The Wire's Scores
- Music
For 2,880 reviews, this publication has graded:
-
51% higher than the average critic
-
7% same as the average critic
-
42% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.8 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 74
| Highest review score: | SMiLE | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest review score: | Amazing Grace |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,405 out of 2880
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Mixed: 455 out of 2880
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Negative: 20 out of 2880
2880
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- Critic Score
Young Thug has made a record about the agency public figures have over their own identities. In another, he’s made the year’s most bizarre, brilliant genre exercise. [Oct 016, p.65]- The Wire
Posted Nov 8, 2016 -
- Critic Score
I’d say that the seething intransigence of Impossible Star is precisely what makes it so compelling. A release whose glittering details and dusty undertow can’t obscure how appalled it is. [Feb 2018, p.51]- The Wire
Posted Feb 23, 2018 -
- Critic Score
It is a working through of grief and abuse, characterised by Nastasia’s deeply resonant songwriting. ... It would be tempting to liken the run of songs in between to a personal descent followed by an emergence into the outside world, but Nastasia shuns such easy linear interpretations. [Aug 2022, p.53]- The Wire
Posted Aug 1, 2022 -
- Critic Score
What’s exceptional about Novelist Guy is the ease with which he remakes grime in his own image, gifting it a breadth and charm and appeal others have struggled for over a decade to synthesize. [Jun 2018, p.62]- The Wire
Posted Jul 12, 2018 -
- Critic Score
Gay’s latest is a deep dive into memory but emerges as a triumphant celebration of a past and future antilineage, uniquely conjured from the inner complexities of an artist not tortured by the past but possessed by it. [Dec 2021, p.50]- The Wire
Posted Dec 21, 2021 -
- Critic Score
Sometimes the sensuousness of Serpent Music is missed, but Tumor’s drive to take this radically new music to audiences as big as Blake’s, Ocean’s or even Radiohead’s is exhilarating. [Oct 2018, p.63]- The Wire
Posted Sep 21, 2018 -
- The Wire
Posted Aug 15, 2013 -
- Critic Score
Bores are in the minority and easily avoided, the exquisitely curated majority impress both in isolation and together as kaleidoscopic wonder. An unlikely joy. [Jul 2023, p.58]- The Wire
Posted Jun 7, 2023 -
- Critic Score
More passionate and sophisticated than much of what passes for musical eclecticism these days, Dark Matter is a fusion of old and new, acoustic and electronic. [Feb 2020, p.42]- The Wire
Posted Feb 12, 2020 -
- Critic Score
As with most of these tracks, the effect is cumulative, and if Co La's modus operandi at first appeared to be almost flippant, the resulting music is inescapably hypnotic. [Jan 2012, p. 52]- The Wire
Posted Jan 23, 2012 -
- Critic Score
The oozing synths of “Umbra” slide deliciously in and out of phase to an ethereal keening. .... Elsewhere, she hacks and revolves samples into chittering humus – an overripe garden of imagination, bustling with enthusiasm, circuitry and life. [Jun 2025, p.64]- The Wire
Posted Jun 17, 2025 -
- Critic Score
The music on Old Star is not black metal, stylistically speaking, but it nonetheless telegraphs Darkthrone’s cackling, sardonic grimness so as to transpose a blackened atmosphere into speed metal riff salad, epic/trad doom and frequent moments that call up Celtic Frost’s hallowed splicing of iron and velvet. [Aug 2019, p.64]- The Wire
Posted Jul 11, 2019 -
- Critic Score
This is Irreversible Entanglements at their most accessible, their free jazz roots tightly folded into song form. While the tighter structures of such tracks leave less space for improvisation, the band find other ways to expand the sound, as on "Panamanian Fight Song" where an ambient piano intro recurs as a reverb-heavy apparition. [May 2026, p.53]- The Wire
Posted Apr 20, 2026 -
- Critic Score
An album of sombre yet uplifting electronic music. ... If that [a requiem for a close friend and respected artist] wasn’t the original intent, one can hardly imagine a finer tribute. [Sep 2022, p.43]- The Wire
Posted Aug 31, 2022 -
- Critic Score
Let It Come Down suffers just a little from Pierce's presumably healthier outlook. [#211, p.66]- The Wire
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- Critic Score
Some of Out Of Season's lyrics are almost too impossibly idealistic and airy fairy to carry off. [#226, p.54]- The Wire
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- Critic Score
There's no point chasing diminishing returns on a four-track, and the buffed-up West is a kick worth revisiting. [Aug 2011, p.63]- The Wire
Posted Aug 17, 2011 -
- Critic Score
Effective, perhaps, as background music for adverts or TV vignettes... The second CD, Heim, is better. [Dec 2007, p.65]- The Wire
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- Critic Score
The Blow excel at cold wave beats and detached machine pop. But much of this sounds a bit too defeated, or needs some more of their nicely weird online humour to offset the gloom. They sound stronger and more substantial on the souped up “Get Up” which embraces its own Debbie Downer side and promises “I want to come through, persist/ I’m going to form all my selves into the shape of a fist”. [Apr 2018, p.50]- The Wire
Posted Apr 5, 2018 -
- Critic Score
There’s a food theme to this super light and easy but lushly layered 1970s and 80s themed reverie. [Aug 2019, p.66]- The Wire
Posted Jul 11, 2019 -
- Critic Score
As ever, he works with a solid dub toolkit, but tracks like "The Well Is Poisoned" (co-written with Brian Eno) and "Hiroshima Dub Match" sound newly anxious. [Nov 2025, p.56]- The Wire
Posted Oct 17, 2025 -
- Critic Score
If you listen to White Stuff and hear good time rock ’n’ roll then perhaps it’s time to check into the rock ’n’ roll nursing home. On the other hand if you hear avant garde brinksmanship, check your ears. It’s both, it’s neither. Does it matter? Does anything? Yes and no.- The Wire
Posted Feb 20, 2019 -
- Critic Score
The way Baird and Jones mix room tone with the intruding outdoors invites consideration of human impermanence, but the sweet affection that Jones's melodies impart wards off the blues. [Mar 2016, p.54]- The Wire
Posted Mar 9, 2016 -
- Critic Score
The overall effect is that of a mutated being, inexplicably functional but undeniably alive, slowly making sense of the alien world in which it finds itself. [Dec 2021, p.44]- The Wire
Posted Dec 21, 2021 -
- Critic Score
Snow Bound adheres to the template he has been carefully fine tuning over the years, a series of thoughtful, occasionally joyful, barbed pop rockers with masked sociopolitical references attached, all artfully designed to hook themselves into your memory and hold fast. [Oct 2018, p.64]- The Wire
Posted Sep 21, 2018 -
- Critic Score
Dream A Garden only starts to sound radical when it breaks the bounds of its songforms and an eerie melancholy steals in. [Mar 2015, p.48]- The Wire
Posted Mar 25, 2015 -
- Critic Score
What emerges so strongly from this collection is evidence of gradual development over time--stumbling, erratic, silent and brilliant by turns--ultimately leading to a stage of maturity. [#200, p.68]- The Wire
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- Critic Score
Across 13 brief sketches – some only a minute or two long – the groove is paramount. A hint of Afrobeat pops up a few times, here as a sludgy crawl, there as if Tonto’s Expanding Head Band had lugged their gear down to Fela’s shrine. [Jul 2024, p.66]- The Wire
Posted Jul 2, 2024 -
- Critic Score
At best, the end result has an epic and ethereal sheen, though there are certainly moments where Araab succumbs to the tackier elements of his influences, like blind fist-pumping four on the floor or arpeggiated faux-bliss. [Aug 2011, p.69]- The Wire
Posted Aug 17, 2011 -
- Critic Score
The ten tracks are built on foundations of looped percussion and tight bass sequences, usually based around short, sharp and undeclarative sounds – synthetic rimshots and damped hi-hats rather than snares or kicks. While this can run into staid territory, as on the triphop shuffle of “One Two”, for the most part its subdued hardness accents the drift of Milton’s vocals. His delivery often overwhelms the matter of his lyrics in the best way. [Apr 2021, p.54]- The Wire
Posted Apr 9, 2021