- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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Nov 11, 2013While it may lack some of the focus of its predecessor, it retains every bit of its oddball charm.
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Mar 12, 2014In the past, the singer's relied on frayed musical quirks to add her own element of weird, but Mug Museum remains delightfully off-kilter without resorting to weird for weird's sake.
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Nov 11, 2013This Welsh singer-songwriter wears her love of the Velvet Underground proudly, particularly on Mug Museum, her third album, which jingles and jangles even when the subject matter turns dark.
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Dec 9, 2013This is strange, boutique folk-pop with a vitalised imagination--a rewarding listen, and then some.
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Nov 8, 2013While Mug Museum is probably Cate le Bon’s weakest collection of songs, it’s nonetheless a great refinement of her recent artistic development, a typically rewarding showcase of gutsy eccentricity, and the promise of more satisfying material to come.
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Jan 29, 2014Mug Museum gives off a solid first impression, but gets sturdier the more time you spend with it.
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Nov 18, 2013In addition to Hadreas’s wavering vocals, Le Bon also received instrumental contributions from Nick Murray (White Fence), Sweet Baboo and H. Hawkline to help create her most experimental and impressive album to date.
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MojoNov 8, 2013One of the most characterful voices of recent times--one minute suggesting folk rock paradise, the next Macbeth. [Dec 2013, p.90]
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Nov 18, 2013It adds another fine collection of songs to her already impressive catalogue, songs whose inwardly-focused subject matter renders the music more restrained than the punky pop of career highlight Cyrk.
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Nov 14, 2013Mug Museum, her third full-length, is as wonderfully weird as any of its predecessors. And there’s now sparseness in her music, plus a cool, controlled confidence that showcases her knack for the surreal more than ever.
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Nov 14, 2013It’s a pleasant listen with some great moments herein.
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Nov 15, 2013Most of Mug Museum is bare and direct, quaint and unassuming, but Le Bon makes a rather grand occasion out of it--she's a master curator and consummate immortalizer.
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Nov 26, 2013If at times it feels akin to a parallel world kept behind glass, touching from a distance, it’s a soundscape alive with enchanting melody and evocative poetry.
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Q MagazineNov 8, 2013This is music that hovers at the edges of modern life, out of time but in its own glorious world. [Dec 2013, p.116]
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Dec 16, 2013Mug Museum emerges as another low-key intelligent pop gem from Le Bon.
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Nov 11, 2013Psychedelic leanings and Le Bon’s fragile Welsh lilt make Mug Museum a typically unusual listen, but its sincerity shines throughout, finding beauty in the strangest, sometimes saddest of places.
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Nov 8, 2013It’s still clear, though, that she has too many ideas not to be able to take them somewhere interesting once settled into a new life. File under ‘transitional’.
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Nov 14, 2013Although a bit more polished sounding than past endeavours, Le Bon is blessed enough with both sound melodic sense and a strain of Welsh peculiarity that lends Mug Museum a singular sound.
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UncutNov 8, 2013If there’s any justice, Mug Museum should break Le Bon out of her current cult status. [Dec 2013]
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Nov 15, 2013The album's highest point--a duet with Perfume Genius titled "I Think I Knew"--is also its calmest; it comes at the midpoint of this robust, sometimes-frenzied experience, giving listeners a much-needed moment to catch their breath.