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This is an awesome, magnificent, incandescent, trailblazing record.
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The drums get busy at times, but never fear--this sounds more like Rounds than it does like anything else. Just a little funkier.
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Like Madlib or MF DOOM, Four Tet is at the crest of the electronica/hip-hop wave, forcing the genre's evolution into new realms and making everyone else look like amateurs in the process.
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When Pause came out in 2001, that sounded like an artist at his peak. But get this: He's still at his peak, and the view is no less scintillating, crisp, and sweet, rolling with drums and shaded by clouds of horn reverb and file-sharing swish.
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"Everything Ecstatic" pulses with imagination and subtle talent, choosing to follow a sweet technicolour road rather than take a harder, and far well trodden path.
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Even at its most intense, Everything Ecstatic combines percussive aggression with warmth and vivid emotion.
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MagnetEmphasizes melodic intention in a manner that transcends electronica or the outer reaches of experimental hip hop. [#68, p.92]
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It boasts the asset of versatility, possessing the buoyancy and charisma of a distinguishable party album whilst remaining resistant to the usual temptations associated with the so-called “lap-pop” tag.
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MojoIt's a noticeably urban record, an irritated rebuttal to the notion that dance music is dead. [Jun 2005, p.98]
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An album of considerable depths, beauties and terrifying contrasts.
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This is his best flowing album to date, his most demanding, most infuriating, most invigorating and most intense.
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It lacks the mind-blowing qualities that made Rounds the essential album in his catalogue, but Everything Ecstatic is another must-own from Four Tet, the most reliable of producers.
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There are more ideas in a few minutes of Everything Ecstatic than on most big dance producers' recent albums.
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UncutFour Tet's epiphany is concerned entirely with the properties of sound itself. [Jun 2005, p.117]
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Even if it is hard at certain points to cut through the thick fog of psych drum riffs, Everything Ecstatic leaves ears ringing like a loud summer afternoon in the city – sun-drenched cacophony that doesn’t quite know where it’s going just yet.
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It's the sound of a music fiend obsessively pawing at his record collection and troubling over ways to pay it proper tribute.
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New Musical Express (NME)Hebden has recalibrated his sound to something darker and more rhythmic, without losing a note of melody. [21 May 2005, p.66]
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Everything Ecstatic doesn’t come together as solidly as prior Four Tet releases, but it unquestionably contains the blueprint for far greater explorations to come.
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SpinSometimes Kieran Hebden's electronic music is dawn-over-the-Buddhist-shrine gorgeous. [Jun 2005, p.108]
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Everything Ecstatic marks his first slight step backward as a solo artist but it's hardly a failure.
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For the most part, Evertything Ecsatic succeeds, but occasionally Hebden strays from the path.
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Q MagazineImmediately satisfying. [Jun 2005, p.120]
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BlenderThis dense noise assault may not sustain the feeling of ecstasy from beginning to end, but its percolating trance rhythms... and captivating space experiments... connect on a visceral level that's rare in the cerebral world of electronic music. [Jun 2005, p.109]
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The left turn Hebden has taken into jumpy Krautrock with 2005's Everything Ecstatic will make listeners yearn for the clever, nuanced productions he turned in on Pause and Rounds.
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The WireHebden is a voracious consumer and producer of ideas, although there is sometimes the feeling, amid all this glut and gusto, that they're ideas for idea's sake. [#256, p.54]
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Everything Ecstatic provides an enjoyable listen, but it also sounds as much like a groping as a declaration.
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The album just doesn't have the innovation that previous albums from Hebden have shown.
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It’s an intermittently interesting and somewhat forward looking work-in-process, but at the moment Hebden sounds like an underground hip-hop producer with a few ideas but no MC.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 22
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Mixed: 3 out of 22
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Negative: 2 out of 22
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Apr 17, 2022
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SanYFeb 18, 2006
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andrewhAug 31, 2005Best Album Ever. Even better live.