The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,074 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: 1,596 out of 2074
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2074
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2074
2074 music reviews
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    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Now and Then [Single]
    The finished track simplifies Lennon’s emotional give-and-take; it edits out his misgivings about himself. .... As in many Beatles songs, “Now and Then” has an unexpected closing flourish: a decisive, syncopated string phrase. And low in the mix, after a final shake of a tambourine, a voice says, “Good one!” Like the other posthumous Beatles tracks, “Now and Then” leans into nostalgia. Its existence matters more than its quality.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Spirit Moves
    The five-piece ensemble handles each tune with soulful aplomb.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    22, A Million
    The results are, in many places, as ethereally and lustrously beautiful as the best Bon Iver material but more removed. ... Because this album travels in so many directions, there are places where Mr. Vernon sounds unanchored, and where his reluctance gives way to lack of commitment. His naïveté has always been carefully studied, but sometimes here, especially in the middle of the album, it feels just vague.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Let England Shake
    Ms. Harvey's vocals rise out of a kind of bleary skiffle, with the strumming of Autoharp or distorted electric guitar above rudimentary drumbeats.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sound Of Silver
    The strongest stuff of Mr. Murphy’s career.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Who Kill
    For all the ups and downs of the lyrics, the music has no doubt that manic creativity and craftsmanship, along with rhythm and noise, are a survival kit.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Comicopera
    Comicopera, his 12th solo record since 1970, has indulgences and longueurs, as all his records do. But it also has some burstingly beautiful songwriting.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    thank u, next
    Thank U, Next has some hiccups but is still her most musically flexible and au courant release to date. ... The [Max] Martin songs are crisp, as always ... [But] It’s in the other songs [not produced by Martin], however, that Grande takes her most intriguing leaps, largely because of the new fluidity she brings to her singing.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Are We There
    For a wallow in obsessive love, it’s hard to top “Your Love Is Killing Me” on Sharon Van Etten’s fourth album, Are We There.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    How I Got Over
    Even in its boasts, How I Got Over is selfless: an album of doubts, parables and pep talks.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love & Hate
    The music makes space for him to ache.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    RoundAgain
    If “RoundAgain” has anything notably in common with “MoodSwing,” it is the feeling of musicians with a scary level of talent playing into the moment, with full faith that they belong within a lineage.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Estudando o Pagode
    He's both analytical, distilling songs down to essential parts, and whimsical in his fondness for funny noises. [10 Apr 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Separation Sunday
    These are songs full of offhand aphorisms, and they can grab you from the first line. [23 May 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    But Here We Are
    “But Here We Are” has a back-to-basics immediacy and intensity that was missing from the last few Foo Fighters albums.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Promises
    Not until the latter half of the album does the orchestra fully come alive, with a rich and immersive passage on Track 6 — sometimes regal, sometimes bluesy — that almost eclipses the motif, but not quite. And then there is Sanders’s tenor saxophone, a glistening and peaceful sound, deployed mindfully throughout the album. He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heaven & Earth
    On Heaven and Earth there’s a balance between big-stroke conceptualism--the first CD, “Earth,” is meant to represent worldly preoccupations; the second, “Heaven,” explores utopian thought--and the workmanlike reality of collaboration. The two collections don’t vary significantly in terms of sound; instead, they’re a testament to the sturdy rapport of Mr. Washington’s ensemble.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    to hell with it [Mixtape]
    This layered approach makes PinkPantheress’s debut album, the warmly ecstatic and cheekily gloomy “To Hell With It,” so striking. It’s short, controlled and lived-in. ... On some new songs, though, like “Reason” and “All My Friends Know,” the balance is slightly off: She sounds more firmly embedded in the music, not quite riding atop it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Luxury Problems
    You need several listens to get your head around it, to recognize the landmarks and figure out the proper speed of anticipation and delivery.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Platinum
    Her characters in these songs--which feature some of the most incisive songwriting in any genre--are complex, self-confident and self-lacerating all at once, and most crucially, completely knowing and in on the joke.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Blade
    In 2013, she released the elegantly scarred “Like a Rose,” a striking album that showed her to be a sly, progressive songwriter and a nimble, tradition-minded singer. At its best, The Blade, her follow-up, continues that arc.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    3 Pears
    The record draws closer to where he started: this music is entirely referential, but doesn't want to be contained. It's got some freelance cool, some autonomous energy.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Black Sheep Boy
    What's most exciting about ''Black Sheep Boy'' is that Okkervil River sounds more than ever like a band. [9 Apr 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective
    A reasonable first impulse is to try to identify all the sound sources; the inevitable second impulse is to marvel at how well he has chopped up and rearranged them into units of rhythm.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stone Rollin'
    Stone Rollin' is a better, more lively album than the last one Mr. Saadiq made in this vein, "The Way I See It," from 2008.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Soul of a Woman
    Soul of a Woman is a final set of genre-perfect old-school soul: brisk rumba-soul in “Sail On,” hand-clapping neo-Motown in “Rumors,” a girl-group slow dance topped with hovering strings in “When I Saw Your Face.” The band sounds as if it’s playing live in the studio.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chavez Ravine
    Its seriousness never makes it earthbound. Mr. Cooder brings to it all he has learned from a career delving into odd corners of American and world music. [13 Jun 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Harps And Angels
    Intermittently brilliant, occasionally belligerent, it presents a vision of American identity as sprawling and ultimately as confused as the country itself.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I See The Sign
    I See the Sign is a seriously intelligent record, but never cute or overbearing; its Icelandic producer, Valgeir Sigurdsson, has left it dry and full of space, so that you hear the seams.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint
    Mr. Akinmusire has a strong aesthetic compass, and as a bandleader, he keeps a steady hand on the wheel; he’s not just stumbling into the album’s shadowy and unsettled mood.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller
    His performance is a respectful but contemporary nod.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    DAYTONA
    Daytona may stand alone in this moment--particularly in contrast to the woozy, blown-out rap albums dominating the charts because of the primacy of streaming--but it isn’t as effective as “My Name Is My Name,” Pusha-T’s 2013 full-length solo debut album. Daytona is terser, leaving only nits to pick; say, that the second and third verses of “Come Back Baby” lack the fire and wit of the rest of the album.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Boxer
    There are verbal nuggets throughout the album... but it’s not the antihero sentiments that make the songs memorable; it’s the methodical yet obsessive patterns that frame them.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Simple Songs
    It sounds fantastic as a study in symphonic-rock ambition and studio mixing techniques.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Popular Problems
    There’s no lesson, no punch line, just the unflinching gaze of someone who’s already seen too much.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
    For the familiar songs the original album choices were usually better, with tauter lyrics and arrangements pushing away from the generic. Still, with a songwriter like Mr. Dylan the rough drafts, alternate lyrics and multiple versions of “Dignity” and “Mississippi” are fascinating glimpses of how restlessly he tinkers with mood and meaning.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happier than Ever
    During its slower stretches, “Happier Than Ever” languishes. ... The risks start to pay off, though, on the album’s strong closing stretch, beginning as the warping “NDA” segues into the brash posturing of “Therefore I Am,” one of several lukewarm singles that benefits from the surrounding context of the album. ... Eilish remains an inveterate rebel. “Happier Than Ever,” though, exposes both the strengths and the limitations of her preferred mode of subversion.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Haw
    The songs ponder mortality and devotion, love and family, searching for peace of mind and finding it, no doubt temporarily, in the folky benediction of “What Shall Be (Shall Be Enough).”
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shaking the Habitual
    This music has deep weirdness but incredible will and charisma.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Agent Intellect
    Protomartyr is from Detroit, and there’s a dour, industrial affect to this record-- the band’s best, though like the others it can sometimes feel like one long song--which seems to confirm everything you think you know about that city.... But Mr. Casey’s excellent lyrics go bigger and more abstract.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers
    It is an album that aims to repel, or if not quite that, then at least is at peace with alienating some of its audience. ... [The album] often feels insular, lyrically and musically. “Mr. Morale” is probably Lamar’s least tonally consistent work. ... Rangy and structurally erratic, full of mid-song beat switches, sorrowful piano and a few moments of dead air.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
    At first, the songs can seem remote and arty, but gradually they start to add up; they're filled with a sense of loss and a hope for transformation. [6 Mar 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Malibu
    Malibu--his second album under this moniker, following a stretch under the name Breezy Lovejoy--is multilayered. It’s also incisive, languorous and deeply felt, a warm bath of studiously relaxed hip-hop and soul.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So Beautiful or So What
    He's not preaching on this album. He's finding solace, fleeting and fragmentary, and every springy guitar lick is its own benediction.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Daddy's Home
    Clark and her co-producer, Jack Antonoff, have clearly had fun with the creation of this finely tuned alternate universe, but at a point, its many detailed references start to feel like clutter, preventing the songs from moving too freely in their own ways.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Late Registration
    For much of "Late Registration," the striver has turned into a hip-hop V.I.P., and a cool arrogance has crept into the songs. [29 Aug 2005]
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Relatives in Descent
    Now, on its fourth album, the band is moving toward an idiom that’s more flexible and contrasty yet just as gripping: Protomartyr’s own post-post-punk.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stay Positive
    Despite some subtle new touches --a harpsichord, a banjo, light strings--the sound proposes constancy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reality Show
    Playing a woman too often scorned, she comes out victoriously soulful.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sleep Well Beast
    The National’s 2013 album, “Trouble Will Find Me,” was a culmination of sorts: accomplished, polished, measured, mature. Sleep Well Beast is just as polished and even more intricate. But it also shakes things up.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lookaftering
    Pastoral doesn't quite describe it; this seems to come from some place more eco-protected than any in existence. [24 Oct 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Before Today
    There are still the bursts of ’60s and ’80s melodies, astral synths and slashing guitars, but this record, crisp and unhesitant, leaps beyond his previous inconsistency and preciousness.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Made Possible
    The band is tinkering here, and it says something that the album still feels traceable to no other source.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams
    It’s a more countrified album, with the two singers, partners by marriage, often harmonizing in a rough blend. Things work best when Ms. Williams takes the lead.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wind's Poem
    Mount Eerie’s third album, is deeply homemade and crazily dynamic, running from quiet harmonium-and-voice drones to black-metal cataclysm.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kaputt
    The record as a whole can seem to disappear or evaporate almost as you're listening to it. But that's its charm; that's why you might want to hear it again.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yonder Is The Clock
    On Yonder Is the Clock, the Felice Brothers loosen up, making room for absurdity as well as the travails they sing about.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mental Illness
    Mental Illness wallows in its troubles, and it’s an exquisite wallow.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    X 100PRE
    The music is rich with low end, serving as ballast for ethereal, sometimes claustrophobic synths. There’s little breathing room on these songs--both Bad Bunny and his music seep into all the available space.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Little Oblivions
    Magnificent. ... Although she played all the instruments on “Little Oblivions” herself, she built out most of its arrangements so they could be performed with a full band onstage. This choice brings a new, sweeping dynamism to Baker’s music, and keeps “Little Oblivions” from feeling sonically repetitive.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Light Up Gold
    The singing and songwriting mostly split between Austin Brown and Mr. Savage, who are astute enough to write taut, smart lyrics, and self-aware enough to arch an eyebrow while maintaining the pose.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Medulla
    While the album might seem to be a conceptual stunt, it finds gorgeous and startling new ways to extend Bjork's longtime mission: merging the earthy and the ethereal. [29 Aug 2004]
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Emily's D+Evolution
    She still favors too many Wayne Shorterish chord progressions to truly suit the easily impressed. It’s precisely when she stretches--as on “Rest in Pleasure,” which has a melody you wouldn’t wish on a less acrobatic singer--that Ms. Spalding seems most ingenuous and unbound.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Treats
    Even after wide Internet exposure of their demos, and brief yet clamorous live sets, the album versions of the songs maintain or increase the impact. The tracks don't just rock--they detonate.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trouble Will Find Me
    This time, the National utterly refuses to buttonhole listeners; the music calmly awaits attention, but amply repays it.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. Misunderstood
    The album, a love letter to his influences, is the gentlest of Mr. Church’s releases, the one that least wears his rowdy tendencies on its sleeve.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hell On Heels
    The songs have the feeling of rejuvenative writing, small experiments in genre and style for artists versed in country's classic modes but who rarely get to fiddle around with them.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Shape
    With Mr. Hadreas’s aching, androgynous voice at their center, the songs deploy cinematic orchestral arrangements, spooky electronics and instruments that can sound vividly natural or treated and surreal.
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