Rate the Critics!

I have discovered an easy way to see if the music-review site you use is worthwhile or not.

1) Go to this page, which is metacritic's roundup of all the reviews of the Electric Six's "Fire" (2003).
2) Notice that metacritic has read all the reviews and assigned them a score from 1 to 100, with 100 being the best. This number represents the number metacritic thinks the reviewer would have given it, because often the sites don't use stars or whatever. Sometimes the sites have ratings, and they just convert those to the 100 point scale.
3) This is the tricky part: this number is also a fantastic gauge how good the reviewing site is. Again, 100 is the best score, and 1 is the worst. Logically we can extrapolate that the Onion is right about twice as often as Pitchfork, and that Urb and Stylus are pretty good, whereas the Guardian isn't really that great.

The caveat here is that "Fire" isn't really a hundred-point album, but it's definitely a 90, and I can certainly understand the VV giving it a 91. I think it's telling that Pitchfork and the VV share some writers, a lot of the time the same records get wildly different scores: the Voice represents what happens when their talent and intelligence gets tempered by people who aren't engaging in the worst kind of hipsterism.