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Oct 11, 2018His brilliant fourth album Love Is Magic takes listeners on a similar thrill ride [as his 50th birthday], dominated by swirling loops of grand, romantic melody, sly twists of sardonic wit and heart-stopping drops of sheer honesty.
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Oct 9, 2018There isn't enough time across the space of one album for the contemplation that this music requires, but the spacious arrangements do their best with a wide variety of electronic affectations.
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Oct 10, 2018Grant might just be taking the piss here, but his impish spirit reflects a writer with his fingers on the pulse of what’s really magic in this era: an understanding of humanity and all its feathery mess.
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Oct 16, 2018Grant gives us his synthpop troubadour, a persona soaring between bleak and soulful. Enjoy it before he shifts again, then enjoy that, because the thing about John Grant is whatever he does, the music is always great.
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Oct 12, 2018A collection of songs and finds Grant at his loosest, funniest, and most heartbreaking.
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Oct 12, 2018Love Is Magic feels like a victory lap. Frequently boundary-pushing, side-splittingly funny and anything but safe, John Grant’s fourth LP is a rip-roaring thrill ride that’s immensely danceable to boot. Magic really does work in mysterious ways.
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Oct 11, 2018Love Is Magic feels like three shredded albums spliced back together. But it’s nutritious, colourful and occasionally funeral-level mournful, an emotional pick’n’mix that, by its very nature, increasingly repays revisits.
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Oct 10, 2018Grant’s lyrics have always been striking, often highly emotive and confessional, but also frequently designed to raise more than a few eyebrows. Here, there are moments where he is more cutting, and more sleazy than ever.
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Oct 10, 2018For all its fast-paced absurdness, Love Is Magic carves out quiet moments, too. These tiny, rare diamonds stud a world that can so often feel completely evil. It’s a balancing act that Grant ultimately pulls off.
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Q MagazineOct 8, 2018Fabulously vivid fourth solo album. [Nov 2018, p.106]
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Oct 8, 2018The specificity of the lyrics and the boldness of the electronic orchestration should theoretically preclude this--but Grant lets the emotions that drive them show through enough that you can’t help but connect.
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Oct 16, 2018Love Is Magic, however impassioned, brutally candid, and devilishly witty it might be at times, never really ignites like its predecessors.
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Oct 16, 2018Love Is Magic is his most consistent and enjoyable work yet.
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UncutOct 8, 2018The synth reveries outstay their welcome, but the sense is of a great talent whose early solo work vented a lifetime's pain and outrage now experimenting and recalibrating. [Nov 2018, p.30]
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Oct 12, 2018Of course, there are moments so barbed you can feel the blood being drawn--twice they are those when Grant is looking back in bitterness to his teens. ... Best of all, though, are two gorgeous ballads, in which Grant appears to mourn the relationship that caused him to move to Iceland.
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Oct 11, 2018They are peppered with witty lines but, like an over-repeated punchline, the humour wears thin. For all its gorgeous highlights and overall brilliance, Love Is Magic is an album that is hard to love.
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Oct 10, 2018Flawed but unbowed, it is a fascinating but frustrating listen.
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MojoOct 8, 2018Love Is Magic is Grant entertainingly magnified, but the emotional returns comes slightly diminished. [Nov 2018, p.93]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 11
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Mixed: 2 out of 11
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Negative: 1 out of 11
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Dec 20, 2018