- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
Beautifully melodic, quietly clever and painfully smart. [Jul 2004, p.136]
-
90Merritt's lugubrious baritone has never sounded stronger, nor have his songs.
-
When the songs are not just clever but lively--most spectacularly on the unrelenting "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend"--Stephin Merritt's demo-ready monotone could pass for a singing voice.
-
83Merritt's wordplay has never been slicker. [Jun 2004, p.105]
-
80Underpinning this wry melancholy are the winsome languor of Stephin Merritt's voice and the generous stash of tunes.
-
80True, [Merritt] still sings in a voice that's subject to fairly strict demarcations of range and malleability, but his deft spadework in the trench of song-craft more than compensates. [May 2004, p.93]
-
80At times, i turns dangerously slow and arty.... But for the first time, [Merritt's] lethargic croak also emits a few degrees of human warmth. [May 2004, p.124]
-
80A proper treat for aficionados of the laugh-out-loud lyric. [May 2004, p.106]
-
Similar to Ben Folds and Aimee Mann, Merritt revives the lost art of inventing captivating fictions entwined with personal reflection.
-
As far as songwriting goes, i follows the typical Magnetic Fields album standard of several great songs balanced with a couple unremarkable ones, with the rest being simply really good.
-
80The marked contrast between the deadpan vocals and the lightness of the music mostly works, although because of the limitations of Merritt's vocal range, he is not always able to project the same depth of feeling detailed in the songs' lyrics.
-
80Many of the witty, lovelorn pop songs here can stand beside any in Merritt's formidable catalogue.
-
80The only real problem with i is the sheer volume of excellence we've all come to expect from Merritt.
-
Tracks as smart as the dreamy, melancholy character sketch "Irma" and the lyrical album-closer "It's Only Time" suggest how Merritt can top 69 Love Songs: one song at a time.
-
His Cupid's-arrow vignettes reach deep into the fictional dream through heedless genre-bending, ingenious rhyme and incongruous simile, bleary-eyed dislocation and straight-faced melodrama.
-
77Granted, the record is far from perfect... Despite all of that, it is a Stephin Merritt record. And SM still maintains his charmingly cynical worldview and almost bottomless well of clever turns of phrase.
-
Sometimes his lyrics are better than his melodies... and too often even his happy songs sound dreary. [7 May 2004, p.84]
-
Merritt's kitchen produces pop confections that can rot teeth, but the bitter aftertaste owes more to Randy Newman than it does Belle & Sebastian.
-
I doesn't have all of 69 Love Songs' expansiveness and droll humor, but there's no denying the bittersweet charisma of Merritt's pop craftsmanship. [27 May 2004, p.80]
-
70Finds Merritt and his longtime backing band moving away from pop formalism, slightly toning down the cabaret affectations and focusing a little more on the melodies and hooks rather than the genre-hopping arrangements.
-
70The only disappointment is the fact that everything sounds a tad too familiar.
-
In brevity it betters the 1999 boxed set, in songwriting it plateaus.
-
i is a well-crafted work with its share of strong moments, even if its impressive attention to craft holds the listener back from emotional investment.
-
60Appallingly tasteful.
-
A record of flippant, tossed-off, uninspired, only sporadically involving chamber pop that feels, dare I say, half-hearted.
-
40A curiously uninvolving affair. [Jun 2004, p.95]
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 12 out of 12
-
Mixed: 0 out of 12
-
Negative: 0 out of 12
-
alexf9Another great album by Stephin Merritt.
-
SaraL10Dark, cheerful, and catchy..."I don't really love you anymore" is my favorite.
-
JohnA8