Era Extrana radiates with enough passion to make life more than a little woozy.
There are surely treasures to be found in The King of Limbs, as the listens pile up ... However, the initial awe is simply not there, and the love-at-first-listen isn’t either.
The highs are notable. The problem is, Blake has put himself in a tight box, and when he strays out of it the material wavers.
It's with Nine Types that they've taken their longest step toward highlighting the influence of Bowie's late '70s/early '80s work and weaving it into a current context.
As Wild Beasts records tend to go, Smother is par for the course in terms of its opulent eccentricities and its magnificently polished arrangements. This time around, though, the Beasts have been tamed. Frankly, that's a disappointment.
The Year of Hibernation occupies many spaces at once, a seeming contradiction that makes better use of its incongruous pieces than most records do of its complimentary pieces. The result is both mournful and joyful, but totally enjoyable.
On the lofty Ceremonials, even a bad boyfriend can be an epiphany from on high.
This fully delivers on the potential that 2008’s Wagonwheel Blues hinted at, a swath of nostalgia in a storm of mind-bending audio. This is boss-gaze, and—sorry, old dudes and purity chasers—it’s stupendous.
If there's an underlying motif that guides Let England Shake, it's one of being utterly enraged with the seemingly endless cycle of war and violence, while simultaneously being captivated by the mythology of one's home nation.
The songs on Skying are dense, towering, and occasionally overstuffed.
Far from that folksy, laid-back image, Helplessness Blues confirms Fleet Foxes' place as one of the most exacting, creative, and straight-up best bands making music in 2011.
It's a logical progression from Emma, and one that few artists have been able to make. Most try to return to their wallowing, to mine the same material that connected them with their audience in the first place. But Vernon deserves tremendous credit for wanting to express his hope and his joy.
Where Clark previously impressed through the sheer audacity of her strengths as a songwriter and arranger, here she has stopped trying to impress and simply made an album assembled through feel and intuition, and, taken as a whole, it feels perfect.