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Jan 7, 2019The music performed by Allen, Simonon, and Tong, holds a strong presence on the album, necessarily complementing Albarn's lyrics while simultaneously crafting a modern folk sensibility.
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Dec 5, 2018While the Good, the Bad & the Queen are skilled at providing a wide breadth of styles here--from the woozy, carnivalesque organ of “The Last Man to Leave” to “The Truce of Twilight”’s militaristic chants--they especially succeed at conveying a crumbling and isolated Britain.
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Dec 4, 2018He's mined this territory before, notably in Gorillaz's Demon Days, yet the very fact that the Good, The Bad & The Queen function as a band, drawing strength from their own interplay, gives Merrie Land a human resonance that echoes long after the final song ends.
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Nov 21, 2018Merrie Land feels like the perfect soundtrack for these uncertain, worrying times.
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Nov 19, 2018Although Merrie Land has its flaws, this son of Colchester is usually right about the important stuff.
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Nov 16, 2018Ruminations on a post-Brexit nation from a bunch of middle-aged musicians is, perhaps, less essential than it seems to deem itself, but there are probing thoughts and moments to make it worth sticking with.
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Nov 16, 2018Rich and accomplished; beautifully played and immaculately conceptualised, Albarn’s latest trip from FitzRoy to Faeroes and back, via Dogger and Dover, is a drizzle-soaked deep-dive into a fractured land and fractured people. One of the quiet highlights of the year.
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Nov 16, 2018It does work as a bulwark against the cherry-picking, playlist-happy listening habits of the modern music fan. It works best as a complete dose of bitter medicine; a groove-happy message of fear, love, and measured hope.
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Nov 16, 2018The musical mood of much of the album is a dense, unsettled fug: slightly paranoid, rather unfocused.
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MojoNov 15, 2018If any art is currently encapsulating the sense of "wrongness" abroad in our land, this is it. [Dec 2018, p.82]
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Q MagazineNov 15, 2018Merrie Land works best when these sounds and visions come together in an impressionistic haze. [Dec 2018, p.109]
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UncutNov 15, 2018There's a fine line between the sincerely wistful and contemplative and the nostalgic and morose, but Merrie Land understands where the borders are and stays within them. [Jan 2019, p.18]
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Nov 15, 2018Albarn on Britain is a proven formula, but Simonon, Allen and Simon Tong combine to craft curious twenty-first century folk about curious twenty-first century folk.
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Nov 15, 2018For all its gloom, Merrie Land is an entertaining and theatrical album, with vocals that capture the social observation of early album Parklife. It’s also an immensely clever feat of word painting, never relying on lyrics alone to reflect the sense of anxiety.
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Nov 15, 2018The ten songs on this thing really are special, and worthy of the epic introduction tacked on to every article about it.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 29
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Mixed: 1 out of 29
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Negative: 3 out of 29
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Nov 18, 2018
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Jul 9, 2019