The Wire's Scores
- Music
For 2,617 reviews, this publication has graded:
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51% higher than the average critic
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7% same as the average critic
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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: | Spiderland [Box Set] | |
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Lowest review score: | Amazing Grace |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,167 out of 2617
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Mixed: 430 out of 2617
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Negative: 20 out of 2617
2617
music
reviews
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- Critic Score
The original running order is slightly shuffled, but starting with "Raw Power" wasn't such a good idea, as it mostly serves to highlight the way the album sags in its second half. But ending with a roaring "I Got A Right" salvages the set. [Jun 2011, p.48]- The Wire
Posted Aug 12, 2011 -
- Critic Score
Musically it’s mannered to the point where he makes Stormzy look like Tempa T. Token exceptions offer some respite. On “Location” with Burna Boy and “Disaster” with J Hus he briefly escapes the bland backing and naff counselling concept to explore more primal modes of expression. But ultimately the failures predominate, most notably ten minutes of the heavy handed domestic violence PSA “Lesley”. [May 2019, p.50]- The Wire
Posted May 7, 2019 -
- Critic Score
In classic Simz style the journey’s more fulfilling a little further down the rabbit hole. ... But ultimately it’s hard to escape the comedy of such grand ambition also spawning the corniest voiceover since Prince invited Kirstie Alley to vandalise his symbolically titled 1992 album, and a cringe so intense it threatens to undermine everything.- The Wire
Posted Aug 31, 2021 -
- Critic Score
There is still a sense here of a group magisterially marking time, shying away this time round from any grand, rhetorical, countercultural purpose. [Dec 2007, p.63]- The Wire
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- Critic Score
In many ways this is his finest outing since The Boatman's Call. [#247, p.55]- The Wire
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- The Wire
Posted Apr 28, 2011 -
- Critic Score
Introspective, emotionally charged pieces such as “Father Time”, “We Cry Together” and “Savior” provide high – or jarring – points on the record, but elsewhere there are periods of lull absent on previous efforts. ... As sonically impressive as his latest album may be, his approach to the topics under discussion doesn’t feel sufficiently thought out. [Jul 2022, p.48]- The Wire
Posted Jun 15, 2022 -
- Critic Score
The mood is subdued, the backing spare, meditative, but--as we've become used to with Bush--lacking in any adventurousness of spirit, at points, you could even describe it as late night jazz club tasteful. [Dec 2011, p.52]- The Wire
Posted Dec 8, 2011 -
- Critic Score
I found myself wishing [the booklet] was three times longer and the music three CDs less. [Nov 2011, p.60]- The Wire
Posted Dec 6, 2011 -
- Critic Score
Musically, in other words, Strange Mercy delivers plenty of interest. What's not so convincing is the songwriting, specifically the lyrics. [Oct 2011, p.60]- The Wire
Posted Dec 6, 2011 -
- The Wire
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- Critic Score
His concerns are serious--consumerism, race, fame, relationships--but he rarely addresses them with the craft or focus they deserve. [Sep 2013, p.66]- The Wire
Posted Dec 10, 2013 -
- The Wire
Posted Jun 29, 2021 -
- Critic Score
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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- Critic Score
This strained affair makes the party rocking simplicity of 2 Chainz or even LMFAO look absolutely artful. Brown's too smart to make music this dumb effectively. [Nov 2013, p.66]- The Wire
Posted Dec 11, 2013 -
- Critic Score
Until the Quiet Comes is cluttered and schmaltzy. [Nov 2012, p.59]- The Wire
Posted Dec 5, 2012 -
- Critic Score
Stripped of the visuals, the seemingly endless succession of minor variations (75 tracks between the two collections) on the same sets of glossy and pleasant synth arpeggios can be at once bitty and overwhelming. [Oct 2016, p.63]- The Wire
Posted Nov 8, 2016 -
- Critic Score
Hot Sauce Committee finds The Beastie Boys being The Beastie Boys with nothing that isn't exactly what on would expect from The Beastie Boys. [Jul 2011, p.44]- The Wire
Posted Aug 17, 2011 -
- Critic Score
The issue with Pusha’s fourth solo album isn’t his insistence on portraying a heartless American striver as if he’s the rap game Al Pacino – it’s that he’s unable to consistently conjure the menacing intensity that enlivened his work with with twin brother Malice as Clipse. [Jun 2022, p.52]- The Wire
Posted Jun 14, 2022 -
- Critic Score
The music veers between between a kind of funk slop with trippy organ squelches and good ol' fashioned rawk with biblical overtones, It feels a little like drowning in a bath of Jack Daniels, but not in a good way. [Sep 2010, p.53]- The Wire
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- Critic Score
The best stuff views the world through the sunkissed psychedelic lens of Brazilian psych-troupe Os Mutantes; the lesser material just sounds like lite Brian Wilson. [#243, p.59]- The Wire
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- Critic Score
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
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- Critic Score
Accelerator captures a confused, jokey arc of the duo's trajectory that hasn't aged well in the 14 years since its release. [Dec 2012, p.70]- The Wire
Posted Jan 8, 2013 -
- Critic Score
The music is gentle but ominous, and it’s hard to be sure which impression they want to linger. “Read The Room” and “Teleharmonic” are more conventional rock songs; the former in particular could have come off any 21st century Radiohead album. [Mar 2024, p.52]- The Wire
Posted Feb 8, 2024 -
- Critic Score
Danger Mouse constructs decorative, melodic beats that don’t really bang, resulting in a hazy, slightly funky and psychedelic quality reminiscent of late 1960s pop. ... It’s frustrating to see him [Black Thought] shut off that aspect of his creativity in favour of “bars as hard as Angola’s”. ... Cheat Codes is compelling enough, but one wonders where it’s all going. [Sep 2022, p.42]- The Wire
Posted Aug 17, 2022 -
- Critic Score
There's a lingering sense of calculation to their weirdness, the feeling that this is someone's specific idea of what next-level hiphop is supposed to sound like and not the type of batshit creativity bursts that can lead to truly transcendent experimental hiphop.- The Wire
Posted Aug 12, 2011 -
- Critic Score
A few tracks stand apart: "Story Of OJ" and "Mercy Me" both impress for verve and venom if not his every chain of thought. Otherwise it's all so dry that after a couple of listens it feels more like spoken word. [Sep 2017, p.62]- The Wire
Posted Oct 11, 2017 -
- Critic Score
Desertshore is less a report than a dramatisation, an upending of their defiantly aura-less usurping of traditional performance modes in favour of a theatricality that feels more selfconsciously like a big event than the DIY/samizdat style of old.... [The Final Report] fares a little better, though again, it's a shame XTG have framed it in the form of a report.[Dec 2012, p.69]- The Wire
Posted Jan 8, 2013 -
- Critic Score
While Gunn gets in some liquid licks, they’re brief asides, never trips that’ll take you somewhere on their own, and they’re often folded into gleaming layers of keyboards and harp. While the drums occupy considerable sonic space, they are frustratingly unemphatic. ... He has never sung better. However, every time he solos, one wishes he’d keep going a bit longer. Here’s hoping that Gunn can figure out how to showcase his voice without doing so at the expense of his instrumental gifts. [Sep 2021, p.52]- The Wire
Posted Aug 31, 2021 -
- Critic Score
The rest of the album makes the distance between now and (Berlin) then of "Where Are We Now?" painfully evident, a pain heightened by Visconti's failure to convert this collection of session muso workouts into anything memorable. [May 2013, p.55]- The Wire
Posted Apr 24, 2013