All Music Guide's Thom Jureck says "thank the gods" that The Wire "isn't like anything else on television." And the show's first-ever soundtrack, out today on Nonesuch, "carries its own punchy swagger" and "stands on its own" as a work of art. Yes, writes Jureck, "It's art man, period."

The album contains 35 tracks—songs from across genres and dialogue taken from across five years of the series. The eclectic mix, for Jureck, harkens back to radio in its heyday, when "you never knew what you were gonna hear from one minute to the next," when radio

was the soundtrack to life, and in that sense, at nearly 80 minutes, this whompy, unwieldy, unlikely wonder of a mixtape is a representation of that same thing for characters in The Wire.

But even radio at its best never came with the "added bonus" that accompanies The Wire soundtrack—three liner notes that "are alone worth the price of admission." As Jureck describes them:

[S]eparated by color stills from the series, they are that good. They're provocative and revealing, yet utterly elliptical, at once mercurial and unintentionally evasive. They lay it out: you can scoop it up and take it in deep, or simply ignore or reject it. But they don't lie and neither does the music assembled here. This is a brilliantly done project. Period.

To read the complete review, visit allmusic.com. For more on the soundtrack, click here.