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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    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Xscape
    Xscape does polish up these old songs, even if it wipes away some of Jackson’s ideas, like the big-band tango Jackson invoked on the demo of “Blue Gangsta.” And Jackson’s voice--deliberately pushed up front in the mixes--is more vivid, and less processed-sounding, than it was on his later albums.... Yet it’s clear why Jackson shelved the songs on Xscape. They’re near misses, either not quite as striking as what he released or lesser examples of ideas he exploited better elsewhere.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unrepentant Geraldines
    Like most of Ms. Amos’s albums, her new one revels in multiplicity and mannerisms; she’s not afraid to warble. The lyrics wander between myth and realism, the personal and the political.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shine On
    Her songs materialize in grand resonant spaces, with pealing guitars, piano chords haloed in reverb and drums that boom without aggression. Her voice whispers breathily, swells right up to the verge of tearfulness and then gracefully backs away, ever sympathetic and ever poised.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Natalie Merchant
    Produced by Ms. Merchant, the music is modest but not austere; strings and horns arrive unobtrusively.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Corazón
    In some tracks Corazón feels like a committee crossover project.... But Corazón also finds vibrant international connections.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Never Learn
    This is harsh, unyielding stuff, and most of this jolting album contains more the same. On her two previous albums, Lykke Li has been something of a floating presence, but everything about this album is intensely grounded.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    That's Harakiri
    From beginning to end, it moves from tense sound collages toward polyrhythmic music that can be danced to--but the progression isn’t explicit, and neither is anything else.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shriek
    When everything clicks, as in the ghostly bounce of “Schools of Eyes,” the band’s new direction seems inevitable.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Inventions
    Inventions sets aside such linear development; instead, in a track like “Flood Poems,” the background looms up and submerges the guitar and percussion. Still, the album does head somewhere; marches emerge as the beat strengthens in the album’s closing tracks.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Way and Color
    With productions that rely on analog-sounding synthesizers and drums both live and programmed, Teen can hint at Stereolab, Erykah Badu or Dirty Projectors. Yet the songs also tend to metamorphose as they go, starting out perky and pointillistic and ending up, perhaps, in a brass-section chorale or a brawny rock guitar riff.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Honest
    Even if not everything on this album pulses with full intensity--the back half of it lags--Future is generally magnetic.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Food
    Sometimes the tracks are merely eclectic, and you feel that this would be pretty impressive for, say, a Sheryl Crow record. But sometimes it’s almost mutant, and then it feels right for Kelis.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The New Classic
    Student’s complete commitment to character and form compensate slightly for the unrelenting weirdness of this project.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So It Goes
    This album is chilly and paranoid and urgent, sloppy as the city Ratking hails from.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Testimony
    Most of this album moves with slowness and throbbing deliberation that focuses the ear and adds urgency to Mr. Alsina’s confessions. It’s also poignant for its intimacy.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Make My Head Sing...
    As a whole, the album is monochromatic, too single-minded about Ms. Mayfield’s new sound--and, at times, a little too determined to reverse-engineer Nirvana’s flanged guitar effects. And her laconic new lyrics don’t always offer the subtleties and paradoxes of her earlier songs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tremors
    The promise of Sohn’s debut album is that he has still more ideas hiding in the shadows.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Remember Me
    Those songs [“Gas Pedal” and “Red Nose”] are both the standouts on “Remember Me,” and also the template which Sage the Gemini tries to emulate, with varying success.... Half the songs on this album are under three minutes, and feel even shorter. Since Sage the Gemini has little to say with his words, his music does the loud talking. And as these songs speed by, they still exert strong force.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shakira
    The warbles and breaks in her voice that make her professions of love sound both innocent and obsessive, and the idiosyncrasies of her English lyrics: “You looked at me with your blue eyes/And my agnosticism turned into dust.” They keep her from getting entirely swallowed by the Anglo pop machine.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Singles
    The synth-pop skeletons here are alluring: Singles succeeds in accessing the unconscious pleasures associated with the cold percussion and computer melodies of the early-mid-1980s.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Teeth Dreams
    It’s a more intricate embrace of the 1970s guitar rock that the Hold Steady has always prized, but it’s also a leap forward.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If You Knew Her
    The second album by the British singer Zara McFarlane on Brownswood Recordings, constructs a kind of black music that descends from Nina Simone and Pharoah Sanders: serene, post-folk, post-soul, mystical.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Toujours
    Some of Sabina’s songs have a more enigmatic side, an undercurrent of restlessness and displacement.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Recess
    Recess arrives feeling more like a checked-off item on a bucket list.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mind Over Matter
    Mind Over Matter has a fuller, brassier sound than this group’s debut, and especially emphasizes the guitars of Jacob Tilley and Eric Cannata.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Supermodel
    [An] album, which is comfortingly straightforward, despite Mr. Foster’s jagged sentiments.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Krazy Life
    YG has grown mightily as a rapper, and because DJ Mustard, who produced more than half of the album, has found a way to make his sketches theatrical without sacrificing their urgency.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Close to the Glass
    With guitars or electronics, the Notwist projects a sense of isolation and displacement.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lift Your Spirit
    Throughout the album, Mr. Blacc sings with the kind of earthy vitality that many studied neo-soul singers don’t have the voice to match. But too often, the production--most of it by DJ Khalil--is so thoroughly retro that Mr. Blacc only reminds a listener of whom he’s emulating.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Electric Balloon
    The record keeps pulsating from one energy to another, suggesting art project and ritual.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Holly
    His work--from the single “Some Place,” in 2010, to his new album, Holly, his second--has been slightly insufferable and very good.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Soul of All Natural Things
    The album is brave in its fragility and sincerity; it’s not for the cynical. But it’s not naïve, either.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Atlas
    The calm, earthy and delicate Atlas, the third Real Estate album, is less ambitious than its second album, “Days,” and somehow more heroic.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Riser
    He’s deliberate in his choice of songwriters, including Shane McAnally and Josh Kear, who provide some of the better songs on this hit-or-miss album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bluebird
    She builds the title track around a moment of beauty and renewal, and elsewhere she sings of companionship and comfort. Her backing band on the album, including Tony Scherr on bass and Rob Moose on guitars, violin and viola, sounds cozy enough to be playing in a living room.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Voices In A Rented Room
    Both men put tender wheeze and murmur into their voices, but sing in unison or octaves as a default mode, which grows dull almost instantly.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Morning Phase
    He’s found the right sound for his disposition and, he resonates like crazy with that sound.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blank Project
    It’s a stark but warm-blooded product of avant-garde pop, just the sort of album you might have once hoped for from Ms. Cherry, whose singing is still limber and unlabored, earthy but cool.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Divine Ecstasy
    Vertigo is still clearly the goal of tracks that loop and layer and pile on speedily pattering percussion, deliberately occluding vocalists who are busy emoting and elaborating.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Small Town Heroes
    The album adds up to a scrapbook of wandering and loss, drawing what consolations it can from music.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lights from the Chemical Plant
    [A] gut punch of a third album of downcast roots music and soft, soft rock.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    No Way There from Here
    [A] prim and wistful sixth full-length album.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Haden Triplets
    The album’s center of gravity, always, is the Hadens’ vocal blend, which isn’t seamless or airless but rather a series of alert, intuitive micro-negotiations in the realm of intonation and timbre. At times you notice how much is actually happening, moment to moment, in that blend.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After the Disco
    The songs are full of characters.... The pop structures, meanwhile, are comfortingly crisp verse-chorus-verse and the settings are, at best, subliminally familiar without being too blatant about their sources.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Choir of Echoes
    Guitars intertwine and gather around them, in ever-thickening skeins of picking and strumming, pulling a listener into all the mesmerizing turbulence of those troubled romances.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Too True
    A few chords, a clear melody and succinct verse-chorus-bridge structures are filled with darkly allusive lyrics and floated amid gauzy, sweeping guitar effects.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    That Girl
    [An] always pleasant and occasionally more-than-that album.... Only rarely does this album capture Ms. Nettles’s remarkable voice, a twang-thick burr with real soul-music depth.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Hopes
    The best of them--mostly the resigned or farseeing songs, the songs that have no hero and no story--rise above the odds. But a large portion of the record feels, let’s say, official.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rival Dealer [EP]
    It’s the sound of something--or someone--rumbling to the surface, about to erupt.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    7 Days of Funk
    The two [Dam-Funk and Snoop], collaborating as 7 Days of Funk, have a loose and luxurious self-titled album (on Stones Throw) that places both men on comfortable turf.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wig Out at Jagbags
    [The album sounds] well rehearsed in all its complexities, but enthusiastic and offhand. Mr. Malkmus has written enigmas that are open to exegesis, but they also just roll on by with a whoop and a grin.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Among the Grey
    She expands her palette, sometimes overdubbing chamber-pop strings and voices that allow her introspection without solitude.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Panties
    Songs like "Cookie," "Crazy Sex" and "Legs Shakin'" start off as promises of highly skilled sexual attentions, but end up as to-do lists.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Days of Gold
    About half the album’s tracks bear a credit by Jaren Johnston, and others bear the fingerprints of first-call Nashville songwriters like Dallas Davidson, Ashley Gorley and Shane McAnally. Their best efforts home in on Mr. Owen’s capacity for open heartache.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life Love & Hope
    The songs come with soaring sentimental choruses, but brittle rhythmic foundations--you will miss Sib Hashian, Boston’s old drummer--as well as deeply grandiose or cornball keyboard parts.... Where Mr. Delp is absent, the singers Tommy DeCarlo or David Victor commit passable imitations, or Kimberley Dahme provides bland contrast.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nina
    Recorded in a day, it’s the least ingratiating sort of tribute, dedicated to the spooky, unsettling side of Simone’s art.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Purgatory/Paradise
    Some of the music is unplugged but scrappy, with shifting meters and the grit in Ms. Hersh’s voice; they’re more scuffle than skiffle.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    What The...
    It’s often only functional, crucially low on thrills; the riffs, over barely changing, stock-punk rhythm patterns, have no breathing space.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Britney Jean
    Ms. Spears and Will.i.am have turned to European disc jockeys who have found dance music’s lowest, least funky common denominator: the steady thump of four-on-the-floor. And they’ve settled for too many tepid tracks.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Midnight Memories
    With a couple of exceptions, this is a dimly written album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Woman I Am
    Ms. Pickler sees the humor in country music, and its pathos, and its pulpy core, and she sings it with whimsy and complication.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Five Spanish Songs [EP]
    Mr. Bejar’s versions of Mr. Luque’s songs--“Maria de las Nieves,” “Del Monton,” “El Rito,” “Babieca,” and “Bye Bye”--are a little more down at the heels than the Sr. Chinarro originals, but they’re honest covers of lovely songs, sung with care.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Open
    I can’t think of a record I was less eager to go back to a second time, and I can’t think of a record I changed my mind about more on the second, third and fourth time, except maybe the Necks’ last one.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Watching Dead Empires in Decay
    He leans toward ominous possibilities: creaks and thuds, clanks and scrapes and sounds that are more like pressure zones than notes; at times an elegiac string section or a slow thread of melody looms.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Baptized
    It [his voice] wants badly to roar but is given almost no opportunity to here apart from the savage “Traitor.” And so mostly, Mr. Daughtry is a caged animal on this album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cupid Deluxe
    This record is less unified than “Coastal Grooves,” the last Blood Orange album, as well as more luxurious, and far less isolated.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Back To Land
    It’s music conceived for interior spaces but influenced by open-air ones.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Marshall Mathers LP 2
    [A] relentless, demanding and often convincing seventh major-label album.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wed 21
    For all its clarity and premeditation, her music still perches on the edge of delirium.
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Nov 4, 2013
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kaani
    The mesh keeps changing; the momentum never lets up.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wenu Wenu
    The beat is strong; the music is fused enough.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get There
    They wrote, sang and played everything (except drums) on the album, meshing individual styles where they comfortably overlap, in a zone of graceful, grown-up folk-rock.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Loved Me Back to Life
    On this album she’s singing with more rhythm, if not more clarity, than usual.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Night Time, My Time
    [A] bracing, aggressive and surprisingly tender debut album.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reflektor
    Some of the tracks go on longer than necessary, but it’s an excess of generosity.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lily & Madeleine
    There are missteps--like “I’ve Got Freedom,” with the kind of twinkle-lilt that feels pitched to the marketing arm of Apple--but far more common are the minutely scaled successes.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Retrash
    Oozing Wound is plain, taut, dumb thrash metal, which is to say, it’s firm, and aggressive, and heavy on logic and structure.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cut 4 Me [Mixtape]
    She floats elegantly and easily over the beats here, which are largely provided by modern club innovators like Kingdom, Nguzunguzu and Jam City.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Suffering from Success
    “You Don’t Want These Problems”--a posse cut featuring Mr. Ross, Big Sean, French Montana, 2 Chainz, Meek Mill, Ace Hood and Timbaland--comes closer to hitting the album’s bull’s-eye of gloating complaint.... Much of the rest of Suffering From Success feels rote, with too little payoff for the crassness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big Wheel and Others
    He’s into strange turns and oblique repetition, but as with some of his past records, he will come at you every once in a while with a single track that will pin you down with its beauty. Like a John Lennon love song. There’s a few of those here: “Angel Blood,” “Dealing” and “Untitled Spain Song.”
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pull My Hair Back
    Ms. Lanza, who is Canadian, moves with purpose and authority in and around the rhythms on this album which, produced by her with Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys, in places nods explicitly to Timbaland’s skittish production.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New
    The songs are full of contrasts. It’s easy to imagine Mr. McCartney gathering his favorite phrases from assorted works in progress and challenging himself to pull the miscellanies together.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lightning Bolt
    What comes across is the teamwork of musicians who have been working in tandem for decades. They’re grown-ups with fewer demons and more polish, but they’re still pushing themselves.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Build Me Up from Bones
    Her lyrics have a mystical streak, projecting love and loneliness across the landscape and the sky.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Interiors
    Where “Ring” was punctuated by physical percussion and casual human moments, Interiors is more immaculate and artificial.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bitter Rivals
    This third album is faithful to the band’s idea, but toned down.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Blow
    Cheap and bloodless electronic pop is too easy to imitate and score points with these days. Someone’s been studying how to transcend that problem; this album is always both intelligent and sentimental.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Days Are Gone
    Thanks to its overwhelming and triumphant exuberance and the care with which it embraces its palette of influences, Haim has made itself impossible to hate.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Event II
    Del the Funky Homosapien hasn’t lost his verbose velocity, and his partners retain their gift for brooding airs and funk grandeur. But what felt ahead of its time around the turn of this millennium now scans as classicism, only tweaked to include newer co-conspirators like Emily Wells.
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