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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    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lorraine
    Lorraine is evenly split between mercilessly detailed songs like these and frustratingly blank ones ("Sweet Disposition," "Rocket Science"), which feel like hollow templates designed to be inhabited by other, less imaginative singers. On those songs Ms. McKenna sounds complacent; discomfort suits her better.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ritual
    Every gesture feels like flagging down a passing ship from a barren island. Every emotion registers on the Richter scale. This can be wickedly effective, as many a successful British rock band will attest. And periodically on this album, the stars and planets do align.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    H.F.M. 2 (The Hunger for More 2)
    Mostly, though, he comes up short, delivering rhymes that on paper are clever and punchy, but on record are congested and monotone.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Boys Allowed
    Ms. Hilson's own records aren't tipping toward bona fide dance music as much as Rihanna's, and don't yet have their audience-strafing sweep. But a few songs here are good enough to stop the overthinking comparisons
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Train to Paris
    None of these guests feel out of place here, but not because of the potency of Diddy's vision. Rather, it's because they have made records like these elsewhere, giving Last Train to Paris a secondhand feel.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Calling All Hearts
    Keyshia Cole tries for a slow burn but rarely ignites on her fourth album, Calling All Hearts.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Beginning
    It's a much lesser record than "The E.N.D.," and yet it isn't boring, even when the echoes of old songs are more than echoes.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Endlessly
    It's rigorously written, but Duffy sounds uncertain, spotlighting the particulars of her voice: the many crannies, the narrow backbone, the decay at the edges, the tentativeness she feels when it's unclear just how much room she has to maneuver.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Acoustic Sessions
    It's not awful. But while Acoustic Sessions carries the hush of a whispered secret, it divulges little beyond the fact of its stylish presence.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Live It Up
    Only the album's last track, "A Song About Love," feels true. His voice is serrate, his mood is foul, and the song is sturdy enough to stand up to both. It's the sound of Mr. DeWyze's then and now finally colliding.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Living Proof
    What's wrong with the record is plain. The lyrics' first-person mythmaking gets trite. The guest appearances sound fainthearted, tailored to the ears of Grammy voters. But the heart of the record is deeply, honorably misbehaved.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Soulsville
    But aside from transposing the keys--a measure most likely taken to suit a limited vocal range--these songs take few liberties.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nothing
    Nothing is the fourth N.E.R.D. album and the first to feel altogether detached from its surroundings.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Funstyle
    It's a jumble of snarky (and funny) music-business skits and raps, junky computerized samples, tuneful near-pop songs with awkwardly overstuffed production, thudding cliches and, in tantalizing fragments, glimmers of her unsettling insight into character flaws, including her own.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Incredible Machine
    This all amounts to an unwelcome unraveling of the Sugarland formula. As a country duo, the members of Sugarland are surefooted. As tweakers of Nashville orthodoxies, they're goofy and fun, but clumsy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being
    While diversity is Lil Wayne's strength, it's a lack of commitment of a different sort that hamstrings this album. Too often Lil Wayne lapses into predictable flow structures, quick ideas paired with built-in rejoinders.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    $O$
    $O$ may be as much Die Antwoord as the world needs. Except for "In Your Face," the newer songs already sound forced. But Die Antwoord's initial blasts deserved all their mouse clicks.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bullets in the Gun
    Bullets in the Gun is his most scattershot album to date, a jumble of attitudes and tactics. Much of the time Mr. Keith, who has been one of the most underappreciated vocal stylists in country music, is singing without conviction on songs that are mere archetypes and lack any of his signature gestures.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time
    It's easy to imagine Santana completely revamping some guitar-centered hits. But for most of the album, that was apparently too daring for Mr. Santana and his pop mentor and co-producer, Clive Davis. These oldies tend to stay close to the original arrangements and vocal phrasing, perhaps hoping that familiarity can sneak them onto the radio.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Gravity
    The rest of her follow-up, No Gravity, a competent, sometimes exciting pop album, collects other attempts: in essence, a series of portraits drawn by people with radically different styles.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cloak and Cipher
    She's good at finding obscurity, but sometimes not to her benefit. Ms. Powell wrote a lot of the lyrics on Cloak and Cipher with scrambled input from books and various other texts, and she doesn't do much to smooth out the results, savoring the disjunctive and the cryptic.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Reason Why
    Redolent of Southern gospel and feather-light country-rock, it's a comfort zone for this group, employed consistently in the choruses, which can be arrestingly sharp, and often elsewhere. But piled on top of plangent guitars, the convergence can become grating, with all the emotion of archery, or some other sport that prizes accuracy above all.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cowboy's Back in Town
    While Mr. Adkins shares a sense of gravity and an air of intractability with his new boss [Toby Keith], he lacks the winking cheekiness and self-deprecation that have always been Mr. Keith's aces in the hole.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise
    This one has missteps, but for Mr. LaMontagne it's those songs that feel the most honest, those where he says what he means, not what he hopes you'll think.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crazy for You
    Ms. Cosentino and her collaborator, Bobb Bruno, envelop the songs in guitar reverb and distortion--between the Raveonettes and the Jesus and Mary Chain--to place them in an ominous haze.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dark Night Of The Soul
    Here were two artists, anxious and passionate, who knew how to talk to each other. That connection is missing from much of the rest of this collection, an exercise in Rolodex-flexing and loose oversight.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Korn III: Remember Who You Are
    On Korn III: Remember Who You Are, the band has jumped back to the sound and attitude that made it famous - if without particularly inspired tunes - and Mr. Davis, almost 40, seems to have regained some of his younger self as a lyricist.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pilot Talk
    He raps in tight clusters of syllables that sound smooth but say little. Mainly he's interested in getting high and, occasionally, getting high with other people. Still, many of his friends, under the influence or not, perform better.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sex Dreams And Denim Jeans
    Applying Auto-Tune to her deadpan rapping, she anticipated the sound that helped make Kesha’s “Tik "Tok" an international hit in 2009. Now her debut album, Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans, has to play catch-up.
    • The New York Times
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Sellout
    Her scratchy charm gets her through some of the stompers, like "Kissed It" and "Still Hurts," and her old humor surfaces now and then. But the desperation rings all too true in "Help Me."
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Recovery
    What Eminem hasn't let go of is his taste for melancholic bombast in production.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bionic
    Now, on her new album, Bionic, how has she decided to present herself? Mostly as a sexbot: a one-dimensional hot chick chanting come-ons to club beats.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goon Affiliated
    The brightest moments come from his exceedingly thin attempts at concept.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Family Jewels
    ["Hermit the Frog" is] a rare moment of fun, though; mostly Ms. Diamandis doesn’t let herself get comfortable. She’s strongest on the songs that nod, obliquely or otherwise, to fame.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stone Temple Pilots
    In its heyday Stone Temple Pilots brought swagger and darkness to its second-tier grunge. Now the band has returned from its hiatus with less of a musical identity and blander tidings.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    This Is Happening
    This music sounds fantastic, as usual--clean, tight and separated in the mix--but songwriting inspiration is in short supply.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Infinite Arms
    The band leans on plain, incredibly legible songs that have little to hide behind; successful in a gestural way, but little more. And the songwriting of the frontman Ben Bridwell, always a little obtuse, has begun to decompose, like sketches drawn from faded memories.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Am What I Am
    Mr. Haggard sounds more fatigued than his old sidekick, his voice less willing to bend. There are some lovely moments of stern self-loathing ("Bad Actor," "How Did You Find Me Here"); Mr. Haggard is always sharper when pointing the finger at himself than when celebrating love, as he often does on this album.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Suite #420
    Suite 420, beyond some sweet spots early in the disc, becomes wickedly boring.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Achin' And Shakin'
    "Giddy On Up" is on the shakin' side, which is the weaker half, chaotic and a little glib... The achin' set of songs forces Ms. Bundy to exhale, revealing a lovely voice with alluring nooks and crannies that need no adornment.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Freight Train
    The magic in his stoicism is gone too: Freight Train is filled with songs that are mature but not wise.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love To Live
    The album is solid and respectable, just not a lot of fun.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My World 2.0
    My World 2.0, his debut full-length album, is far sharper than it needs to be, an amiable collection of age-appropriate panting with intermittent bursts of misplaced precociousness.
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Talking To You, Talking To Me
    “Talking to You, Talking to Me” grants each Watson Twin more of a showcase, without abandoning their trademark vocal harmonies. Produced by Russell Pollard and J. Soda, members of the Los Angeles band Everest, it also puts a tougher spin on heartbreak, with a bit more grit and a lot more groove.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Another Round
    Accordingly, Jaheim is not at his best on ballads or on up-tempo numbers (a pair of which, “Another Round” and “Her,” weigh down the middle of this album), but he is on songs that combine the two.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Need You Now
    Its attempts at gravitas--"Hello World," on which Mr. Kelley sets a promising scene ("Traffic crawls, cellphone calls, talk radio screams at me") that doesn’t resolve-- land awkwardly, and its optimistic songs, like "Our Kind of Love," teem with empty metaphor.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ollusion
    Clunky lyrics are everywhere, undoing some of the progress Omarion has made.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unleashed
    On the whole, though, Hurricane Chris sounds bored. Even on an album this short--10 songs, 38 minutes--he manages to repeat lines and references.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Element Of Freedom
    But all that queenliness, and the sameness of the tempo, start to wear you down. It's not until the 10th track, "Put It in a Love Song," that the record starts to bristle with a less regal impulse: flirting.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Graffiti
    A curiously faceless album that largely thumbs its nose at close reading.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Malice N Wonderland
    But too often on this album Snoop is a fuddy-duddy, domesticated and palatable.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Shock Value II
    The productions flaunt Timbaland trademarks: vocal sounds imitating turntable scratching, quick keyboard arabesques, grunts as percussion. But now he fills in the spaces that made his old tracks so startling.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Just Like You
    Just Like You is a workmanlike pop album with shrewdly punky touches, like a ready-made outfit from the mall chain Hot Topic. It flatters Ms. Iraheta as a singer but too often suggests other empowered female stars, like Pink or Brandi Carlile or Kelly Clarkson.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    She Wolf
    It’s so undercooked and overwritten--with wan wolf howls and lines about being treated like a coffee machine in an office--that it reaches a special class of fascinating-awful.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    For Your Entertainment
    This is an overwrought, clunky, only sparingly entertaining record, constantly in argument with itself. Worse, 'For Your Entertainment' isn’t an ambitious flop, it’s a conservative one.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ultraviolet
    There’s a lot about Ultraviolet you might want to like. But it runs more on concept rather than talent; too often it feels self-conscious and low on hooks.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kris Allen
    It’s a seamless continuation of his “Idol” run, full of gentle songs that he only rarely tries to rough up. The flattening of the recording process suits him well.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Seventh Seal
    He still commands the discipline, skills and microphone presence he brought to hip-hop in the 1980s. But if he’s only going to get around to releasing one album per decade, it should be more than a holding action.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Before I Self Destruct
    Taken as a whole this album has a pleasingly morbid tone, in keeping with the best moments from 50 Cent’s first two albums. But context is this album’s undoing.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Circle
    But even while Mr. Bon Jovi is sympathizing with the common man, the scrape in his voice is never wrenching. And while the arrangements are mildly darker than on the group’s previous albums, this group is still drawn magnetically to swelling choruses, its ambition of scale still grander than its ambition of import.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Play On
    No amount of hackneyed songwriting can undermine Ms. Underwood’s voice, which is consistently impressive, capable of pneumatic thrusts. It enlivens plenty of moments here.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Soulbook
    His new versions are respectful and careful, with his voice recorded in close-up. Compared to the originals, they are just about joyless.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Turning the Mind
    The uptempo songs on Turning the Mind suggest disco that’s been hollowed out and confined to a solitary outpost, where Mr. Chapman has only his isolation to sustain him.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Out Of Ashes
    Mr. Bennington strives to sound sympathetic, but after a song or two it’s clear that his only sympathy is for himself; there’s no humility, much less humor or proportion. As real as his prolonged adolescent angst is supposed to be, it quickly curdles into narcissism.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel
    That nuance is mostly gone on Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, Ms. Carey’s 12th studio album, which manages simplicity and clutter all at once.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Man On The Moon: The End Of Day
    Man on the Moon, the debut album from this rapper-singer from Cleveland, is a colossal, and mystifying, missed opportunity, misguided if it is in fact guided at all.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Keep On Loving You
    On Keep On Loving You, her spotty 25th studio album, her voice still has that slightly nasal quality that makes it sound always on the edge of a harangue, even though she rarely bares her fangs anymore.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stupid Love
    This is a scattered, sometimes awkward effort from a singer who has been, until now, tonally consistent and confident.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Guilty Pleasure
    Ms. Tisdale, an average singer, gasps on 'Hot Mess.' "I’m leaving every piece of my conscience behind." But being bad, it turns out, is sort of boring.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rated O
    The cuts are manic psychedelic jams--there’s even a sitar--riding electronic drones and throbbing, insistent riffs. Timbres of instruments are barbed with fuzz tone and static; the voices that infrequently appear might be shouting unintelligibly or nearly buried in the mix.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cradlesong
    Cradlesong, his second persistently polite, numbingly polished solo album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Voltaic [Live]
    So let’s file Voltaic, released by Nonesuch a couple of weeks ago, under the category of Things We Didn’t Think We Needed.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Man's Thoughts
    Ginuwine’s new material uses a more generic palette of sounds from R&B slow jams and gospel. There’s more song to them, more piano-ballad chords and swirling Isley Brothers guitars, and more mediocrity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let The Dominoes Fall
    This album, the band’s seventh, feels familiar in structure, packed with the usual two-minute bursts of aggression. But it’s improbably weighty and ponderous and unusually slow moving for a band that specializes in gnashing.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Further Complications
    His new album, Further Complications--musically more immediate, lyrically more beleaguered--was engineered by Steve Albini, whose aesthetics dictate big drums, big guitars and small vocals. So Mr. Cocker is shouting to be heard, which only improves on his comic persona.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Zee Avi
    Yet while the album includes its share of blandly pleasant songs--the kind that could position Ms. Avi as a less arty Feist--there are also glints of melancholy clarity that promise more.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fantasy Ride
    If she's sweating, though, it's not audible. As per usual Ciara, a singer who prizes rhythm over texture and technical fluency, can't do much to outmaneuver the beats, which are consistently inventive here.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Epiphany
    Epiphany is an unusually labored album, two artists missing each other at the pass.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Summer Of Hate
    If Crocodiles revel in a strain of insolence too familiar to feel transgressive, the band also manages some catchy choruses and efficient low-fi landscapes.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Voice
    In fairness he has mostly dispensed with the shouting and the repetition, vocal styles that helped Mr. Jones embed his signature phrases into the hip-hop consciousness. But his rhymes are still lumpy and dim.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sounds Of The Universe
    Even at its most imaginative, this is seamless Depeche Mode filler, music that could be made by any number of acolytes.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jigsaw
    The album--which, like its predecessor, was produced by Medasyn, another Londoner--merely strikes a few new poses.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unstoppable
    Unfortunately the album is filled with blank and unspecific emotions that without Mr. LeVox’s pyrotechnics, are distractingly dull.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Guilt
    Often Mims refers to how hated he’s become for his success, but truly it’s hard to loathe someone so underwhelming.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    R.O.O.T.S
    Not once does Flo Rida overpower his reference points, making him a rarity: an entertainer wholly without ego, a phantom presence on his own songs.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Elixer
    A palatable but undistinguished batch of slow- to medium-tempo R&B fare.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In A Perfect World...
    Ms. Hilson is clobbered on all sides by ornate production.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Scream
    The new environment rejuvenates Mr. Cornell for good and bad: he sounds shallower than he was before but pithier too.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bare Bones
    It all feels tasteful, companionable and often saggingly dull. Perhaps a steelier singer could use this much gauze; for Ms. Peyroux, it’s Vaseline on the camera lens.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Easy Does It
    That Mr. Owen rarely sounds out of place is a testament to his mutable, honeyed voice, but also to his fundamental blankness, meaning he rises and falls with the mode he chooses to adopt. And when he chooses poorly, it stings.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Common Existence
    Common Existence is the least pungent and immediate Thursday album since its debut. In places it sounds like an experiment, sometimes a successful one.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ryan Leslie
    He shows few idiosyncrasies of his own until the final song, 'Gibberish,' with Auto-Tune effects that render some lyrics unintelligible, as if he thinks they’re irrelevant.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Hate And Then There's You
    The riffs are tight, but not so fresh.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Feel That Fire
    Mr. Bentley still never colors far outside the lines, and his already smooth voice has been polished to a sheen here.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Glasvegas
    Glasvegas is determinedly provincial, insisting there is grandeur in everyday lives. But what sounds rousing in Britain can sound sodden and overwrought to American ears.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Different Me
    Where her voice was once assured and three-dimensional, here, although many of the songs are pleasant, Ms. Cole comes off flat.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Universal Mind Control
    It’s a blatant mismatch, Mr. Williams’s blunt-force id with Common’s casual gravity. The Neptunes, who produce seven of the 10 songs here, treat Common as an obstacle to be worked around, which, in fairness, he is.
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