Anxiety Always

While the casual listener may tire of the repetitive synthiness of Anxiety Always, fans of the genre will dig the act's '80s-inflected tunes.

Anxiety Always shows Miller and Kuperus trying a lot of new ideas and singing with much more range and emotion.

Like the most effective camp, the line between what's intentionally and accidentally embarrassing is utterly ambiguous. [#58, p.82]

Adult. add unflinching aggression to the razor-sharp beats and vaguely sinister lyrics first mapped out on 2001's Resuscitation. [May 2003, p.104]

'Anxiety Always' is a triumph of punkish spirit, an album that embraces creeping horror like an un-comfort blanket.

It's tempting to call it one of the most messily brilliant things we'll see all year, but it can't, in good faith, be recommended to everyone: if the duo's buzzy neurosis was enough to drive some people nuts before, the raw jumping and nagging of Anxiety Always will sound to many like the shoddiest, most amusical sham to be held up as a masterpiece in many of our lives.

Anxiety Always is, to put it bluntly, one pissed-off album, a snide, sarcastic, bitchy commentary on trend-followers, relationships, and the brainwashed masses out there, and it's so up front in its condescension that you're taken aback at first, so punk-like is Adult.'s sound.

Hipster-mocking songs like "Turn Your Back" aren't as funny as the scene they want to outsmart. [May 2003, p.116]

Twitchy, insistent and more kinetic than a dancefloor covered with electric eels, Anxiety Always should establish Adult. as the anti-Fischerspooner -- an '80s-inflected duo whose garish stylistic flourishes are far outweighed by their extensive resonant merits.

Adult. proves that there need be nothing fey or even particularly cheeky about synthesizer music. [#231, p.75]