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Nov 6, 2012The amped-up chiptunes and film score moments are interesting enough, but the band sound their best when expanding on the lush tones and tension-laden improvisations they've been working on since the beginning.
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Nov 6, 2012While there are some audible growing pains, Just To Feel Anything holds a great deal of promise and first-rate material.
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Nov 12, 2012There's real drama in the band's sweeping crescendos and ringing guitar chords; there's something genuinely affecting in their newfound emo overtones.
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Nov 5, 2012The album really peaks though in its most contemplative moments.
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Nov 14, 2012There's much to recommend Just To Feel Anything and while, as with all retro-leaning instrumental rock, the question of its exact purpose is perhaps a little hard to answer when the details come together, as in Adrenochrome's shifting bass-line, or in how the title track gradually blossoms into life, such concerns are ultimately rendered entirely, wonderfully, redundant.
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The WireDec 5, 2012Just as there's something inescapably seductive about fast cars in a nocturnal metropolis, there's something innately pleasurable about this Emeralds release. [Nov 2012, p.58]
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MagnetJan 4, 2013It's easily Emerald's least utilitarian album yet. [No. 94, p.53]
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Nov 13, 2012Tightened and more focused, Just To Feel Anything wouldn't entirely jar the listener out of their headphones. Still, it shines when you hold it up to the light.
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Nov 5, 2012Just to Feel Anything doesn't disappoint, although those eager for meditative meanderings might feel detached from its propulsive, purposeful tangents.
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Nov 6, 2012What emerges is a cathartic, theta-wave blend that could score a fighter jet skirmish over a Himalayan peak during a lightning storm and the opening montage of a siren-strobed cop show from 1985 with equal efficacy.
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Nov 13, 2012Just shy of magnificent and unprecedentedly accessible, Emeralds' latest is not their best work, but at least in terms of the group's development, it's among their most exciting.
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Feb 4, 2013For their third album together, John Elliott, Steve Hauschlidt and Mark McGuire bring the same sense of fearless adventure to them modular synths, creating a seven-song cycle unlike anything in the Emeralds canon yet.
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Nov 8, 2012The Ohio trio took their time with Feel Anything, arriving at this more focused, albeit less celestial, effort.
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Nov 8, 2012While some longtime fans may find Just To Feel Anything's retreat from the cosmos a disappointment, the album's relative conceptual restraint actually allows it to be even more emotionally accessible, inviting the listener into the trio's interstellar clubhouse instead of only letting us peak in from the outside.
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Nov 9, 2012Part of what makes Just to Feel Anything such a rewarding listen is its ability to quickly shift between aerial jams and understated lulls without abandoning Emeralds' unspoken ethos.