- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
As is the case with nearly every other Frog Eyes release, Paul’s Tomb may be riddled with claw marks, broken needles, vomiting angels, and eternal suffering, but it’s well worth the visit.
-
A disappointing pattern begins to take shape in each of these long chapters, as the band begins on a promising note during the first three minutes, but exhausts itself over the last nine.
-
If Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph is not their best album, it’s certainly a close second (Tears of the Valedictorian remains their high-water mark for me). However, I do feel confident calling Paul’s Tomb the band’s most cohesive and expansive LP.
-
UncutFrog Eyes' fifth album has been three years in the making and is every bit as much of an epic as its acclaimed predecessor "Tears Of The Valedictorian." [May 2010, p.90]
-
A volatile brew of uneasy drama and emotion from a band that, on this showing, should always record live.
-
Paul's Tomb: A Triumph has two distinct modes – those slowburn instrumental passages, and the lyric driven, quicker, melodic segments. Frog Eyes succeed when the joins between the two really 'flow', when the segues work.
-
As always, Mercer’s vocals threaten to dominate the songs--each line could be the last in a prolonged, bellowed tantrum--but the mostly live-in-studio takes capture the skilled frenzy of Frog Eyes’ shows.
-
Mercer rants like the end is extremely nigh and songs refuse choruses, stapling together shattered fragments of classic psychedelia and the bits of Springsteen riffs that their countrymen Arcade Fire left behind.
-
You’ve got death and exaltation, followed by a sly wink at rock history. Not a bad set of tools for making smart, defiant music.
-
This release feels freer, though--not easier, necessarily, but delivered with a clarity of purpose not quite as muddled, consumption-wise, by sheer weirdness as was their previous LP, Tears Of The Valedictorian, for instance.
-
As a guitar record Paul’s Tomb may be, somewhat surprisingly, the best guitar record since, gosh, Pink (2005)?