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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.