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Oct 15, 2013From the brash, banging tracks all the way to the idyllic soft touches, Beautiful Rewind is captivating and completely refreshing to hear.
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Oct 16, 2013It sprawls and can feel tenuous, even precipitously close to collapse under its own weight, but the moment of calamity never arrives. It stands instead as a monument not to the person who has erected it, but to the multitudinous influences that brought it into being.
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Q MagazineNov 25, 2013Free from any external pressure to conform, Hebden has managed to make a wholly uncompromising record that remains compulsive from start to finish. [Dec 2013, p.115]
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Oct 29, 2013Beautiful Rewind is an extended tribute to pirate radio, connecting the dots between jungle, garage and minimalist house music.
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Oct 17, 2013Quickly working 11 tracks into 40 minutes, the album is visceral and unrefined, two qualities not often associated with Hebden.
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Oct 15, 2013Even though Beautiful Rewind is a call to dance music's past, it's the contemporary, more experimental sounds that establish the album as a standout in both the Four Tet oeuvre and a growing collection of dance albums that pay homage to the past.
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Oct 14, 2013While the album does seem rather patched together with a lack of focus--it plays out like a pair of distinct EPs and a couple transitional orphans on shuffle--there's an irrefutable charm to the restlessness.
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Oct 14, 2013An (almost) unexpected pleasure.
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Oct 14, 2013Thankfully, he's enough of a careful, diligent, and experienced artist to make even the lackluster experiments feel vital and significant in the larger scope of his oeuvre.
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Oct 10, 2013In general, the album's tracks take more risks, and surprise in a way that we've not quite heard from Hebden before.
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Oct 10, 2013At times it’s a strange record. The rough tones don’t register as forcefully as the hooks on previous works. That said, it’s a rewarding listen, one that eventually embeds itself once given full attention.
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Oct 10, 2013Beautiful Rewind is the sound of an artist looking to cut loose, and its playful spirit proves catching.
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Oct 17, 2013At just over 40 minutes, Beautiful Rewind is an effortless listen, but when it wanders it feels like a bauble, one from an artist from whom we are accustomed to receiving richer gifts.
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Oct 18, 2013A focus on beats and ecstatic dance fever comes at the expense of more expansive songcraft revealed by Four Tet of yore, but the effect remains otherworldly in its mix of finesse and raucous musical adventure.
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Oct 18, 2013On Beautiful Rewind, Hebden displays the possibilities and complexities within the music itself.
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Oct 15, 2013Admittedly, Beautiful Rewind isn’t Kieran Hebden’s magnum opus, but it’s an album that succeeds at both moving the listener emotionally and, like much of the producer’s impressive body of work, inspiring him or her to literally and physically move.
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Oct 10, 2013There’s certainly nothing on Beautiful Rewind with a hook as memorable as ‘Locked’, from last year’s Pink. When Four Tet hits that sweet spot between fragile beauty and gritty pirate radio music (as on the aforementioned ‘Aerial’ and ‘Buchla’, for instance) however, you really feel as if he’s onto something.
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Oct 31, 2013It's still recognizably Four Tet, still a cut above most EDM. It just feels a little frustrating.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 12
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Mixed: 0 out of 12
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Negative: 0 out of 12
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Feb 28, 2014
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Oct 16, 2013