The Wire's Scores

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For 2,879 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: 100 SMiLE
Lowest review score: 10 Amazing Grace
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,404 out of 2879
  2. Mixed: 455 out of 2879
  3. Negative: 20 out of 2879
2879 music reviews
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per page
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Darkness Rains
    The initial impression given by Death Valley Girls’ third album is of a hypertypical Los Angeles band: kinda punky, kinda raucous, but wholly beholden to the rock canon, in the style of past-decade LA outfits like The Icarus Line and The Warlocks. Multiple spins of Darkness Rains don’t refute this, but do reveal an undeniable spirit and likeable energy. [Nov 2018, p.65]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 16, 2018
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Who Do You Love
    Who Do You Love? may be a tacit admission by Norway’s Årabrot that they can push that sound no further. There’s an unlikely, boisterously garage rock vibe to much of this record, albeit larded with gothic drama by Kjetil Nernes’s vocal approach. [Nov 2018, p.65]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 16, 2018
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Room 25
    The biggest problem with Noname’s Room 25 is that the opening two tracks, adding up to barely four minutes of music, are just too damn good. ... The rest is merely exceptional. Essential. [Nov 2018, p.68]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 16, 2018
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Public Image Is Rotten: Songs from the Heart [Box Set]
    The tracklisting is divided between acknowledged classics and ephemera. There are extended remixes, demos and live tracks, but only a couple of genuinely illuminating items, and more often in theory than practice. [Nov 2018, p.72]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 16, 2018
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lovers Rock
    Musically it’s a joyous triumph: vocally Estelle is utterly assured but naturally ebullient, the sound of someone totally at ease. [Nov 2018, p.68]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 16, 2018
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Broken Politics
    The album deftly balances expansive environments with a singular vocal intimacy. [Nov 2018, p.51]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 16, 2018
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ecce Homo
    It's a well-worn concept, but one which Gorgun works through with curiosity and clarity of purpose. [Oct 2018, p.61]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 16, 2018
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Possible Dust Clouds
    If there’s fun in her music, it’s somewhere between the anaesthetising effect of especially her more electric noises and the ecstatic release in her vocal, both too honest to be anything else but awkward. Fundamentally sociopathic. [Nov 2018, p.55]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 9, 2018
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Twisted Crystal
    Their newest struts and froths like the wild-eyed offspring of Deerhoof and Thundercat, raised in the swamps on little but No New York and toadstools. At turns, it’s impossibly upbeat--something like a Martian single parent’s go-to motivational album--and spasmodically funky, in the best tradition of Bernie Worrell-era Talking Heads, flipped on 45. [Nov 2018, p.54]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 9, 2018
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Elephants on Acid
    It's not so much a return to first principals as a 3D reboot of the homicidal stoner aesthetic established between 1991-1995 with Cypress Hill, Black Sunday and Temples Of Boom. [Nov 2018, p.52]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 9, 2018
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Resistance
    This is actually a joyful, bouncing album. [Oct 2018, p.68]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Oct 9, 2018
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Wake
    A strong late career release. [Oct 2018, p.63]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 26, 2018
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Another Life
    Another Life captures the ecstacy and catharsis of bodies exchanging sweat and petrol, crushing each other in unison. [Oct 2018, p.48]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 26, 2018
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Autobiography
    Having already worked with the likes of William Basinski and Herndon, remixing for Björk and Max Richter, Jlin is taking the innovative spirit of a regional Chicago born style to the institutional stage of the creative establishment. Applying that to a project with a choreographer like McGregor is an experiment in combining the best of both worlds. [Oct 2018, p.55]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 26, 2018
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    1 Time Mirage
    Not a satisfying record, nor a fully rounded one, but one that suggests so much future exploration. [Oct 2018, p.56]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 25, 2018
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love in Shadow
    Love In Shadow, Sumac’s fourth studio album in three years, features four songs occupying a side of vinyl each and brushes territory you’d hardly associate with its members’ other projects. [Oct 2018, p.62]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 25, 2018
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    For My Crimes
    Her craft comes through more strongly on For My Crimes. It therefore takes a little longer to appreciate that the song structures are just as acutely developed as on her previous two albums. Despite its lyrical themes of romantic suffocation and nostalgia, and its allusions to domestic violence, For My Crimes is steady and unwavering. [Oct 2018, p.59]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 25, 2018
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Digital Garbage
    Digital Garbage is an honest and oddly selfless document of the time, impressively free from bravado. [Oct 2018, p.59]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 25, 2018
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Konoyo
    It might take you a few cuts to pick up on the gagaku thing. [Oct 2018, p.54]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 25, 2018
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    TA13OO
    His new LP is a sonic assault; holding tight to punk ruthlessness and discipline, drenched in Dirty South origins. [Oct 2018, p.68]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 21, 2018
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On Dark Horses
    Rundle explores shadowy dreams and gothic fantasies through a series of precariously balanced electrified compositions that hover around her--light as a feather one minute, heavy as lead the next. On Dark Horses rides headlong into the singer’s psyche as she pulls us into the darkest corners of her imagination and breathes out fevered secrets. [Oct 2018, p.64]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 21, 2018
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snow Bound
    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
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Safe In The Hands Of Love
    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
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New Hymn to Freedom
    If the album feels a little like it’s beginning to run out of ideas by the end of its 45 minutes, the audacity of its central aesthetic propels it to some dizzying heights along the way. [Oct 2018, p.62]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 21, 2018
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Head Cage
    Pig Destroyer explore transgression on their sixth album by creating a new narrative that begs for more careful introspection about who we are and the world we live in. [Oct 2018, p.60]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 21, 2018
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Body
    Body is a sound sculpture that cares less for internal time than for the cerebral pleasures of long duration. [Oct 2018, p.60]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 21, 2018
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Render Another Ugly Method
    Sifting through these hermetic songs is like coming across a cobwebby box of photographs in an empty home. Tiny fragments of narrative emerge, only to be drowned by ambiguity and absence. [Oct 2018, p.58]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 21, 2018
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Double Negative
    Double Negative stands alongside Yo La Tengo’s There’s A Riot Going On as a painfully honest expression of what it’s like to live in a post-truth country and have to call it your own. [Oct 2018, p.58]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 21, 2018
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Giant Who Ate Himself and Other New Works for 6 & 12 String Guitar
    Beauty, tradition, experiment: American primitive guitar is in safe hands. [Oct 2018, p.55]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 21, 2018
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bodied
    These are elements that need time to present themselves, on an album that requires a retreat inward. It’s the kind of mindquietening escape. [Oct 2018, p.55]
    • The Wire
      • Posted Sep 21, 2018
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