| Rating |
Summary |
|
| n/a by www.adequacy.net |
Everything is here: melody, harmony, great lyrics, smart instrumentation and pure emotion. It’s book ended by two of the best songs of the year and everything in between is music gold. |
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| n/a by www.prefixmag.com |
With his band's fourth studio album, frontman Will Sheff stakes a claim here for the right to be called the best songwriter working right now. |
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| n/a by www.filter-mag.com |
Wildly alive, majestic and by turns brooding and raucous--often within the same song--The Stage Names burns with all the loneliness and adventure of a never-ending road trip. |
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| n/a by Pitchfork Media |
Despite its density (they fit worlds into just nine songs), the album remains exciting and accessible, albeit highly sobering. |
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| n/a by www.avclub.com |
The Stage Names is a relatively straightforward roots-rock record, rounded out by clever, pop-culture-obsessed songs. |
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| n/a by www.dustedmagazine.com |
The Stage Names is raucous, rambunctious and occasionally quite funny. |
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| n/a by www.sputnikmusic.com |
The Stage Names, despite being dense, is rarely difficult and is probably the band's most accessible effort to date. |
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| n/a by Popmatters |
On The Stage Names, the band have once again shown themselves to be expert at creating this undeniably sad and powerful indie rock. It’s one of the year’s essential albums. |
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| n/a by Billboard |
The cerebral lyrics take center stage, as it were, while the band rocks out much harder than it did on 2005's melancholy "Black Sheep Boy." |
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| n/a by www.nowtoronto.com |
The Stage Names is much more of a balls-out rock album than most of Okkervil River's oeuvre, and also more orchestral and layered, with arrangements that include everything from non-sissy glockenspiel to metronome percussion. The complexity is the perfect counterpart to Sheff's dense writing. |
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| n/a by www.drownedinsound.com |
Simple, patient, dreary (in a good way) music dominates this soundtrack, providing the perfect accompaniment for Sheff to wail off about doctor and patient sex in a shrink office, society’s pervasive attraction to celebrity and the plights of aging, among other topics. |
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| n/a by www.austinchronicle.com |
The urgency is still there, as guitars and pianos take turns screaming during the breakdown, but the violence is replaced with a sense of frivolity and playfulness that lingers throughout the group's fifth release. |
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| n/a by www.stylusmagazine.com |
This album comes in a neat package: well-guarded and wry, artists competently displaying their hard-earned skill. It's all very professional, but no more meaningful than the titular appellations, the smile of a persona. |
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| n/a by www.villagevoice.com |
The Stage Names shares the frenzy of pre–"Black Sheep" songs like 'The War Criminal Rises and Speaks,' and if it isn't as monolithic as the album that spurred the band's rise to "Believer"-subscriber prominence, it does contain several fine examples of hyper-articulate hysteria. |
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| n/a by www.slantmagazine.com |
The band's arrangements are still wonderfully unpolished, so while these tunes should please anyone who buys CDs at Starbucks, they still pack some ragged glory of what makes the Austin collective so intoxicating on stage. |
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| n/a by NME |
Yes, it's solid rock but what they might lack in glamour (no back up dancers here, dude), they make up for in sheer sincerity. |
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| n/a by www.pastemagazine.com |
These sad-sack satirists pepper their fourth album with tracks that quicken the pace to anaerobic levels, as frontman Will Sheff liberally shpritzes his microphone while the band gets lathered up like participants in a grade-school dodgeball game. |
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| n/a by www.cokemachineglow.com |
The nearly impossible thematic scope attempted and deftly handled here is a tribute to Will Sheff's dexterity and range as a songwriter (if not a vocalist), and the band's chops for being able to keep pace. |
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| 3 by Aftonbladet |
Amerikansk indierock kan vara det tråkigaste som finns, likformigheten känns ofta rent förlamande. Men fortfarande vågar några få kravla sig ur uniformen och gör... |
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| n/a by Expressen |
ROCK
DÅ: Neil Young: ”On the beach” (1974) NU: Bright Eyes: ”Cassadaga” (2007) En stor amerikansk berättare presenterar sig. Inte så att Will She... |
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| 8 by Dagensskiva.com |
I den sedvanliga diskussionen huruvida skivan såsom format och fysiskt föremål idag, då musiken allt oftare förvaras på datorn, mp3-spelaren och mobiltelefonen, skulle vara död fortsätter jag med best... |
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| 4 by Sydsvenskan |
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| 7 by Metica |
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