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CRITIC REVIEWS
90
While it may be inspired by Sandy's fallout, Landfall's reach runs to a sea of loss, chaos, and confusion. It's an elemental mystery of quietly epic proportions made exceptional through clarity of thought and feeling.
85
There is a profound sense of loss, not only physical, and awe turning to desperation as the energy develops and the quiet gives way to agitated rhythms from the quartet as the recognition of the wreckage takes hold. Anderson ensures that the daily ordinariness of everyday life and conversation is never fully recessed, as her narration swings between descriptions that are real, then surreal and then overwhelming.
83
The results are better than we could have hoped for.
80
The composer’s song cycle on the 2015 storm that devastated New York has the power to make us shiver with empathy.
80
Her text muses on things swept away – dreams, memories, old equipment, extinct animals – while the music, some drawn from pieces they’d been working on for years, has retrospectively acquired storm-specific titles, echoing the way that floods literally place things in different contexts.
80
Landfall is a welcome and fitting addition to both artist’s canons, which in itself is very high praise.
80
It’s a hard-hitting, ambitious album that only serves to further consolidate the reputations of all involved.
77
Laurie Anderson’s collaboration with the San Francisco-based string quartet presents a powerful, elegiac cycle of songs that show how human memory can be stronger than catastrophe.
70
Laurie Anderson and the Kronos Quartet are two names frequently associated with the experimental, yet their first collaboration with each other, Landfall, is by their standards conventional.
Laurie Anderson and the Kronos Quartet have created a haunting, mysterious, and always tipping on the edge of comfort record with their collaborative work "Landfall." Electronic sounds, beats, and noises beautifully intertwine with the Kronos Quartet's minimalist stringed arrangements, as does Anderson, on occasion, with her realist and surrealist passages about Hurricane Sandy. To say that I enjoy one track over another would result in the failure to see this work as a unified, ... read more
A little obsessed with the album centerpiece here - 'Nothing Left but their Names'. I'm feeling apocalyptic and so having an Ent muse about time, dinosaurs, yoga class, human language and our impending extinction just appeals.
Far worse ways you could spend 10 minutes today than spinning that tune...
Far worse ways you could spend 10 minutes today than spinning that tune...
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Year End Lists
| #56 | / | PopMatters |
| #61 | / | Uncut |
| #82 | / | The Quietus |
Track List
- CNN Predicts a Monster Storm
- Wind Whistles Through the Dark City
- The Water Rises
- Our Street Is a Black River
- Galaxies
- Darkness Falls
- Dreams
- Dreams Translated
- The Dark Side
- Built You a Mountain
- The Electricity Goes out and We Move to a Hotel
- We Learn to Speak yet Another Language
- Dawn of the World
- The Wind Lifted the Boats and Left Them on the Highway
- It Twisted the Street Signs
- Then It Receded
- The Nineteen Stars of Heaven
- Nothing Left but Their Names
- All the Extinct Animals
- Galaxies II
- Never What You Think It Will Be
- Thunder Continues in the Aftermath
- We Blame Each Other for Losing the Way
- Another Long Evening
- Riding Bicycles Through the Muddy Streets
- Helicopters Hang Over Downtown
- We Head Out
- Everything Is Floating
- Gongs and Bells Sing
- Old Motors and Helicopters
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Added on: December 4, 2017