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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ONoffON
    Tense, febrile and messy, but tuneful and cohesive at the same time. [2 May 2004]
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Feels
    If it isn't as formally shocking as "Sung Tongs," it's still a strong record. [17 Oct 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blue World
    There’s something alluring about this odd little gift of a session, which for Coltrane must have landed somewhere between “just a gig” and “just a favor.”
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Western Stars
    On Western Stars, a few songs — “Tucson Train,” “Sundown,” “Stones” — sound like the E Street Band could be swapped in for the orchestra. But Springsteen strives to meet his chosen idiom more than halfway. He wrote songs that thrive on the swells and undulations of orchestral drama, and he sings with long-breathed phrases that aren’t exactly crooning — he’s not built for that — but that set out to sustain more than they exhort.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bird Songs
    The elastic interplay of Us Five is in fact the main point of Bird Songs, which approaches its Parker-centric repertory as a springboard rather than an altar.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yeezus
    No one is expecting Mr. West to turn into a latter-day Public Enemy, making political statements as a full-time mission. He, and we, are rightly fascinated by the limelight, by the culture of consumption and by Mr. West’s endlessly contradictory reactions to all that attention. But now that he’s transfigured his music, his words await an upgrade to match.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wildheart
    He doesn’t always try to play the good guy or the heartthrob, either. The music, meanwhile, places sinuous tunes, pushy guitars and lush vocals against uneasy backdrops--seductive, but never without second thoughts.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
    The result is an indie-rock album that sounds mysterious without being diffident or difficult, without piling on the noise or retreating into whimsy.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In My Mind
    The best parts of In My Mind, BJ’s strong major-label debut album, come when this young singer tasks himself with ethical responsibility.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Takk...
    On past albums, Sigur Ros has forged songs into hermetic sanctuaries, but on "Takk..." it expands its music toward both the abstract and the corporeal. [13 Sep 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nomad
    [Dan Auerbach] helped Bombino make a spacious, centered record, one that stretches to appeal to Western listeners--like the nomads, known for their circular dancing, who temporarily inhabit the fields of Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tenn., every June--without strain or clutter or hipness overload.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
    The melodies are forthright, the arrangements are hand played, and Ms. Case’s voice is open and robust, with the richness of prime Linda Ronstadt and Patsy Cline.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Burn Your Fire for No Witness
    Her band’s arrangements are deliberately scrappy, but keyboards or guitars surge in whenever she needs them.... She has stripped away both sweetness and protection so that her songs grow even spookier.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Invasion of Privacy
    What’s most promising about the exuberant and impressive Invasion of Privacy--an album full of thoughtful gestures, few of them wasteful--is that it’s a catalog of directions Cardi, 25, might go in, slots she might fill, or even invent. ... A hip-hop album that doesn’t sound like any of its temporal peers.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran
    With this album Mr. Johnson proves not only that he plays well with others (especially Ray Price, Lee Ann Womack, Willie Nelson and George Strait) but also that his cantankerous charm flows out of a sentimental continuum.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ANIMA
    The songs teeter on a psychological divide between intellectually informed glumness and the physical pleasures of rhythm.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Crane Wife
    As a sustained effort, it represents the band’s sharpest and most satisfying work, and one of the most accomplished albums of its kind this year.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Extraordinary Machine
    There's a new layer of perspective on her magnificent third album. [3 Oct 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sometimes, Forever
    Throughout the album, Soccer Mommy staves off despair with musical craftsmanship.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rips
    Rips is a feel-good gut-punch of a debut album, working a sound that dates back to the Runaways, but also can hold its own right up against current practitioners like Dum Dum Girls.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Seven Psalms
    “Seven Psalms” stays true to Simon’s own instincts: observant, elliptical, perpetually questioning and quietly encompassing. ... It has places of lingering contemplation and it has sudden, startling changes; its informality is exactingly planned.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Pretty Toney Album
    "Pretty Toney" doesn't match the high standard of Ghostface's first two, "Ironman" and "Supreme Clientele," but it's a strong album nonetheless, packed with dense narratives and weird conceits.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sweet Warrior
    Even when Mr. Thompson uses his caustic wit for laughs, the songs on “Sweet Warrior” hold a tension and vehemence that make their bitterness linger.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Currents
    Currents is a tour de force for the songwriter and his gizmos. But it’s also decidedly hermetic, nearly airless.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get Off On The Pain
    Get Off on the Pain is the year’s best country album so far, almost as brilliantly anguished as Mr. Allan’s 2003 masterpiece, “See if I Care.”
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sling
    At times, “Sling” sounds like Steely Dan’s “Pretzel Logic” had it been released on the D.I.Y. label K Records. ... “Sling” makes the case that her most direct vocal precursor is either Elliott Smith or Phil Elverum. ... There was always more depth to Clairo’s sadness and songcraft than could be conveyed by the three-minute synth-pop ditty that made her famous. It also demonstrates that her music is at its most lucid and effective when an extended hand — or paw — is drawing her back up to the surface.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Shepherd's Dog
    The Shepherd’s Dog is the brilliant culmination of his experiments.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take Me Apart
    The songs are intricately plotted to give the illusion of being impulsive and obsessive, buffeted by shifting emotions: by turns sensual and wary, vulnerable and guarded, leisurely and urgent.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eternal Atake
    It is part old-fashioned bluster, part flamboyant style exercise, all rowdy thrill.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Second Hand Heart
    The album is a reckoning with grown-up love, a battle against disillusionment and a big brash stomp..... He’s still pushing, still sure of what makes a song alive and durable.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eternal Sunshine
    Unsurprisingly, this is one of Grande’s most meticulously crafted and texturally consistent releases — it sounds as expensive as the gleaming treasures she sang about on “7 Rings” — though it lacks the whispered asides, rough edges and irreverent humor that made those last two albums so fun. Still, “Eternal Sunshine” is awash in lavish atmosphere, adventurous melodies and an emotional weight that brings a new sophistication to Grande’s songcraft.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beauty & Crime
    Thanks to a keen sense of proportion and concision--and the unmannered integrity of Ms. Vega’s singing style--the album isn’t ponderous.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dream River
    You sense that he’s walked past those doors, revising his ideas, waiting, looking for something. He’s found it. Listen through his astonishing new album, Dream River, and you will hear, lined up neatly, his trademarks.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hold the Girl
    “Hold the Girl” continues to mine deep material — “Imagining” addresses a mental health crisis; the opener, “Minor Feelings,” takes its title from a Cathy Park Hong essay collection — but the protruding eccentricities that once made Sawayama’s music so distinct often sound sanded down. ... There is, however, a bold and satisfyingly angry stretch across the middle of the album with some of its strongest material.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything's Fine
    This is an album that takes familiar hip-hop starting points and denatures them, resulting in a compelling collage that feels structurally untethered to hip-hop then or now. The results alternate between tragic and comic, but the ambition is steadily high throughout.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mar Dulce
    Bajofondo brings in guest vocalists as wild cards: singers including Nelly Furtado, Elvis Costello, the Argentine rockers Gustavo Cerati and Juan Subirá, the Mexican rocker Julieta Venegas and the octogenarian Uruguayan tango singer Lágrima Ríos, in her last recording, as well as rapping by Mala Rodriguez (from Spain) and Santullo (from Uruguay). They tip the balance toward imperfect, immediate humanity, and their drama rubs off on the instrumentals too.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Folk Art
    It’s a bit out of focus, perhaps intentionally. Made with his new band, Us Five, it’s sketchy, groovy and a little burdensome.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wondervisions
    Delicate Steve flaunts every loose end, every unfinished seam. It might be testing to find the threshold of musical coherence; it might just be having a well-plotted lark. But if Delicate Steve's music were any more polished, it wouldn't be half as intriguing or anywhere near as much fun.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Mosaic Project
    The caliber of these artists speaks for itself; there's no sense of compromise here, or of an agenda limiting the options. And Ms. Carrington, who produced the album, brings accessibility and continuity to the listening experience.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She
    The songs ponder affection and honesty, desire and independence, rightly confident that their modesty makes them all the more approachable.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Middle Class
    American Middle Class, her debut album, comes fully formed, clear about its purpose.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Break Stuff
    The band’s refractive language makes sense of whatever material it plays. You don’t hear the record and seize on its sense of rupture or argument. Instead, it sounds whole.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bad Plus Joshua Redman
    As a chemistry experiment, the album is a knockout.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    10 Years Solo Live [Box Set]
    We’re off and away by then, following a mind awhirl in creative reverie. Mr. Mehldau--tracing connections, making digressions, but never quite forsaking the original framework--sounds both grounded and almost boundless.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tropix
    [A] stylistically varied, intricately detailed, slyly coherent fourth album.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kin Sonic
    For all the seriousness of the songs, Jupiter & Okwess make sure to keep the party going.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Petals for Armor
    Many of these songs sparkle with insight and the daring of a shape-shifting vocalist, but a handful assume too readily that maturity and seriousness are only achieved through dour restraint. Still, as she and her band proved on Paramore’s excellent 2017 record “After Laughter,” Williams was already a pro at packing complex emotions and perceptive wisdom into bright, technicolor pop-rock songs.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh
    It’s filled with spacey, leisurely songs about desire, longing, betrayal and letting go. The album plays as one long tease on the way to its last song: the 10-minute, three-part “Out My Mind, Just in Time,” which is even more protracted.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One Kind Favor
    The ache, the anger, the elegance and the edge of Mr. King’s blues are undiminished and authentic.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nostalgia, Ultra.
    Given how slick and intuitive this album is--full of astral soul that owes debts to Terence Trent D'Arby, Pharrell Williams, even Drake--it's more likely that someone will lose his job than that Frank Ocean will lose his record deal over this kerfuffle.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Live at the Cellar Door
    Live at the Cellar Door--the latest rough diamond from his archives is from a booking in Washington, and it has the coiled tension of its time.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clark
    It’s an album that plays as an album, not a D.J. set.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cruel Country
    On “Cruel Country” Wilco offers no grand lesson or master plan, only observations, feelings and enigmas. Many of the album’s best moments are wordless ones.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bright Mississippi
    It’s a producer’s record. And it works, possibly because Mr. Toussaint is no pushover.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harry's House
    “Harry’s House” is a light, fun, summery pop record, but there is a gaping void as its center; by its end, the listener is inclined to feel more intimately acquainted with the objects of his affections than the internal world of the titular character himself.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Food & Liquor
    There are few weak tracks on this beautifully quiet album, but there is no truly irresistible beat either. [18 Sep 2006]
    • The New York Times
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Real Animal
    The particulars of Mr. Escovedo’s autobiography on this album — his wanderings to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin--may not matter much to those not already following his music. But the songs also tell a larger story: of reckless youth and unrepentant maturity, of time’s ravages and insights.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Old
    With all these styles packed in tight, Old ends up being a maybe-inadvertent career retrospective for Mr. Brown, echoing his speedy and jagged evolution over the past few years.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Hate Music
    They’re love songs about persistence, and that’s embedded in the sound of the record; you don’t need a lyric sheet to hear it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Game Theory
    Black Thought... sounds more focused than he did on the Roots’ last album, “The Tipping Point,” and more engaged than on the one before it, “Phrenology.” But because he’s not the kind of rapper to modulate his emotional pitch, his intensity can level off into monotony.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Faith in Strangers
    On his new record, Faith in Strangers, the details are different but the achievement is similar.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tempest
    He sings forcefully, in a raspy, phlegmy bark that's not exactly melodic and by no means welcoming. Battered and unforgiving, he's still Bob Dylan, answerable to no one but himself.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Piano & A Microphone 1983
    While the session is informal--he sniffles now and then, and at times something rattles in the piano--the performance is not sloppy for a moment. The one-take, real-time vocals are exquisite. .. He shifts musical styles and vocal personae at whim--melancholy, playful, devout, flirtatious--yet it’s all Prince. ... It’s a glimpse of a notoriously private artist doing his mysterious work.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blunderbuss
    Few songs on "Blunderbuss" truly knock the wind out of you, as the White Stripes could - even with riffs that were fragmentary, simple or borrowed. This is a songwriter's record, and a kind of orchestrator's record; there's also a new overall vehemence in the lyrics, hammering on dishonesty, jealousy, immorality.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love
    It’s an album of connoisseurship, revealing the inspired details tucked into so many Beatles songs.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Until the Quiet Comes
    The album's aesthetic is elastic and permeable, and yet strong enough to hold its shape.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amygdala
    [A] sleek and immersive new album.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pain Killer
    Streamlining its roots-minded harmonies and delivering them with new, lean muscle, making for its best album yet, one of the signature country releases of the year.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harlan & Alondra
    Like YG’s songs, Buddy’s music is full of small homages to the Los Angeles sounds of yesteryear. But while YG is polishing one idea until it shines blindingly, Buddy is crossing generations, building new paths.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Still Brazy
    Still Brazy is an artisanal, proletarian Los Angeles gangster rap record, less tribute to the sound’s golden age than a full-throated and wholly absorbed recitation.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2
    As the hip-hop mainstream shouts and booms its way into the 21st century, Beastie Boys are happy temporal outsiders, partying in their never-ending 1980s.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    High On Tulsa Heat
    At its best, High on Tulsa Heat is starkly elegant, addressing sadness with clarity and directness.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Evening with Silk Sonic
    [Mars and Paak] flaunt skill, effort and scholarship, like teacher’s pets winning a science-fair prize; they also sound like they’re having a great time. Silk Sonic comes across as a continuation for Mars and a playfully affectionate tangent for Paak.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unflesh
    In her synthetic universe, nothing is stable and anything can be a threat, a condition she greets with matter-of-fact bravery even at her most fragile moments.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sour
    Nuanced and often exceptional debut album. ... Songwriting flourish is emblematic of what Rodrigo has learned from Taylor Swift on this album (which, in shorthand, is Swift’s debut refracted through “Red”): nailing the precise language for an imprecise, complex emotional situation; and working through private stories in public fashion.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Apocalypse
    Apocalypse is bolder and clearer, less blissed-out and more grippingly immediate than [2011's The Golden Age of Apocalypse].
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rival Dealer [EP]
    It’s the sound of something--or someone--rumbling to the surface, about to erupt.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Good News For People Who Love Bad News
    The best Modest Mouse album yet.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
    It stands to reason that there should be another album's worth of this material, which flickers back and forth between different kinds of sessions and ideas, some quite elegant, some deeply boring, none of it very well edited.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Uproot
    DJ/Rupture knowledgeably traverses a world of ominous meditations, complete with anxiety about his entitlement as a curator.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hidden
    Somber, arty and quintessentially British: that's Hidden the second album by These New Puritans.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hey! Merry Christmas!
    The beginning of Hey! Merry Christmas!--the first holiday album by the country music interrogators the Mavericks--strolls along at a friendly pace, their original songs touching on Western swing, 1950s rock, traditional country and more. But midway through comes a bawdy new cabaret-esque number, “Santa Wants to Take You for a Ride,” that feels less like an apostate take on holiday good will and more like a lost Blowfly original.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wounded Rhymes
    Wounded Rhymes, her follow-up on the same label, has thumping drums, Farfisa organs, girl-group vocal harmonies and darkly pealing guitars. It also has songs of desolate stoicism and disconsolate fury.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Majesty Shredding
    Once the great indie hope of Chapel Hill, N.C., this band--Mr. McCaughan, the bassist Laura Ballance, the guitarist Jim Wilbur and the drummer Jon Wurster, who favors dense, thudding bass kicks--has recaptured its grasp on bright, puckish and punkish power pop with no apparent effort.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Be
    "Be" is certainly a triumph, but if it isn't quite the all-time classic Common was hoping for, that's because it sounds a bit too straightforward. [25 May 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blue Water Road
    “Blue Water Road” instead radiates delicate warmth. In a creamy, full-throated voice, Kehlani exudes a tenderness not felt since their 2017 studio album, “SweetSexySavage.” ... But it’s Kehlani’s candid ruminations on queer desire and estrangement that resonate the deepest here.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Laurel Hell
    She’s constantly observing and interrogating herself. Her melodies are long-breathed and deliberate, sung with calm determination, while the arrangements, largely constructed by Mitski and her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, veer between austere, exposed meditations and perky, danceable propulsion.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brighter Than Creation's Dark
    This is a typically crowded Drive-By Truckers album; it doesn’t need all 19 songs. But the overload is part of the point.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blackjazz
    Blackjazz was produced by Sean Beavan, who has worked with Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, and its sound skews dark but a bit cartoonish.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wild Flag
    The meeting point for the songwriting is in structures that are pushier than Helium's and less knotty than Sleater-Kinney's - in other words, closer to the garage and to Patti Smith's kind of punk.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grinderman
    It sounds terrific, in a turbulent fashion. [9 Apr 2007]
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone
    She’s pithy and penetrating, bruised but steadfast, proud of the grain and drawl of her voice.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Black Noise
    Black Noise is slightly busier than Pantha du Prince’s sublime “This Bliss” (Dial) from 2007, a pensive, slender and tough album that remains his high-water mark.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    You Could Have It So Much Better
    Far more than a sequel. [3 Oct 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Under Color of Official Right
    Mr. Casey mopes mightily as the frontman of the Detroit postpunk band Protomartyr, which on its darkly romantic and droll second album Under Color of Official Right (Hardly Art) has honed its sound.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    SVIIB
    Minimalist repetition turns into pop certitude, and the arrangements--sorting out the many tracks Mr. Curtis recorded--set aside the buzzy, abrasive keyboard tones of the group’s 2012 album, “Ghostory,” for a sonic vocabulary of reverberation and depth, of optimistic promise.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    We're New Here
    To its great credit it's high and low and all over the place. The dislocation works: the record has patience and breadth and almost zero pretension.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Boy Named If
    While the lyrics are convoluted, the music simply charges ahead. Like so many pandemic albums, “The Boy Named If” was pieced together remotely. ... Yet the Imposters sound gleefully, brutally unified, every bit as bristling as the Attractions on “This Year’s Model” or the Imposters on “When I Was Cruel” in 2002.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Sunset Tree
    It may be Mr. Darnielle's best album so far (which is saying a lot) and his most straightforwardly autobiographical (which isn't saying much). [25 Apr 2005]
    • The New York Times
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    High
    The standard narrative is that a band’s second record reflects experience, wisdom or moderation, and High has a bit of that in a larger and more managed sound.
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