The Wire's Scores

  • Music
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:
2879 music reviews
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Buck's refusal to recognise musical boundaries and his instinctive ability to pick out elements that work together--sometimes surprisingly so--have given us a genre-bending album of high artistic vision, spit and grit. [#258, p.52]
    • The Wire
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The mood is always unsettled and unsettling, either furious or fragile. [#258, p.67]
    • The Wire
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Some of these tracks have a stark, haunting beauty that marks them out as perfectly realised compositions in their own right. [#258, p.68]
    • The Wire
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A richly nuanced album, and eloquent in its restraint. [#257, p.57]
    • The Wire
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Callahan is a true original. [#255, p.65]
    • The Wire
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hebden is a voracious consumer and producer of ideas, although there is sometimes the feeling, amid all this glut and gusto, that they're ideas for idea's sake. [#256, p.54]
    • The Wire
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Even when the songs aren't motivated by anger or frustration, they have a drive and a momentum that's breathtaking. [#256, p.52]
    • The Wire
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Caught somewhere between the big yucks and the thoughtful overview are moments of genuine strangeness that are both captivating and unsettling. [#255, p.59]
    • The Wire
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The ideas are better realised here than on [Why?'s] earlier material. [#258, p.67]
    • The Wire
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's clear... that the quartet... are growing in confidence and ideas. [#256, p.54]
    • The Wire
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Niblett takes the old quiet-loud dynamic and stretches it to unexpected lengths. [#258, p.68]
    • The Wire
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This intriguing, relatively mild entente between elegiac melodicism and freeform lyrics has many moments of quiet innovation. [#256, p.63]
    • The Wire
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The only drawback to this semi-collage approach is that many tracks are too brief. [#256, p.51]
    • The Wire
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A complex and challenging listen. [#257, p.61]
    • The Wire
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If anything, however, Autechre have pulled back the throttle on their excursions into the unknown. [#254, p.53]
    • The Wire
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This decidedly literate songcraft has a range of ancestors, including Talking Heads, Sparks and David Grubbs, but three albums along, The Books are nailing down a distinctive soundworld of their own. [#254, p.54]
    • The Wire
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It begins as quite a thrilling ride. But at this level of concentration, ten minutes feels like an hour; it soon becomes enervating. [#255, p.55]
    • The Wire
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Touching and beautiful. [#256, p.63]
    • The Wire
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Residents walk a precarious line between American underbelly creepiness and a more mannered absurdism. [#254, p.63]
    • The Wire
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darkness At Noon works because it doggedly pursues its convictions through to a satisfying conclusion and in doing so creates its own kind of offbeat logic. [#254, p.53]
    • The Wire
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Guero turns out to be much stronger than its provenance suggests. [#256, p.66]
    • The Wire
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A thrilling affair. [#252, p.63]
    • The Wire
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    There are, unsurprisingly, great contrasts in material and quality. [#254, p.54]
    • The Wire
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pop itself is not a problem, it's just that in Tarwater's take on it nagging tunes and interesting textures are in short supply. [#253, p.65]
    • The Wire
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Imagine cLOUDDEAD jamming with Wilco, with David Lynch producing, and you're only halfway there. [#257, p.70]
    • The Wire
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    If Brian Wilson had crashed a motorcycle and holed up to recuperate at Big Pink with The Band, this is how The Basement Tapes would have sounded. [#256, p.49]
    • The Wire
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Immaculately interwoven electronics and the care with which each beautifully recorded track unfolds recall Chicago post-rock. [#254, p.53]
    • The Wire
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The slippery polyrhythmic music is a difficult terrain for MCs to conquer. [#253, p.57]
    • The Wire
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One imagines Blue Eyed In The Red Room might serve as an alternative soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. [#252, p.47]
    • The Wire
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    [An] overstuffed sound hurricane. [#255, p.58]
    • The Wire