Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | 87 |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| The A.V. Club | (favorable) |
| BBC | (favorable) |
| Robert Christgau | |
| Entertainment Weekly | (A-) |
| The Music Box | |
| NME | (8/10) |
| Paste | (very positive) |
| Pitchfork Media | (10.0/10.0) |
| PopMatters | (favorable) |
| Rolling Stone | |
| The Village Voice | (favorable) |
The album received widespread acclaim upon release, including positive reviews from media outlets such as Rolling Stone and BBC. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was voted as the best album of the year in The Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll. Brent Sirota of Pitchfork Media gave the album a perfect 10.0 rating, noting that the album was "simply a masterpiece." David Fricke of Rolling Stone praised its resemblance to psychedelia while Allmusic writer Zac Johnson lauded its musical complexity.
Trouser Press was one of the few major media outlets that did not give the album a good review, stating that "more time spent in the songwriting lab might have yielded material more suitable to the evident studio effort invested and brought Wilco closer to making a truly great album." Robert Christgau gave the album a one-star honorable mention rating, stating that he found the lyrics and vocals in general to be boring.
Though Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was recorded before the September 11, 2001 attacks, critics perceived references in the album to the attacks. For example, Jeff Gordinier of Entertainment Weekly compared the two towers of Marina City to the World Trade Center towers. Also containing similar themes are the songs "War on War" and "Ashes of American Flags" which contains the line "I would like to salute the ashes of American flags."
The album was voted as the 100th "Greatest Album Ever" in a 2006 Q Magazine poll. In 2008, Rolling Stone critic Tom Moon listed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot among the 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot found a place on many lists of the greatest albums of the 2000s. Rolling Stone ranked the album at number three on its list of the 100 Best Albums of the Decade. Pitchfork Media put the album at number four on the Top 200 Albums of the 2000s. The alternative music website also named "Poor Places" and "Jesus, Etc." as the 147th and 61st best songs of the decade, respectively. Paste named the album the second-best album of the decade.
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