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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    • 100 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    OK Computer: OKNOTOK 1997-2017
    The remasters find some new glimmers of clarity and sparkle, particularly on guitar sounds, but aren’t startlingly different from past versions. ... After 20 years, it’s clear that “OK Computer” was the album on which Radiohead most strongly embraced and, simultaneously, confronted the legacy of the Beatles.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Revolver Special Edition (Super Deluxe) [Box Set]
    With a few takes of each song, the session tracks hint at how intuitively the Beatles worked. ... The new mixes on the expanded “Revolver,” made with current technology and 21st-century ears, are a pleasure; they have more transparency and a more three-dimensional sense of space than the 1966 mixes. ... The new set insists that the clearer it’s heard, the odder it is. “Revolver” still holds surprises.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    1999 [Super Deluxe Edition]
    The music still sounds contemporary and alive. ... Every song exults in the architectural savvy of a musician who, from the drumbeat up, seemed to know exactly how he’d be jamming with himself as he built the song. ... A handful [of the previously unreleased material] — including the absolute standout, “Purple Music” — are gems; none is a dud.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sign O' the Times [Deluxe Edition]
    Some of the Vault tracks are early or alternate versions of familiar songs, but dozens are newly revealed. Prince’s original choices for the album hold up. But it’s a delight to hear so much more.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1
    It captures Davis's finest working band at its apogee, straining at the limits of post-bop refinement.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fetch the Bolt Cutters
    “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is daring in a new way, scrambling and shattering the pop-song structures that once grounded her. ... I am floored by this record. I hear freedom, too. These songs make some breathtaking hairpin turns. ... It’s not just the wild craftsmanship of each song. It’s also that she’s fearless about what she’s doing: with sounds, with structures, with people’s expectations.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Pimp A Butterfly
    At its best, it’s a howling work of black protest art on par with Amiri Baraka’s incendiary play “Dutchman,” or David Hammons’s moving decapitated hoodie “In the Hood”.... He hasn’t outrun his tendency toward clutter. He is a dense rapper, and even though he’s more at ease with the music now, he still runs the risk of suffocation.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghosteen
    “Ghosteen” is an eerie, somber monolith, a set of 11 songs that stretches over an hour and is grouped on two CDs.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Match Girl Passion
    Listeners familiar with Mr. Lang’s more obstreperous instrumental works may not recognize his style here (though a few more meditative ensemble pieces hint at it). But these choral settings, composed from 2001 to 2007, show that he has idiosyncratic but effective ideas about how to use voices.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    Tart and punchy.... Sometimes boisterous, sometimes swampy, rarely fanciful album--it’s Mr. Lamar’s version of the creeping paranoia that has become de rigueur for midcareer Drake. And yet this is likely Mr. Lamar’s most jubilant album, the one in which his rhymes are the least tangled.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rough and Rowdy Ways
    Latter-day Bob Dylan is for die-hards. ... His music is adamantly old-fashioned, and he’s not aiming to ingratiate himself with anyone. But for those who have stuck with him this far, his new album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” is at once a summing-up and a taunt, equal parts death-haunted and cantankerous.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Messiah
    It doesn’t leap out of speakers; it oozes and bubbles, waiting for a listener to be drawn in. As it does, the pleasures and rewards keep growing.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die (world war)
    It is just as electrifying as the group’s first two LPs, but with a wider sonic horizon and more parts in motion. And there’s a triumphant streak running through it that only heightens the pain of Branch’s demise.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Wildflowers & All The Rest
    One of the geeky joys of “Wildflowers and All the Rest” is observing Petty at the absolute peak of his songwriting powers, making small, intelligent tweaks to these songs in progress. Sometimes it’s a single world, a few letters. ... The deep despair is there, too, in the rich soil of these songs. But what makes it bearable, and makes the record so timelessly listenable, is everything else that’s mixed in: humor, wisdom, a little randiness and a palpable sense of hope.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Crow Looked at Me
    There is sad music, which is to say music that deploys lyrical or musical motifs meant to connote misery. And then there is this album, which mostly exists in a space beyond those concerns. It is an album because a musician made it and it is broken up into songs, but it is also a diary, a balled-up tissue, found art.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Room 25
    What she wants to say on Room 25 is complex: thoughts on community, sensuality, mortality and self-determination. ... Noname is a full-fledged maverick, but not an abrasive one. Phoelix’s production situates her in leisurely, atmospheric R&B, and there’s almost always the hint of a smile in her voice. But no one should mistake her soft, playful tone for submissiveness.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The 1966 Live Recordings [Box Set]
    Dylan going electric now seems quaint, these concerts are a big part of the reason: He proved he was right.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Biokinetics [Reissue]
    Nearly every sound in these tracks has amorphous parameters: an indeterminate pitch, a gradual attack and decay, the sensation of being heard from a distance, or perhaps underwater.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    ["Sorry,"] is a combative, unglossy track on an album full of them. ... As she did with her 2013 album, “Beyoncé,” she has also paired the music with full-length video that expands and deepens its impact.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ants From Up There
    Throughout “Ants From Up Here,” and through the course of every song, Black Country, New Road tests and reinvents itself, creating music that sounds both intricately plotted and precarious.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At Carnegie Hall [Live]
    There’s still something to be gleaned here, perhaps especially from the frisky pianist Ruben González and the debonair vocalists Compay Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer, all of whom are now gone, having enjoyed twilight acclaim.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Melodrama
    Writing about parties and untrue love, Lorde risks joining the pop pack instead of upending it the way she did with “Pure Heroine.” But she still has the immediacy of her voice, with its smokiness, melancholy and barely suppressed rage, and she refuses to let her lyrics resolve into standard pop postures.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    COWBOY CARTER
    It’s the odder, genre-fluid songs that give the album its depth. .... Beyoncé has been a stalwart of the full-length album, sequencing and juxtaposing songs in synergistic ways. But “Cowboy Carter” is a bumpier ride than “Renaissance,” “Lemonade” or “Beyoncé.” It suggests that Beyoncé wanted to pack all she could into one side trip before moving on elsewhere.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
    The sturdy structures of pop only go so far in Perfume Genius songs. They provide reassurance that others have found ways to capture similar feelings. But they can’t hold back the immediacy of longing, the all-consuming physical need. That’s captured in a pair of songs near the end of the album.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Grand Don't Come For Free
    The problem with "A Grand Don't Come for Free" is that the pieces often work better as stories than as songs.... But it is still a thrill to hear Mr. Skinner toy with the form that he invented.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Renaissance
    Beyoncé’s singing here transcends any price tag. The range of her voice nears the galactic; the imagination powering it qualifies as cinema. ... Its sense of adventure is off the genre’s map, yet very much aware of every coordinate. It’s an achievement of synthesis that never sounds slavish or synthetic. These songs are testing this music, celebrating how capacious it is, how pliable.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Black Rainbows
    “Black Rainbows” is one songwriter’s leap into artistic freedom, unconcerned with genre expectations or radio formats. It’s also one more sign that songwriters are strongest when they heed instincts rather than expectations.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The ArchAndroid
    The 70-minute album sags by the end, and every listener will probably find one must-skip song. But Ms. Monae gets away with most of her metamorphoses, and the sheer ambition is exhilarating even when she stretches too far.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Guts
    Poignantly fraught, spiritually and sonically agitated. .... Her self-doubt is a powerful animating force. Throughout this album, she kiln-fires her anxieties into lyrics that cut deep. .... Here [on "Teenage Dream"], and in the most potent moments on “Guts,” Rodrigo’s music pulses with the verve of someone who’s been buttoned tight beginning to come loose. Unraveling is messy business, but it is also freedom.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    S.O.S.
    With 23 songs, “SOS” arrives as a long, nuanced argument SZA is having with her companions and with herself. ... The songs leap from personal beefs to universal quandaries, while SZA challenges herself as both musician and persona.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Illinois
    Even the most elaborate constructions come across as homemade, touched with an optimism that is by no means naïve. [10 Jul 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carrie & Lowell
    A hushed, intent Sufjan Stevens contemplates death, grief, family and memory on his quietly moving new album.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Punisher
    Strange and exquisitely moving. ... Bridgers’s lyrical talent was evident on her 2017 debut, “Stranger in the Alps,” which had a few perfect songs but as a whole sometimes felt muted, languid and downcast. “Punisher,” though, moves along fluidly with its eyes to the vast sky. Bridgers’s arpeggiated guitar work remains quietly deft.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Socks
    JD McPherson is a vivid reinterpreter of the strutting rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s. His holiday album, Socks, is a collection of original songs with startlingly original conceits.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings [Box Set]
    Both the boxed set and the film sprawl proudly and unpredictably, just as the Revue itself did. And both projects traffic in revelation and put-on, sometimes simultaneously. ... Dylan completists will likely cherish newly unveiled rehearsal tapes . ... For those willing to dig in, the new box also makes clear how consistently impassioned Dylan’s Rolling Thunder performances were.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What Were You Hoping For?
    This is a messy album, sometimes thrillingly so, a mélange of psychedelic rock, punk energy and R&B desperation.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Funeral
    One of the year's best indie-rock albums. [3 Oct 2004]
    • The New York Times
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jama Ko
    Ngoni Ba was already remarkable for its plucked, pointillist modal grooves, and on Jama Ko, its passionate defense of Malian culture makes the music even sharper.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    the record
    The years between boygenius recordings have made all three songwriters more confident and more levelheaded.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    græ
    It’s hard to imagine many of its songs being performed onstage, even before the pandemic — even as it encompasses more sonic possibilities, from the orchestral to the surreal. ... Sumney doesn’t have to explain himself in prose. His songs do it even better.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    St. Vincent
    With the producer John Congleton, Ms. Clark creates an unpretty backdrop for some of her most alluring melodies.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like a Rose
    There’s not likely to be a more earthy feeling and backward-sounding country album released on a major label this year.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    RTJ2
    These are pummeling cyber-howls, these songs.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LEGACY! LEGACY!
    Legacy! Legacy! is a fully realized follow-up, sure-footed in its blend of what was, what is and what might be.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Coloring Book [Mixtape]
    On the jubilant, nourishing Coloring Book, his third solo release, has blossomed into a crusader and a pop savant, coming as close as anyone has to eradicating the walls between the sacred and the secular.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    When I Get Home
    Although the album is punctuated by spoken-word interludes--bits of poetry, self-help, comedy and tribute--it is designed to flow as a whole, gradually infusing a room like incense or the smells of home cooking. ... And Solange’s voice is sure-footed and playful, confident that the music will follow her every whim. ... Outside a few prominent guest raps, Solange and her musicians slip the collaborators into the background. This is her space, her sanctuary.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wearemonster
    Gorgeous... One of the year's best electronic albums. [29 May 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hell Hath No Fury
    These clattering and clear-eyed tracks add up to something singular. [27 Nov 2006]
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Women in Music, Pt. III
    This newfound looseness and fluidity suits them. Best believe that Haim still has chops and a bar band’s encyclopedic knowledge of rock riffs, but on its third album it’s finally learned how to carry those things lightly enough to move with its own particular stride.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Same Trailer Different Park
    Ms. Musgraves has a sweet character to her sound, which allows her to deliver a cynic’s wisdom in the voice of an inquisitive child.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    folklore
    “Folklore” songs fall into roughly two camps — excellent Swift-penned songs that are sturdy enough to bear the production, and others that end up obscured by murk.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Be Kind
    To Be Kind continues a run of evermore committed, detailed and powerful work since the band formed again with a new lineup four years ago.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Valentine
    “Valentine,” her remarkable second album as Snail Mail, is alive with such crackling and revelatory emotion.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II
    It doesn’t reflect a lack of evolution, or even a regression, but rather the completion of a circle--and probably a landing pad, even as the world continues to whiz by.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964
    There are minor variations, like key changes and picking patterns, but nothing as radical as the ways he would transform the songs in later years.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Divers
    [A] rather brilliant record.... You almost want to hold the whole thing still, flatten it out and study it.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    30
    Even as she sings about desperation and uncertainty, on “30” Adele’s voice is more supple and purposeful than ever, articulating every consonant and constantly ornamenting her melodies without distracting from them. Details are fastidious.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Moon Shaped Pool
    Grim tidings arrive amid gorgeous backdrops ... The results often hark back to the late 1960s; in a way, "A Moon Shaped Pool" is Radiohead’s psych-folk album.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Masseduction
    Masseduction stays poised between passion and artifice, trusting listeners to decrypt its paradoxes.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Saint Cloud
    Confident and accomplished fifth album.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
    Every so often, this imperative to speak big-tent truths can become strained and make her lyrics frustratingly vague, as on “Children of the Empire” (“we tend to live long, that’s why so many things go wrong”), but that song’s gorgeous vocal melody and Mering’s impassioned performance lift it beyond its limitations.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 1: The Early Years 1963-1967 [Box Set]
    A thorough but imposing six hours of material, this collection is less about any specific unearthed gem than the larger transformation it charts.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vulnicura
    Even amid the most abstruse music, these songs have an emotional immediacy. The physicality of Björk’s voice and the strings are even more striking against the impersonal electronic sounds, all the better to reveal the interior landscape of heartbreak and healing--not a simple story, and all the better for it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    CTRL
    She fully commands the foreground of her songs. Her voice is upfront, recorded to sound natural and unaffected, with all its grain and conversational quirks.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Love You, Honeybear
    This warped, lovely album suggests that a true longtime partnership isn’t two people who love each other even for their flaws, but of two people accepting decay--their own and each other’s--and choosing to ride it out nonetheless.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Be the Cowboy
    Mitski’s songs about love are a tangle of mixed messages in precise, idiosyncratic packages. ... On this album, even more than she has before, Mitski makes the music her partner.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    xx
    In fairness to the XX, that song was one of Aaliyah's most languorous, its eroticism delivered in small, subtle kicks, but that does little to soften the airlessness of the XX's version. And it's that same fundamental reluctance to engage that suffocates this group's self-titled debut album, which has become a favorite of bloggers and the British.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Neon Bible
    Arcade Fire mines classic U2 and Bruce Springsteen far better than the Killers recently did. And Arcade Fire didn’t lose its own voice in an attempt to sound bigger and grander. [5 Mar 2007]
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs By Karen Dalton
    Working separately, the songwriters converged in lonely reflection; the album adds up to a composite portrait of a ghost.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beautiful Africa
    The Malian singer Rokia Traoré has a gentle voice with a steely core, one that’s revealed more clearly than ever on Beautiful Africa.
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