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Jun 2, 2016Even when his quality control slips slightly, the music remains utterly beautiful, like glittering light on a river, or gossamer threads floating through the air on a summer’s day.
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May 18, 2016His music is meant to be both nakedly honest and cathartic at once, and this is where Skip a Sinking Stone succeeds the most.
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Jun 20, 2016It’s an album to truly cherish.
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Jun 13, 2016It is an album-lover’s album, too as each track bleeds into the next, the transitions ooze, indistinct and lovely, making it hard to listen to one song without listening to every song. In a musical landscape powered by singles and populated by an insurmountable avalanche of new material, a record like this, which pulls like taffy and takes its time, really is a treat.
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May 20, 2016Throughout, the album never loses its quietly hypnotic, reflective character or its soft-footed, ornate chamber-folk palette, transporting us to a distinct and remote destination that's nonetheless intimately relatable.
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May 18, 2016Skip A Sinking Stone isn’t an immediate record, and neither is there anything particularly novel in its utilisation of imagery, but that’s picking holes for the sake of it; tracks such as Getting Gone and the titular Skipping Stones balance naturally, the harmonies gentle, the acoustic guitar, piano and strings positioned with grace.
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May 19, 2016Mutual Benefit occasionally build to moments of wonderful melancholy, before coming back down and resetting their expectations. It’s a charming sense of reality, but ultimately the music drifts in the middle lane too much to be truly mesmerising.
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May 19, 2016The mindset of Skip a Sinking Stone is best entered with the intent of total immersion and allotting a similar amount of Mutual Benefit music to more conventional song structures and interludes can feel like a vision quest stopped too frequently for bathroom breaks.
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May 18, 2016The album is being billed as two distinct halves, and that certainly is the case. The first part of Skip a Sinking Stone looms large over the whole album, setting a bar the rest of the album, lovely and hopeful as it is, can't quite hit.
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May 18, 2016Like the flatness of a reflective pool, Skip a Sinking Stone stretches out in stunning beauty, giving listeners a gorgeous reflection of soaring, spectral synesthesia. But beyond a skip along the surface, the release is hesitant to move toward anything of a prescriptive statement; though, with lightness and transience so central to its theme, maybe that’s by design.
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Jun 22, 2016Lee’s music comes from a place that’s pure, completely at odds with his current urban environment, handled with loving precision; nevertheless, it also fails to resonate when he’s too wrapped up in his own insularity.
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May 19, 2016The rich swells of optimism that characterised earlier cuts such as ‘Skipping Stones’ or ‘Lost Dreamers’ have been replaced with a yearning melancholy.
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May 18, 2016Skip A Sinking Stone is Lee’s most mature, thoughtful work yet, filled with complex reflection and meditation. That sense of calm also serves as the record’s biggest drawback, as it lacks the dramatic tension and sweeping heights that made songs like “Golden Wake” or “Advanced Falconry” so direct and impactful.