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Jul 23, 2018Soil is a crucial psalm; crucial for its queerness, crucial for its catholicism, its pagan roots protruding into sidewalks, crucial for its purity of heart, crucial for how it avoids imperative, softly chiming.
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Jun 11, 2018soil is an extraordinary album, triumphing seemingly without making any artistic concessions.
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Jun 11, 2018The album is a visionary statement of arrival, a potent and singular masterpiece that exposes the deepest chambers of a fiercely beating heart with a singular purity of focus. It's a mesmerizing journey of self-actualization in an era when constant connection makes that all the more difficult. After soil, Wise's reach seems infinite.
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Jul 3, 2018Serpentwithfeet teaches us to be ourselves, to endure and be happy and love each other, and it’s rare to hear these simple, well-known things being delivered with a power and strength that can transcend the medium of music itself, turning it into a pure magic.
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Jun 14, 2018With soil, serpentwithfeet deeply engages with the complex membranes between the self and a loved one, the self and the world. Few albums attempt this much nuance in articulating love; Wise’s success in his ambitions feels like a gift.
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The WireJul 13, 2018Though this particularly esoteric presentation was not unique to Serpentwithfeet, few executed it as well. But just as he did with the genre tag pagan gospel and his initial handle Josiah Wise Is The Serpent With Feet, this time around Wise has, lyrically at least, mostly discarded such trappings in service of something more tangible and familiar. [Jul 2018, p.49]
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Jun 19, 2018The resulting soil is almost tangibly immediate.
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Jun 14, 2018The title of serpentwithfeet’s debut full-length soil is perhaps literal then: a return to his roots and a celebration of finally having found his feet.
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Jun 14, 2018soil is an album that delves into the dirt of passion, be that artistic, romantic or religious. For every moment of ecstatic energy there’s another equal moment of debilitating disappointment, for every igniting of love, there’s wilting relationships.
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Jun 13, 2018serpentwithfeet is not a project that deals in restraint, but it's the mix of melodrama and newfound control that makes soil a great record.
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Jun 11, 2018The music here is richer, dense rhythms and surprising samples wrapped into sensuous tracks detailing love and loss.
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Jun 11, 2018Soil captures a passionate, complex artist coming into his own.
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Jun 11, 2018Soil has contributions from sound-makers as diverse as Katie Gately, digital hip-hop hand Clams Casino, and even Paul Epworth (Adele), taking Wise’s vision into glorious sonic HD.
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Jun 11, 2018Overall, soil is a courageous effort where serpentwithfeet's bravery pays off.
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Jun 11, 2018As a songwriter, the former choirboy pulls melodic influence from traditional gospel music à la Kanye West, Chance the Rapper and others. A fan of Dvorak, Kirk Franklin, Brandy and Björk, the artist, born Josiah Wise, sings love songs that resemble hymns like "Cherubim," on which he lets loose a flood of emotions as helicopter drones compliment his distended vocals.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 38 out of 47
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Mixed: 1 out of 47
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Negative: 8 out of 47
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Jul 30, 2018