America Give Up - Howler
America Give Up Image
Metascore
68 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 17 Critics What's this?

User Score
6.7 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 7 Ratings

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  • Summary: This is the first full-length release for the Minnesota rock band led by Jordan Gatesmith.

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9 out of 17
  2. Mixed: 8 out of 17
  3. Negative: 0 out of 17
  1. New Musical Express (NME)
    Jan 18, 2012
    80
    America Give Up is, quite simply, an effortlessly brilliant debut.
  2. The Fly (UK)
    Feb 10, 2012
    80
    America Give Up proves them to be far more exciting than a mere second generation rip-off.
  3. The Guardian
    Jan 12, 2012
    80
    Howler have enough good [songs] to remind you of how good the Strokes used to be, rather than make you think how much better the Strokes are than this.
  4. Under The Radar
    Mar 21, 2012
    60
    This is mainly just sunny, disintegrated, low-stakes rock music. [Mar 2012, p.84]
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User Reviews

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 3
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 3
  3. Negative: 0 out of 3
  1. Binki
    9
    "America Give Up" is not perfect but for a debut album it's really great ! My favorites tracks are "Beach Sluts" and "Black Lagoon". They're also really good live ! A band to keep an eye on !… Collapse
  2. Steech
    7
    Howler is a group of impossibly young people from Minneapolis who blur the line between guitar rock and guitar pop. Perhaps that impossible youth is a barrier against sounding like those other Minneapolis bands that - once upon a time - also blurred the line between guitar rock and guitar pop. Howler sounds absolutely nothing like Hüsker Dü or The Replacements. Instead, they bear more than a glancing resemblance to a band from a later epoch, The Strokes. But where The Strokes were jangly and focused on 60s rock, Howler is fuzzy and based on 80s rock. America Give Up is destined to show up on a lot of "best of 2012" lists. More importantly than that, though, America Give Up seems like an album we will still be listening to five or ten or fifteen years from now. Howler shares some of the same callow characteristics of other fuzzy pop bands. Unlike Best Coast's Crazy For You (not to pick on Best Coast - I happen to like that record very much), America Give Up has more than naivete for appeal. It's a very good album by many measures and the band seems like it will grow.… Expand
  3. MusiclyMade
    4
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