The Wire's Scores

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For 2,628 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 0.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 73
Highest review score: 100 SMiLE
Lowest review score: 10 Amazing Grace
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,177 out of 2628
  2. Mixed: 431 out of 2628
  3. Negative: 20 out of 2628
2628 music reviews
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Loose Fur
    A pleasant if somewhat plain folk-rock record, less adventurous than either Wilco's or O'Rourke's own recent outings. [#227, p.68]
    • The Wire
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Master And Everyone
    Every knot has been planed away. It's hushed, wistful, 'cool,' acoustic, sweetly dolorous and subtly well crafted... and dull as corrective footnotes in a treatise on ditchwater. [#228, p.54]
    • The Wire
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Writers Without Homes
    It lacks something crucial at its centre: definition, precisely. [#221, p.66]
    • The Wire
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sea Change
    The risky juxtapositions that mark his best work are critically missing. [#224, p.51]
    • The Wire
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The King of Nothing Hill
    Some awful lyrical lapses scupper otherwise promising pieces. [#223, p.51]
    • The Wire
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    They Threw Us in a Trench and Stuck a Monument On Top
    They're at their best on tracks like "Nothing Is Ever Lost[...]," where they conjure the wheeling claustrophobia of PiL circa Metal Box. [#223, p.66]
    • The Wire
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kissin' Time
    An album of mostly pleasant contemporary pop. [#218, p.61]
    • The Wire
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    TA
    Like Urge Overkill or The Velvet Monkeys at their grossest, Trans Am's genre exercises don't stand up to close scrutiny, but as a dim soundtrack to your next beer bust, you might want to bring it on. [#220, p.66]
    • The Wire
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In The Afternoon
    The moments of beauty caught fleetingly in the gaps between over-arranged blocks make for frustrated listening. [#218, p.64]
    • The Wire
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cover Magazine
    Jocular and enjoyable to flip through, but the nagging feeling that leaks through is that this collection is little more than a respite for Giant Sand until Gelb returns from the bunker with enough fresh material to record a real new album. [#216, p.63]
    • The Wire
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Something Wicked This Way Comes
    Poorly sequenced instrumental epics and rap cuts leave Something Wicked sounding disjointed. [#217, p.56]
    • The Wire
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Geogaddi
    Of the 23 tracks, only four truly stand out. [#218, p.58]
    • The Wire
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Eban & Charley [Soundtrack]
    A decent film soundtrack. [#219, p.74]
    • The Wire
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    AOI: Bionix
    The new, mature De La means traditional pop over brash artistry, religion over irony, and conformity over the extraordinary. [#215, p.59]
    • The Wire
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bavarian Fruit Bread
    Sandoval's overly stylised vocals really start to grate over the distance of a whole LP. [#213, p.65]
    • The Wire
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Drukqs
    Not enough of Drukqs confidently breaks new ground, and too often James falls back on the all too familiar dysfunctional jitterbeat which has typified Aphex output since 1996's Richard D James album. [#212, p.55]
    • The Wire
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mi Sei Apparso Come un Fantasma
    Still sounds like the work of someone desperate to gain the approval of the Drag City clique. [#215, p.69]
    • The Wire
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Date Of Birth
    What's lacking on Date Of Birth, though, is any sort of excitement. [#212, p.75]
    • The Wire
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Life On A String
    Fans of Anderson's trademark spoken word phrasing, with pregnant pauses, raised eyebrows and question mark endings, won't be disappointed. [#211, p.52]
    • The Wire
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blowback
    Much of this fascinating, infuriating record is defined by his commingling of HipHop, Electro, dancehall, and, most problematically, stadium alt.rock... Some of it is just odd enough to work. [#209, p.62]
    • The Wire
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Amnesiac
    Pleasant, yes, but not much more.... Too many of these 'songs' snap off at around the three or four minute mark, just as they start to get interesting.... It sounds consistently half-there. [#208, p.52]
    • The Wire
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Music Is A Hungry Ghost
    Sadly much of Music Is A Hungry Ghost is marred by a pebbledash of clicks and glitches -- that already overused signifier of au courant production. [#207, p.87]
    • The Wire
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Uh-Oh!
    [Tipsy] painstakingly process small episodes of manufactured excess and thoughtless musical effect into tracks evoking the giddy pleasures to be found in running your favourite party tapes at the wrong speed. [#206, p.81]
    • The Wire
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cydonia
    It's an extremely listenable record, full of stray moments of delightful mischief, but it's as innovative as a favourite old armchair. [1/2001, p.63]
    • The Wire
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Fifth Release From Matador
    It's hard to shake off the suspicion that The Fifth Release contains more than a few offcuts and outtakes that never quite made the final cut of its more assured and inventive predecessor. [#202, p.55]
    • The Wire
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    More Light
    More Light is, on the whole, more of what made him great--songs with airhead titles like "Where'd You Go," which stretch glorious guitar solos over solid chopping riffs--but it's packed with too much filler. [#200, p.80]
    • The Wire
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
    On earlier releases, the traces of anger, sorrow or despair rippling through the found voices seeded roaring rock improvisations that empathetically rooted and resisted the calamities visited upon them. But the improvising on [Skinny Fists] falls within beat parameters too tightly determined to generate any really useful dissonance. [#200, p.66]
    • The Wire
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