The Wire's Scores
- Music
For 2,628 reviews, this publication has graded:
-
51% higher than the average critic
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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: | SMiLE | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest review score: | Amazing Grace |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 2,177 out of 2628
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Mixed: 431 out of 2628
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Negative: 20 out of 2628
2628
music
reviews
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- Critic Score
Promises doesn’t always come across like a true meeting of equals. Laswell used the saxophonist as a plug-in element in the late 90s, Michael Mantler’s Jazz Composer’s Orchestra did the same on 1968’s Communications, and there’s a bit of that feel here. A player with as unique and instantly recognisable a voice as Sanders always risks becoming a gimmick, but his performance here is stunningly beautiful, and the album would be unimaginable without him. [Apr 2021, p.57]- The Wire
Posted Apr 5, 2021 -
- Critic Score
More than the spiritual feel of Impulse! releases by Sanders or Coltrane, this music recalls the groove oriented work of Turrentine, Idris Muhammad and Grover Washington Jr for CTI and Kudu. It’s warm weather music, made to be played through speakers propped in open windows, facing the street. [Jul 2018, p.58]- The Wire
Posted Jul 13, 2018 -
- Critic Score
Complex puzzles for nimble feet to crack, custom-built for dancing. [Apr 2015, p.52]- The Wire
Posted May 15, 2015 -
- Critic Score
A warm and thoughtful record. Sometimes the production is a bit light--the first half in particular suffers from a rather MOR unobtrusiveness. But Laveaux’s voice is a treasure, her guitar playing is fresh and prickly, and things get more tangled and interesting the further along we go. [Apr 2018, p.67]- The Wire
Posted Apr 5, 2018 -
- Critic Score
It manages to evoke both void and overload simultaneously, and feels by turns oppressively dense and light as a feather. [Dec 2012, p.74]- The Wire
Posted Dec 7, 2012 -
- Critic Score
The Patience is a little less introverted [than 2021's Elephant In The Room], looking beyond the shutters of lockdown, and feels like Jenkins is maturing into an artist who is aware of how his frustrations need to breathe, wait (hence the title) and take time to coalesce. It’s his best music since his early mixtapes, and certainly his best official album since 2018’s remarkable Pieces Of A Man. [Sep 2023, p.57]- The Wire
Posted Oct 4, 2023 -
- Critic Score
LCD Soundsystem's gift is to forge iron from irony, show that cleverness need not be enervating. [#252, p.46]- The Wire
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- Critic Score
Explosively powerful, yet resoundingly fragile, her extended vocal technique illuminates an astoundingly rich range of embodied possibility. [Apr 2019, p.64]- The Wire
Posted May 20, 2019 -
- Critic Score
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 -
- Critic Score
The nature of their interaction sheds light on the physics and mathematical realities which underlie music and its capacity to stimulate or move us. Often in that process Drift Multiply happens to be unapologetically beautiful. [Dec 2020, p.55]- The Wire
Posted Dec 8, 2020 -
- Critic Score
Raven is full of powerful earworms that mobilise every inch of soul and flesh. [Feb 2023, p.52]- The Wire
Posted Mar 21, 2023 -
- Critic Score
Each listen evokes a different feeling. At times there is a feeling of contentedness. [Oct 2019, p.55]- The Wire
Posted Oct 16, 2019 -
- Critic Score
That the album works so well is less a testament of Twigs's charisma and talent--real as those may be--than it is the limitless possibilities of well-paid freelance teamwork. [Nov 2014, p.63]- The Wire
Posted Dec 15, 2014 -
- Critic Score
Sound Ancestors is a masterpiece. The 16 pieces not only expand the conversation around the art of sampling, but also further hiphop’s ability to grow as a collaborative Black artform. [Mar 2021, p.54]- The Wire
Posted Apr 5, 2021 -
- Critic Score
Implausibly enduring, oddly endearing and extreme in ways both unexpected and otherwise. [Sep 2020, p.57]- The Wire
Posted Nov 6, 2020 -
- Critic Score
Combining tight dynamics with the blurred intent of an impressionistic backwsh, some tracks rush by like vast landscapes, with individual features suddenly highlighted in freeze-frames. [#228, p.59]- The Wire
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- Critic Score
While Steinski's work with DeFranco aka Double Dee, is the most dazzling--precisely because it avoids the pitfalls of run of the mill culture jamming and guerrilla media tactics--Steinski's solo tracks certainly have their own pleasures, even if they are more straightforwardly textural than his collabotation with Double Dee. [June 2008, p.57]- The Wire
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- Critic Score
It’s very easy to get lost in this music, in the sense of immersively absorbed rather than uncomprehending. [Jun 2022, p.47]- The Wire
Posted Jun 14, 2022 -
- Critic Score
So it's Ra the entertainer we get here.... On the second disc the first three tracks take matters further out. [Oct 2014, p.70]- The Wire
Posted Dec 2, 2014 -
- Critic Score
The new Pusha T album is more assured and therefore effective than the last Clipse album, nowhere near the focused brilliance of their first two. All production is handled by Kanye West who’s likewise harking back to his glory days with assorted updates on his College Dropout sound. [Jul 2018, p.62]- The Wire
Posted Jul 13, 2018 -
- Critic Score
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 -
- Critic Score
Though the compilation is vast and the songs hardly bleed into one another--we’re often jumping genres, pivoting off cascading basslines and quickly changing pace without missing beats--there is a level of thematic cohesion here. [Feb 2019, p.66]- The Wire
Posted Jan 25, 2019 -
- Critic Score
It’s hard to get with the tiresome self-deprecation of that album title, the way he hides his pain behind a smile and hides his smile behind a dope aesthetic on that artfully blurred cover. When Earl does choose to project beyond his navel he has a powerful, booming voice and an ear for novelty. Where his gaze shifts to the outside world he can be inspirational. [Feb 2019, p.56]- The Wire
Posted Jan 25, 2019 -
- Critic Score
On Scaring The Hoes, Brown and Peggy sound great together while offering few artistic revelations. [May 2023, p.52]- The Wire
Posted Apr 11, 2023 -
- Critic Score
As with For You And I, the awkwardness of these beats seems dictated less by technical nuance and more by the idiosyncratic rhythms of the human body. ... Even more so than its predecessor, the album is maybe most striking when this idiosyncrasy explicitly reflects James’s lived experience as a Londoner, channelling the steppy rhythms of the hardcore continuum. [Jul 2021, p.60- The Wire
Posted Jun 29, 2021 -
- Critic Score
The album's so-called simple songs might be ambiguous enough to leave you wondering what they're about, even as you're thinking that they were written just for you. [Jun 2015, p.49]- The Wire
Posted Jun 5, 2015 -
- Critic Score
The album has almost Wagnerian scope and immersive power, and at just over 50 minutes it's well organised as a start-to-finish listen. [Mar 2011, p.50]- The Wire
Posted Apr 28, 2011 -
- The Wire
Posted Dec 22, 2021 -
- Critic Score
It's far from perfect record--the guests are phoned in, the beats sometime out-cheese pre-breakdown Kanye at his cheesiest--but it has more than a few perfect moments. [Jul 2013, p.68]- The Wire
Posted Jul 3, 2013 -
- Critic Score
Pick A Day To Die pieces together Sunburned fragments dating back to the late 2000s, resulting in an endearing zigzag of moods. [Mar 2021, p.58]- The Wire
Posted Apr 5, 2021