suffering from Success
    “You Don’t Want These Problems”--a posse cut featuring Mr. Ross, Big Sean, French Montana, 2 Chainz, Meek Mill, Ace Hood and Timbaland--comes closer to hitting the album’s bull’s-eye of gloating complaint.... Much of the rest of Suffering From Success feels rote, with too little payoff for the crassness.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crash My Party
    A few times on the competent but wearisome Crash My Party he sounds dutifully twangy, but those moments are exceptions.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blurred Lines
    What’s striking is how unambitious most of the rest of the album is, especially the half that’s produced by Mr. Thicke with his longtime production partner Pro-Jay.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fuse
    The words are working hard here, and the music is, too, but Mr. Urban is gliding through, barely quaking at all.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    AM
    The songs are still sullen, smart and cleverly constructed. But too often on AM, Arctic Monkeys sound less like amalgamators than like imitators.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nobody Knows
    It’s possible to like this record in theory while imagining one that’s 50 percent more enjoyable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Colored Sands
    The album has stability, consistency. But too much of it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hall of Fame
    All together, that makes Hall of Fame beautiful more often than it’s interesting, because Big Sean’s ear is working smarter than his mouth.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trials & Tribulations
    The end-zone dance that is “Bugatti” is far more in keeping with hip-hop’s prevailing mood, and half of this album tries to match it but falls short. But most of the rest of Trials & Tribulations is far darker and more reflective.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Embracism
    For each solid purchase on a strong lyric there’s a mess somewhere else; for nearly every powerful accretion of sound there’s a nearly unbearable one. The record’s volatility both saves and mars it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blessed Unrest
    The Blessed Unrest is all shoulder-drooping heft, and her musical choices are vexing.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fashionably Late
    Throughout the album, there is chaos.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ciara
    Her fifth, is one of the most convincing R&B albums of the year, even if it does a very thin job of being convincing about Ciara herself.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magna Carta Holy Grail
    Though Timbaland’s productions always hold some sly surprises, “Magna Carta ... Holy Grail” comes across largely as a transitional album, as if Jay-Z has tired of pop but hasn’t found a reliable alternative.
    • 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Omens
    This is a clangorous album in every way, full of brick-dense synths and abusive drums, and it often succeeds by blind force. But elsewhere the duo--Nathaniel Motte and Sean Foreman--are much slier and much more successful.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Re-Mit
    The songs on Re-Mit, his 30th studio album with his band the Fall, resemble a row of unevenly smashed windows, or patches of broken concrete in a street--unsightly ruptures within a familiar context, potentially more shapely and interesting the closer you look, but perhaps not.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghost on Ghost
    The arrangements are bold but often misplaced, cluttering and distracting from the songs instead of illuminating them; the characters get lost in their costumes.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Girl Who Got Away
    The electronics are there, however, and they lift the album’s better songs out of the sad-sack zone.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being II
    It’s less manic, less experimental, less unpredictable and, oddly, less consistent.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What About Now
    What About Now suggests a few paths for progress, and an ambivalence about committing to any one of them, all under a comfort-zone haze of undifferentiated, low-ambition, lightly rootsy hard rock.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cross Culture
    Mr. Lovano is taking a step back from the material of jazz and looking at its motivating forces; implicitly, he’s asking why we make it in the first place. As long as the question lingers in your head, the album works. When the music slackens, and the tension dissipates, the question goes away.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Two Lanes of Freedom
    Two Lanes is an album that’s all compromise and almost no courage, a coloring book that hasn’t been filled in. He is a star resting on what look like laurels but are actually fallacies.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goldenheart
    The results have been slow and messy and atmospheric, full of contemporary R&B's customary ingredients (virtual strings, AutoTune, gold-plated emotion) but stretched out, heavy on atmosphere, light on hooks.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jesus Piece
    When the Game isn't rapping about other rappers--which is rare--he is sometimes rapping like other rappers.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    O.N.I.F.C.
    For someone so relaxed, he certainly sounds at odds with much of this album; even the warm, enveloping production, primarily by ID Labs, doesn't loosen up his stiff flow at all.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pale Fire
    As she watches love drift into and, more often, out of reach, the songs find themselves dissolving too.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Woman to Woman
    Why is her big-voiced delivery so similar and balanced in nearly every song? Why are there no sharp intakes of breath, stutters, meaningful cracks or strange textures, like the battling squeaks that made "Love," one of her early singles, so good?
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Girl on Fire
    It's a measure of how powerful parenthood really is that it generates so many clichés. The new songs that push that subtext out front quickly grow trite, in words and music.... It's the tracks in which Ms. Keys seems to pay attention to a quieter story rather than building new pedestals for herself--that echo and smudge and smear sounds, that lead toward paradox--that suggest something new for her.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Global Warming
    The sources wouldn't matter if Pitbull added much to them. But he's not budging from the formula of his million-selling 2011 album, "Planet Pit."
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ghost [EP]
    All together, it's just another round of throwing ideas at the wall. Everything sticks, more or less. But for how long?
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
    The album wears thin in totality, but has isolated moments: entrances and releases and dropouts.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lotus
    The anonymity of much of Lotus is its biggest crime, more than its musical unadventurousness or its emphasis on bland self-help lyrics or its reluctance to lean on Ms. Aguilera's voice.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hope on the Rocks
    Whatever left turn Mr. Keith took [with "Red Solo Cup"] has been ruthlessly course-corrected on this album, which is dutiful and workmanlike and totally bereft of passion, so rote it could possibly have been written and recorded over a long weekend.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Night Train
    Even at his most powerful, singing hard in his nasal voice--it's got impact but not much traction.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Glad Rag Doll
    "Wide River to Cross," by Buddy and Julie Miller is a contemporary outlier on an album crowded with relics, and its beautiful realization invites the question of what other sort of album Ms. Krall and Mr. Burnett might have made without any point to prove.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cruel Summer
    Mr. West is often nowhere to be found, and more crucially, nowhere to be felt. Parts of this album - "Sin City," "The One," "Creepers" - feature what's easily the laziest music on any Kanye-related project, with no trace of his trademark meticulousness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Charmer
    Charmer, her eighth studio album, represents a sunny turn for her, at least in relative terms.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Centipede Hz
    "Merriweather Post Pavilion," had comparatively more open space, medium tempos, and a lot more Panda Bear, who restricts himself emotionally as he tries to make his limited voice beautiful. This record is dominated, even saturated, by Avey Tare, who does not.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Boys Don't Cry
    Rumer can't conjure the right twinge of dissolution for Neil Young's "A Man Needs a Maid," and her lack of urgency on "Soulsville," by Isaac Hayes, is damning. But elsewhere she slides into the premise as into a tub full of suds, communing with Townes van Zandt's "Flyin' Shoes" and Jimmy Webb's "P. F. Sloan."
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Christian a Tunde Adjuah
    The album's unity of mood becomes a haze over the course of its nearly two-hour running time.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    God Forgives, I Don't
    Even though Mr. Ross's rapping is prime, it isn't enough to carry this album. Just at the moment that he's finally not underrated, he has underdelivered.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Never
    This is an art-school record; Ms. Levi's work resists easy pleasure and traditional beauty.... [yet] her songs hook you.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    MTMTMK
    The partnership [Afro-Euro balance] is more complicated and less satisfying.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Overexposed
    It's when he deviates from the plastic norm that he actually sounds most awkward.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    2:54
    [The album] seems to prefer operating under a steady churn of gloom. But there's real muscle here, both in the singing, which is rendered wide and fat, an ooze of its own; and also in the guitar playing, which is hefty and dark.
    • 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Punching Bag
    His records over the last nine years, including the new Punching Bag, slide too easily into benign corniness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thirty Miles West
    He doesn't sound like he's trying to chase after Nashville's contemporary norm, which is admirable. But his confidence often scans as complacency.
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    California 37
    California 37 resides gladly in "Hey, Soul Sister's" shadow, full of equally goofy songs, some more so.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Is a Four Letter Word
    Filled with platitudes and, eventually, psychobabble, dippy even by Mr. Mraz's standards.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wrecking Ball
    It's got plenty of ups and downs.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All of Me
    [A] comfortable, small and sometimes vague album.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Emotional Traffic
    Mr. McGraw has never sounded this casual. It doesn't suit him.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stage Whisper
    Her singing is collected and on pitch, whether she's working with a whispery hush or a lemon-tart croon.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    TM:103 Hustlerz Ambition
    All in all it's a step forward for Young Jeezy, even if everyone around him is walking much faster.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Come Through for You
    The album stays kindly, polished and simpering all the way through, with only one surprise.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Under the Mistletoe
    Mr. Bieber hasn't ever sounded this good. But even Mr. Harrell can't place Mr. Bieber on equal footing with some of his more accomplished guests
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love After War
    Throughout his cheerful jumble of a fifth album, Love After War, he pushes both of those buttons [tight execution and a suspension of disbelief], asking you to admire his tasteful slickness without delving much deeper than the surface.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    rEvolver
    He mainly revisits old tropes without a wink.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Immortal
    The new versions can be garish (pseudo-tribal drums and jungle noises in "Ben"?) or touching.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ersatz G.B.
    The mess can be tense and charmed, or just dull. Ersatz G. B. is too often dull.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ceremonials
    In making the songs so monumental, Florence and the Machine have also made them impersonal.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Four the Record
    Normally, she's emphatic in the right places, but this album also includes some of Ms. Lambert's least committed singing.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Someone To Watch over Me
    Cut by cut, Someone to Watch Over Me is not as strong as its forerunners.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Great Escape Artist
    The sound is brand-name familiar but all too settled; the songs place their hard-rock hooks neatly but without the original band's startling ups and downs.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Clear as Day
    The energy of this album sometimes outpaces the singer, who's best when he's deliberate, and whose voice isn't as robust as it could be on these songs.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sweetheart of the Sun
    It's a spare and occasionally stiff album that has more to do with, say, the Indigo Girls than the 1960s bands the Bangles grew up worshiping.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    SuperHeavy
    An almost total lack of good songs constitutes the album's basic problem. Once that's understood, the record becomes sort of entertaining: gaudy, vacuous, densely mannered.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Johnny Boy Would Love This: A Tribute to John Martyn
    Like most tribute albums, Johnny Boy Would Love This is mixed, with a few misfires, like Snow Patrol's overblown "May You Never." But Mr. Martyn's pensive, moody spirit comes through, and the tribute should send listeners back to his own 1973 masterpiece, "Solid Air."
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Who You Are
    These ambitiously sung songs make for tremendous chaos: the lyrics about uplift are often trite, the furiously modern arrangements are often cliched.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Femme Fatale
    More than any of her previous releases Femme Fatale is blank. Ms. Spears isn't much more than a celebrity spokeswoman for the work of the producers Max Martin, Dr. Luke and others, who need artists like Ms. Spears as calling cards.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    F.A.M.E.
    Mr. Brown sings, with a modicum of angst [on "Up To You"]. But for much of this album--almost the whole second half, actually--Mr. Brown is chasing Usher with a ferocity out onto the dance floor, where no one will pay much mind to his words.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lasers
    Lasers is a chaotic album full of gummy rhymes that look better on the page than they sound to the ear, delivered with a tone of tragic bombast.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Collapse into Now
    Where the spirit-void blankness of R.E.M. once felt intuitive and intentional, it now feels accidental. Most of this record's musical temperament seems reheated or purchased.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silver Pony
    Her uneven but warmly satisfying new album, Silver Pony, attempts the best of both worlds.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Asleep on the Floodplain
    For me it doesn't work; it stomps on the fragility he's been building up for 40 minutes. But because it comes together so slowly, it's of a piece with this record's careful mood.
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