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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    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    V
    The balance of good cheer and dark clouds is partly in the arrangements--V comprises exceedingly bright songs verging on true pop-punk. It’s probably the cleanest-sounding Wavves album to date.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unbreakable
    For most of Unbreakable, she plays big sister--someone who’s happily in love, willing to offer advice and wishing for a better world. It’s a benign role but a modest one, reinforced by the music.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Honeymoon
    She’s been angry, and then bored of being angry, but now she’s just bored, and her boredom is entrancing.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cass County
    The number and potency of these guests sometimes make Cass County sound like a tribute album to someone not yet gone. They also take away from Mr. Henley, now 68, whose voice has decayed nicely, though it now lacks the wise punch it had on “The End of the Innocence,” his excellent 1989 album.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Allas Sak
    What’s special is the less cosmic parts: the hard, self-contained compositions at the center of these tracks.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    1989
    Mr. Adams isn’t brave enough to depart meaningfully from the script. Where the songs work, it’s because of Ms. Swift’s bulletproof melodies. When they fail, it’s because of his conservatism.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What A Time To Be Alive [Mixtape]
    For the most part, What a Time to Be Alive is a layup from two of hip-hop’s most innovative rappers, not a hasty record, but not an intricate one either, more like a series of energetic first drafts, with choruses often little more than the same phrase repeated ad nauseam.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    GO:OD AM
    One of the most musically appealing hip-hop LPs of the year. It’s lush and crisp, and also diverse.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    La Di Da Di
    Battles thinks hard and kicks harder.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thunderbitch
    It’s old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll that is never studied or antiquarian; Thunderbitch still feels the zap.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Me
    Smartly and shrewdly, Empress Of provides the neatness of pop minus the reassurance.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Story of Sonny Boy Slim
    While he’s well served by the rugged immediacy of the mix--make no mistake, it’s an improvement--his songwriting lags noticeably behind his musical prowess. And he sings much of the album on falsetto, a thin part of his vocal range.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Repentless
    Repentless is comfortable, full of certainty, good enough.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paper Gods
    Largely, though, Duran Duran chooses its collaborators wisely here, opting for some from that golden age, like Mr. [Nile] Rodgers, or those who’ve internalized that era’s balance of sleaze and good cheer, like Mark Ronson.... So long as Mr. Le Bon is oozing atop brisk arrangements like this, the specifics of the words don’t much matter. Everyone here has the posture down cold.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Freedom & Surrender
    Its sound runs slicker and punchier than Ms. Wright’s previous standard.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    HitNRun: Phase One
    The successes tend to be love songs.... But those songs arrive late in the album; first come oddities and overreaches.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz
    Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz is long and slack, stretching many of its 23 songs out of meager ideas, and puts raw faith in the weird or the nonvarnished, as if she had just recently discovered those concepts.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beauty Behind the Madness
    The music has moved from the shadowy haze of trip-hop to an emphatic, monumental clarity--high-end pop craftsmanship. The production still conjures huge spaces, but now they are brightly illuminated, with each sound in crisp focus.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Depression Cherry
    You’ve heard these sounds before, and you’ve felt these feelings before. The added value here, if you want it, is the organization and rigor of the blankness.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    E-MO-TION
    Emotion is full of pure cotton candy--delicious, distractingly sweet and filling, with a mildly suspicious aftertaste.... [The album is] full of excellent songs that seem to give up about two-thirds of the way through.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    #AndSeeThatsTheThing [EP]
    On this EP, the duets are more balanced, be it “Hey There” or the rising hit “Back Up,” a back-and-forth with Big Sean.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Midnight
    On Midnight, everything’s come undone, often for the better. In a few places, it recalls “Tango in the Night,” Fleetwood Mac’s lustrous last (noteworthy) gasp from 1987. Ms. Potter doesn’t quite have the tragedy Stevie Nicks so effortlessly channels, but she nonetheless finds moody pockets for her voice while the band hones a chilly take on brisk rock.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jessie Jones
    It all sounds quickly made, yet clear and confident.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Compton
    Musically, it’s ornate and grand-scaled, and somehow also deft.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At Least for Now
    An album very much about the act of becoming, with a tightrope balance of dramatic artifice and diaristic detail.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Most Lamentable Tragedy
    The high, both in the story line and in the course of the album, is temporary. But it’s one of several vertiginous peaks on a pretty vertiginous record.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cascade
    The standard comment about Mr. Basinski’s work is that its evocation of decay grips your emotions and reduces you to jelly, though I don’t get that so much from Cascade.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Something More Than Free
    The best of them glow with bittersweet empathy.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Communion
    Accepting the accomplishments on this album of diet club music perhaps requires a suspension of distaste for bandwagoners and carpetbaggers. But in this album’s most thrilling moments, whether the music is effective because it’s familiar or familiar because it’s effective almost ceases to be a concern.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ego Death
    There’s convincing thump at work here, but not so much as to overwhelm the lustrous keyboards, the nuzzling bass, the way several of the songs unfurl like blooming roses.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dreams Worth More Than Money
    Some of the strongest songs on this up-and-down album sound like lost 1998 Stretch and Bobbito freestyles.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Feels Like
    Bully has in Ms. Bognanno a special weapon. She’s a bracing songwriter, full of quick jabs and mundane details that end up being full of import. As a singer, she’s evocative, especially when her vocals are double tracked.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Don't Weigh Down the Light
    A true post-folk record, dyed in the acoustic sound of the English and Californian folk movements of the late 1960s and early ’70s, but not particularly scholarly or eccentric.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Life
    Reinvention isn’t exciting unless there’s something existing to reinvent. A record like this--with grown-up passions and accountable moods, stirring key modulations, gauzy slow jams and hyper-mainstream ballads--maintains the tradition.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fool
    Ms. Weaver’s lead vocals sound natural and personal, while Mr. Blanco and Mr. Angelakos build heroic crescendos for her.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Original High
    While there are a few missteps--Mr. Lambert doesn’t have the R&B sultriness required for “Underground,” and “Rumors” bizarrely cribs the jaunty synth pattern from Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop”--there are almost no extravagances. After years of spectacle, Mr. Lambert may have been saved by modesty.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bad Plus Joshua Redman
    As a chemistry experiment, the album is a knockout.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything Is 4
    Everything Is 4 is his second strong album in a row.... Here, Mr. Derulo is a shameless collaborator, a gleeful regurgitator of styles, and one of the most surprisingly savvy decision makers in pop.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Before The World Was Big
    These songs, written and sung with more subtlety since the group’s first EP from late last year.... It almost doesn’t matter what they’re singing about. The sound of their voices together contains it all.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heartbreak Pass
    There’s a lot of thought behind the offhand delivery, from the wry aphorisms of the lyrics to the structure of the album, a rambling decrescendo from rowdy to folky to nearly private.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Multi-Love
    The music is furtively detailed; it’s full of asymmetrical melodies and harmonic detours, bits of countermelody and instrumental interludes. Behind the cheesy facades, Mr. Nielson’s latest batch of songs deals with a complicated roundelay of heartache, androgyny, drugs, decadence and regret.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Before We Forgot How to Dream
    There’s no diffidence in the songs themselves. Soak exposes longings, fears, traumas and resolve--sometimes elliptically, sometimes with disarming bluntness.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At.Long.Last.A$AP
    It’s unrelentingly hazy, a state of mind as much as a musical approach. Rocky is a more precise and impressive rapper here than he was on his 2013 debut album, returning to the nimble and flexible form he displayed on his earlier mixtape and Internet releases.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Oh Man, Cover the Ground
    It’s a meandering, post-folk record with fingerpicked acoustic guitar at the center, and it relates back to the powerful, unsettling, what-comes-after-tradition impulse that musicians around the world were working out from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    II
    On its primally satisfying second album, II, it plays with punk attitude, hardcore discipline and construction-site volume. That all adds up to a glorious rumble, and a fetishistic one as well.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You Should Be Here
    Kehlani’s second self-released album, there’s a calm swagger that underpins even the most anguished of these songs. She easily channels the attitude and swing of mid-1990s R&B girl groups.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hollywood: A Story of a Dozen Roses
    Much of the production on Hollywood is swampy, but it’s a digital swamp. Mr. Foxx’s voice is slathered with so many effects that he veers toward anonymity.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zoy Zoy
    Zoy Zoy is more clearly recorded and no less hyperactive than Tal National’s 2013 “Kaani,” and its songs engage body, conscience and spirit.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Simple Songs
    It sounds fantastic as a study in symphonic-rock ambition and studio mixing techniques.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Why Make Sense?
    Despite all the allusions, the songs aren’t trapped in revivalism. Part of Hot Chip’s charm has been its combination of intelligence and ingenuity with a self-conscious reserve.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Soul Food
    It’s a catalog of strengths, a romp through sacred steel music, blues and Southern soul that often sounds as if it could have been recorded in heated performance.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Della Mae
    Della Mae’s self-titled third album shows a leap in confidence.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sprinter
    Sprinter, her second album, confronts relationships past and present, in songs that sound bravely open, even if it’s not immediately clear what’s on her mind.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dumb Flesh
    He’s giving you something you might find familiar or even commercial by its basic outlines. But he’s still got ways to make it uncanny: close, loud and abrupt.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wilder Mind
    Heard one song at a time, Wilder Mind builds convincing dramas. But Mumford & Sons’ greatest skill--their strategic crescendos--starts to feel like a formula over the course of the album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Waterfall
    All those lyrics about openness, about flow, about mind-body dualism--they suit this band perfectly, along with cavernous reverb and heavy-foot midrange tempos.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kathryn Calder
    Her own albums--this is the third and most transparent--reveal grander structures and a singular perspective, as she sings with tuneful equanimity about deep, unresolved, enigmatic struggles.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Suuns & Jerusalem in My Heart
    Whether they are paced by programmed beats, guitars or both, and whether they lean toward rock, techno or vintage electronic Minimalism, the tracks are headed somewhere urgent.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Culture of Volume
    He has a streak of the 1980s electro-pop songwriter in him, with an earnest tenor voice, a willingness to sustain ballad melodies and a fondness for disco thump that harks back to the Pet Shop Boys. The more those tendencies collide, the better he is.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fast Food
    Fast Food, is full of accusatory songs about love, often addressed to “you.” They spare no one.... Yet as bleak as things get, she refuses to retreat.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Who Is the Sender?
    It means well and conjures fellow feeling and makes you think the long thoughts. But it is a trudge, and strangely ponderous in its smallness.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jekyll + Hyde
    For every song that issues a challenge, there are two that play nice.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crown [EP]
    Though he’s an often astounding songwriter, The-Dream doesn’t have the carnality of Trey Songz or the athleticism of Usher or Chris Brown; he’s a singer who benefits from all the gifts that modern recording technology has to offer. But like the competition, he’s capable of bluster.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Infinite House
    It’s welcoming, but it’s weird, this band. It’s got the sound of practice, especially in the rhythm section.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fast Moving Clouds
    The point of the record is in the ways Ms. Nelson makes the songs gradually move from one definition to another, drawing your attention to its repetition or simplicity, then expanding the context or otherwise defying your expectations.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darling Arithmetic
    While the album is willfully interior and musically conservative, it doesn’t ever feel cloistered, because of the emotional stakes that he keeps clearly in sight.
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No Pier Pressure
    On No Pier Pressure, they [Wilson and co-producer Joe Thomas] juggle past and present in strangely proportioned ways.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dark Red
    Dark Red, his sometimes emphatic, sometimes meandering second full-length album, has moments that underscore just how much Shlohmo--real name Henry Laufer--has evolved.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Past, The Present, The Future
    If you can forgive the album’s concessions to the musical innovations of the last decade or so, like the Timbaland-assisted production on “Incredible,” it’s a logical, if slightly aged, continuation of the group’s music from its prime.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kintsugi
    It’s a smartly shaped response to two recent disentanglements, at least one of which seems to have left a residue of trauma.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carrie & Lowell
    A hushed, intent Sufjan Stevens contemplates death, grief, family and memory on his quietly moving new album.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Don't Like Shit: I Don't Go Outside
    At 10 songs that span barely 30 minutes, this album is so terse it makes Nas’s “Illmatic” seem like “Infinite Jest.” And often it can feel as if Earl Sweatshirt is rapping his dense syllabic tumbles with his back facing the microphone, which is perplexing, since few rappers love the sound of sticky syllables as much as he does.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ark Work
    Mr. Hunt-Hendrix is a feckless, floppy-voiced singer, and either for reasons of safety or rigor he often sticks to a single tone organized into rhythmic phrasing. The monotony can become crazy-making. And sometimes these songs become facile and grandiose.... But the band knows its virtues and works them hard: density, repetition, development, perversity, integration, catharsis.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Short Movie
    The fundamentals of her style are unchanged: the austere beauty of her singing; the grace and propulsion of her fingerpicking; the drones that underscore both Indian ragas and pensive British folk.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    We Fall
    The arrangements provide a plush, tuneful backdrop for lyrics that proffer sympathy but also twist the knife.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Madness
    Sometimes the lyrics don’t match the energy of the music here, especially Jack Fowler’s guitar. They tend toward the blandly inspirational, with a handful of notable exceptions.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Still the King: Celebrating the Music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
    Still the King genuflects little to Nashville’s reigning commercial center, but the artists on deck pull their weight.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Another Eternity
    Another Eternity is at once more expansive and more transparent than “Shrines.”
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Piece by Piece
    Every song aims for the monumental, a strategy that’s competitive for radio play but wearying over the course of a whole album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Don't Lose This
    Mavis Staples and the producer of her recent albums, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, have now completed that album, Don’t Lose This (Anti-), adding some instruments and vocals, and it’s done right: lean, un-slick and focused on Pops’s vividly recorded guitar and determined voice, still finding the unexpected pause and turn.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dark Sky Paradise
    In the last year, he’s made real strides toward lucidity, and on Dark Sky Paradise, his third and best album, he is more human than ever before.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Talent Night at the Ashram
    Talent Night at the Ashram, his fourth album, has a lot of that feeling: Why not?
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    True Romance
    More than on her previous albums, there is a sense of play here, and a feeling that no one was holding a leash tight. That can be a liability, of course--the vocals feel slightly underproduced, and she slips off the occasional note here and there.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reflection
    This strategy [a homage to the last two or so years of pop and R&B] works because all the women of Fifth Harmony--Ally Brooke, Camila Cabello, Dinah Jane, Lauren Jauregui and Normani Kordei--are impressive, flexible singers.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shadows in the Night
    Not every song thrives under Mr. Dylan’s treatment. “Some Enchanted Evening” is stiff, and “Why Try to Change Me Now” denies the song’s humor. But even when it falters, Shadows in the Night maintains its singular mood: lovesick, haunted, suspended between an inconsolable present and all the regrets of the past.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wallflower
    Where Ms. Krall usually plays vigorous keyboards on her albums, here her pianism is all but absent. Most of the fills, played by Mr. Foster, are strictly routine. It’s all the more mystifying because Ms. Krall, when prodded by a rhythm section, can really swing.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Middle Class
    American Middle Class, her debut album, comes fully formed, clear about its purpose.
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