Buy Now
| Buy on |
|
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Sep 17, 2014There’s nothing here as inventive as the ambient electro, hip-hop, psych, and string-orchestra versions made by the amateurs and semi-pros who embraced the project 18 months ago. There are, however, some very good takes indeed.
-
MojoSep 12, 2014The results are too eccentric and sprightly to squash the music's potential. [Oct 2014, p.89]
-
Q MagazineSep 3, 2014[Heaven's Ladder, performed by Beck is] so good, though, that it makes the rest of this complicated exercise seem like a waste of time. [Oct 2014, p.108]
-
Jul 31, 2014For those late to the party, the album offers an opportunity to catch up and at least not miss out on a fine batch of Beck songs which might have otherwise evaded the mainstream. For those with more time and the urge to explore, though, just get yourself down to songreader.net where the real spirit of the project still awaits you.
-
Jul 29, 2014Many of the contributors give the material a rootsy, rattletrap approach, creating a flat consistency that drags a bit. It’s not until the second half that Beck Song Reader comes fitfully to life.
-
Jul 28, 2014These head-scratching moments mean that, despite the collection's successes, it probably works better as a sheet music oddity than a cohesive album.
-
Jul 28, 2014Ultimately, it's a risk-free album of covers: accomplished, certainly, but hardly a novel experiment.
-
Aug 4, 2014For all the eccentric performances and approaches, it’s hard to warm up to these songs.
-
Jul 31, 2014Not everyone is interested in branching out, which is the album’s main shortcoming. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with Tweedy or fun. sounding like themselves, but it feels like a missed opportunity to try something different.
-
Jul 30, 2014The idea is clever, and very Beck: a mix of the modern and the antiquated so fluid that you start to see how they're not that different to begin with. The execution feels out of his hands, and really, out of everyone's--just another project whose purpose seems lost in the labyrinth of production.