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May 6, 2011Because Light After Dark tries so hard to keep up with the tricks of the trade in 2011, it loses any sense of originality that Maguire brings to the table, which, especially in the pop music scene, is the only way to stand out.
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May 6, 2011The production--by chart-grabbing Fraser T Smith (James Morrison, Taio Cruz, Cee-Lo)--can only bring so much depth or variety to unadventurous songs which are bellowed and wailed with all the subtlety of Florence Welch giving birth to a rhino.
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May 6, 2011If you can manage to put such quibbles aside--and it will be a struggle--Light After Dark has some redeeming features.
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MojoMay 6, 2011If Kate Bush backed by MGMT appeals, Maguire's your woman. [Apr 2011, p.105]
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May 6, 2011The rest of the 13 track album sounds like a mix of Latvian Eurovision Song Contest entries and The X-Factor winners' songs; an unmistakable, cringey 'life affirming' theme runs throughout, with the obligatory twinkling electro loops.
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May 6, 2011Sadly, though, Ain't Nobody's by miles the most interesting four minutes on Light After Dark, which suggests Maguire is another startling talent whose every point of interest has been sandblasted off between being signed and getting her album out.
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May 6, 2011It's a cartoon of emotion: even when whispering, there's a stage intimacy about her delivery; and at full blast, she has the emotive subtlety of a foghorn, though that may be to surmount the barrage of thundering tom-toms and pounding pianos with which she's been saddled.
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May 6, 2011Her Lennox-meets-Tyler, or Welch-meets-Tunstall lungs boom out across a Heart FM-friendly pop-rock sound which sometimes attains a sweeping Stevie Nicks drama but often merely reaches Dido level.
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May 6, 2011A flat-out belter of the Adele/Florence school, surrounded variously by daft orchestral sturm-und-drang and flimsy ProTools disco/house. Better may come.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 14
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Mixed: 1 out of 14
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Negative: 3 out of 14
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Sep 29, 2011
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May 25, 2011