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Satan Is Real/Handpicked Songs 1955-1962 Image
Metascore
94

Universal acclaim - based on 6 Critic Reviews What's this?

User Score
5.8

Mixed or average reviews- based on 9 Ratings

  • Summary: Satan Is Real and the best-of collection from the country duo of Ira and Charlie Louvin are packaged together by Light in the Attic Records.
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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 6
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 6
  3. Negative: 0 out of 6
  1. Feb 2, 2012
    100
    Satan Is Real is music crafted by true believers sharing their faith, and its power goes beyond Christian doctrine into something at once deeply personal and truly universal, and the result is the Louvin Brothers' masterpiece.
  2. Magnet
    Feb 2, 2012
    90
    No one made damnation as appealing as Ira and Charlie Louvin. [No. 82, p. 57]
  3. Feb 14, 2012
    90
    In their catalog, though, no album stands out more than Satan Is Real, their 1959 masterpiece that outlines and encapsulates the fragile fine lines of good versus evil, and spirituality versus the mundane.
  4. Feb 14, 2012
    90
    Some of the best songs that the Louvin Brothers ever wrote.
  5. Feb 14, 2012
    85
    The struggle between salvation and damnation has rarely sounded so lively or so gloriously conflicted.
  6. Feb 14, 2012
    80
    Country gospel at its most fervent and rousing.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1 out of 1
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 1
  3. Negative: 0 out of 1
  1. bjk
    Jun 11, 2013
    8
    Great music. Not crazy about the lyrics. Found this in the New York TImes: And then there was the womanizing and spousal abuse. In FebruaryGreat music. Not crazy about the lyrics. Found this in the New York TImes: And then there was the womanizing and spousal abuse. In February 1963, Ira Louvin wrapped a telephone cord around his wife’s neck. She shot him six times with a .22-caliber pistol, and when the police arrived on the scene she was said to have told them, “If the blankety-blank don’t die, I’ll shoot him again.” Ira lived, and Charlie stuck by him (and, amazingly, the wife) and ignored Ira’s threats to quit the duet. But the Louvin Brothers broke up that year.

    Ira was traveling with a new wife (his fourth) and another couple on the night of his wreck. Atypically, according to Charlie, Ira who had a D.U.I. warrant out for his arrest seems to have been sober that night, while the driver of the car that hit him was “nine times over the legal limit for drunkenness.” Oddly, given his habit of smashing mandolins, Ira’s new mandolin a four-stringed, electric instrument he’d designed himself was “the only thing that wasn’t smashed to splinters.”
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