- Record Label: Vagrant
- Release Date: Jul 23, 2013
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Jul 22, 2013Only a handful of the tracks here have a lot of staying power, and the rest, while always colorful and even enjoyable, are fast to fade.
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Aug 9, 2013It's not the music that sinks Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, it's those lyrics: well-intentioned, certainly, but as deep as the bowl on a one-hitter.
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Oct 4, 2013Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes may not be the most stellar example of what the title band can do, but is worth a listen to fans of the band and fans of new versions of old styles of music making.
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Q MagazineJan 27, 2014Nominally folk gospel, they embrace an array of styles from rock to dance, via unashamedly esoteric. [Oct 2013, p.100]
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Aug 19, 2013Mawkish and messy.
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Jul 23, 2013At their best, they conjure a California-commune Arcade Fire. But they can also verge on a hippie Hee Haw.
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Jul 22, 2013Ultimately, it's unfair and even glib to say this album doesn't hold water because it has no "Home" or "40 Day Dream," but all the same, one laments the loss of the magical, poppy Midas touch Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros once wielded with such ease.
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Aug 22, 2013His songs are, in places, bleaker than on his previous two albums.
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Jul 22, 2013On record, though--and particularly this one, which presents churchy performances in mixes both realistic and surreal--these same Up With People tropes don't work as well, particularly with prolonged exposure, as inferior follow-ups to promising debuts by the Polyphonic Spree and I'm From Barcelona have proven.
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Aug 26, 2013There might well be a genuine intention on Ebert’s part to produce something of real artistic worth, but so long as he remains as verbally vapid and as musically undisciplined as he has been on this record, it’s hard to see his output having serious appeal to anybody who wants to be engaged on a level beyond mindless singalong.
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Jul 23, 2013Ringleader Alex Ebert produced the album and sonically, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros feels slick and compressed.
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Jul 23, 2013Even despite her [Jade Castrinos] standout moments and Ebert’s assurance that Edward Sharpe is now something much bigger than him and a rehab-inspired alter-ego, the whole thing is his show, through and through.
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Entertainment WeeklyJul 22, 2013This self-titled outing generates its best vibes when Ebert throws his arms around deep-seated psychedelia like the skronking "Let's Get High" and the chiming head trip "If I Were Free." [26 Jul 2013, p.67]
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Jul 22, 2013The album's adventurous musical scope serves to further expand the mythos behind Ebert's ego-fueled, drug-addled, socio-religious musical experiment.
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Aug 21, 2013Of course, as with any such unrelentingly blissful formula, if their sky-facing euphoria and sentimentality can’t be matched then the whole thing can be terribly nauseating.
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Aug 26, 2013A bright, colour-saturated record indebted to the loopiest excesses of 60s psychedelia – but the chirpiness is wearing thin.
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Aug 23, 2013The cult-like enthusiasm of The Magnetic Zeros is best experienced live, where their massed forces translate into a somewhat muddy morass.
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Jul 23, 2013Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros finds the band/collective in the less useful act of simply aping a style, in this case the electric praise music of feel-good Christian hippies.
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Jul 31, 2013Their self-titled LP has the troupe’s familiar indie-“folk”-meets-psychedelia soundings, yet adds some new wrinkles.
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Aug 26, 2013Brilliant, frustrating, thrilling and irritating. In other words, exactly what we’ve come to expect from an Edward Sharpe album.
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Jul 22, 2013The freedom of expression and thematic irregularity that we hear while listening to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros is a fabulous release from the traditionally despised contract that constrained Ebert’s first and former band, Ima Robot.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 25
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Mixed: 5 out of 25
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Negative: 3 out of 25
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Jul 29, 2013
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Jul 23, 2013
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Sep 14, 2015