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Tiny Mix Tapes

Everything that Happens Will Happen Today is the product of one of the better collaborations that modern music has known.

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The Phoenix

Everything That Happens is a brilliant addition to a creative partnership that has yielded so much and shouldn’t have taken 27 years to rekindle.

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The Onion (A.V. Club)

Everything That Happens is an unexpected album, but a stirring one nonetheless.

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Hartford Courant

Here, Eno, who wrote the music, opts for a more familiar sound, mixing electronic elements and acoustic guitars to create cottony, unobtrusive pop songs.

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Uncut

It's mostly beautiful, and very civilised. [Oct 2008, p.81]

Village Voice

Byrne's singing was never exactly the first thing you loved about him--he so often has the high-pitched blankness of a sustained yawn. But he sounds lovely here, age bringing a surer and rawer tone along with more confidence in his question mark.

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Billboard

While Everything is firmly grounded in Eno and Byrne's previous work, their mutual commitment to musical exploration ensures the album rarely sounds like something we've heard before.

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Drowned In Sound

For those exhausted by a modern landscape, where playing a game of spot the musical reference is de rigueur when approaching every new release, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is certainly a welcome relief.

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Rolling Stone

With their new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the pair rejoin the rock conversation as if they'd never left.

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Slant Magazine

By this point in his career, Byrne's voice has a comforting effect, and the rest of the album builds on this feeling, the lyrics clever if not a little standard, and the music catchy and inviting.

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PopMatters

All the proof you need is how buoyant and energized this album leaves you feeling. Hallelujah.

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All Music Guide

This is unfettered joyful listening, and in its own small way, even profound.

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Pitchfork

It's an enjoyable listen in the here and now, which is all an album has to be, even when created by giants.

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Paste Magazine

Where Eno falters, Byrne picks up the slack. In a first for the notoriously skeptical artist, Everything that Happens is cautiously optimistic, maybe even hopeful.

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Filter

If you generally like Byrne's music, you will unquestionably enjoy this record. If you've come looking for revolution, I'd recommend a time machine. [Holiday 2008, p.100]

Blender

It’s a modest record, but also the first Byrne album in decades to feel sprung from outside the ex-Head’s head space.

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Dot Music

Eno and Byrne's twist, however, is the optimism and hope that breathes through every minute of what is not another boundary-demolishing collaboration, but a delicately crafted work that could only have been recorded after dispensing with the rules.

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Spin

The second duo record by the former Talking Heads frontman and his experimental producing partner is a thoughtful singer-songwriter exercise. [Oct 2008, p.104]

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The Wire

This mood of rocking-chair wistfulness becomes soporific, and there are times when, frankly, the mind, unjabbed by the sort of stimulus that was once Byrne & Eno's stock in trade, begins to wander. [Oct 2008, p.54]

cokemachineglow

The terrible truth of this album hangs stupidly overhead--that it’s a yawner.

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The Guardian

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today may be an album of subtle pleasures, but they are pleasures all the same.

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Observer Music Monthly

A record on which electronics and a grown-up wistfulness meet in a charming, comfortable manner.

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Under The Radar

An underwhelming collection that lacks focus and rarely lives up to the lofty aspirations of these two titans of modern music. [Fall 2008, p.79]

Austin Chronicle

Thirty years after first collaborating on the Talking Heads, these two don't have to mine the past since there's nothing that remarkable about Everything.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this album is 7.3 (out of 10) based on 21 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

nod dinnof gave it a2:
A major disappointment. Somewhere in the middle of the album the lyrics go "This groove is out of fashion/These beats are 20 years old." Yep. Exactly. Although I thought 'groove' was an overstatement. It's a uneven, saccharine flavored attempt to force sunshine in the absence of inspiration. Irritating. First listen was in my car. I'm a person that keeps every CD that crosses my path and I rolled down the window to through the thing out. In the end I couldn't do it. Don't know why.

Simon S gave it an8:
In their decades-long careers, Eno and Byrne have not exactly been strangers to experimental and niche musical territory but, at the same time, they’ve also proven their abilities in writing clever pop songs. The album finds the duo in a more relaxed and affirming state of mind, and the result is a set of songs that can actually be appreciated as songs: no pretensions, no excessively slick production and no bubblegum mentality. This is, in effect, their equivalent of XTC's “Skylarking”.

shotsy f gave it a10:
It grows on you. after about 10 times it had become a 10.

Dave R. gave it a10:
Warm, uplifting, reassuring treasure: Just what we needed i"in these troubled times."

JIm V gave it a2:
Worse than a yawner -- a nightmare! Byrne populates tracks Eno didn't know what to do with, with long-distance whining and smarm. Most disappointing album of the year!

Jeff G. gave it an8:
One might expect something more revolutionary when the creative talents of these two musical titans are marshaled; especially considering their previous groundbreaking collaboration. Or, given Byrne's penchant for the abstract and complex lyricism, you might expect something more cerebral. In either case, you'd be mistaken: this album is musically simple (comparably!), accessible and full of light. Simply beautiful.

Max M gave it a5:
There was only one track that I liked and it is possibly the greatest song I've heard all year. If you buy most of you music off iTunes like me, just start with "Strange Overtones". I made the mistake of buying all the other worthless tracks.

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Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

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