Hummingbird

With Hummingbird, Local Natives have made a thoughtful, lovely album with small gestures that provide great rewards.

For all its sadness, Hummingbird manages to craft a friscalating, sun-setting, post-adolescence in the rear-view mirror.

The deeper emotions being stirred this time around fans out to several other highlights. [Mar 2013, p.106]

[Mt Washington is] an early contender for song of the year, with Local Natives themselves current frontrunners for unexpectedly brilliant comeback of 2013.

There’s an undercurrent of stormy emotionalism that really comes out on the band’s second album.

Hummingbird may not be as instantly likable as Gorilla Manor, but its seductive beauty and emotional pull is virtually impossible to resist.

Hummingbird plays like a sophisticated and logical forward progression. [Jan-Feb 2013, p.88]

This isn't the boldest step forward, but it looks like Local Natives are on a steady ascent and Hummingbird is sure to solidify them as one of the best indie-rock bands out there today.

Hummingbird feels wiser, grander, and more knowing.

Hummingbird is an album of hidden rewards, a record to pick and choose tracks from in order to purvey a single feeling or contribute to the perfect mixtape. What it's not, though, is a cohesive, compelling whole.

This ain't perfect, nor is it exactly sui generis, but it still ought to bump up their summer-festival-lineup-poster font size by a solid five points or so.

From the first sung note of Hummingbird, Local Natives are frank in their presentation of a serious album, challenging listeners to heal along with them; cognizant that investment is proportional to remuneration.

Hummingbird proves that these guys are maturing into a sound that's both singular and wrenching with severity.

The follow-up sometimes feels like its coasting down a long but not-so-steep hill. [8 Feb 2013, p.75]

While there's nothing as immediately engaging on Hummingbird as Gorilla Manor's "Wide Eyes," the album compensates with beauty and seriousness.

Sometimes, the results are heavily wrought and obviously worked over (the muddled instrumentation in the chorus of Breakers comes to mind), and some of the skittering grooves (the spastic tribal pounding of Wooly Mammoth) don't quite fit in the album's overarching arc. Nevertheless, the stately elegance of Hummingbird emphasizes how Local Natives are fit for the role of indie rock saviors.

Opener You & I setting the tone, all unhurried melancholia topped by Kelcey Ayer's soaring vocal. Elsewhere, they show they're equally adept at the euphoria in which Arcade Fire deal.

Produced by Aaron Dessner of the National, the Brooklyn, N.Y., indie rockers who once took Local Natives on the road as the opening act, the album feels like a pronouncement, as if to highlight how much the quartet has grown since its last outing.

Hummingbird's layers complement its psychic search.

The result is a bolder, brighter record than their debut.

As bright and warm a guitar-based indie pop album as that [debut album, Gorilla Manor] was, it left a fair amount of room for expansion and maturity. On second album Hummingbird, that growth is readily apparent from the first track.

From start to finish, Hummingbird is a compelling record that warrants your enduring affections.

With patience, Hummingbird's panorama comes into full view, and it is one full of arrestingly arranged set pieces and an impressive sense of economy.

Overall, Hummingbird is a wonderful album. Each song manifests itself in a truly attractive manner and it's a release that's very much focused in the aesthetic.

There is no shortage of shimmery songcraft here.

It is this cycle of futility and human effort that makes Hummingbird so compelling, and so much more rewarding the second time around