User ratings in Music are temporarily disabled. More info
- Summary: The debut solo album for the Beulah singer features several guest musicians, including the singer's former bandmates from Beulah.
- Record Label: Majordomo
- Genre(s): Indie, Rock
- More Details and Credits »
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 4 out of 6
-
Mixed: 2 out of 6
-
Negative: 0 out of 6
-
Under The RadarThe Desert Of Shallow Effects is a staggeringly good album that will deserve all of the trite adjectives reviewers will surely throw at it. [Winter 2010, p.63]
-
Unbound by a verse-chorus-verse format, the songs meander unpredictably, like a milder Of Montreal, with polymorphous sex replaced by God and health problems.
-
The Desert of Shallow Effects is Kurosky’s first solo effort since dissolving Beulah five years ago, and, happily, his singular gift for melody-rich pop hasn’t deserted him.
-
Shallow Effects is almost shockingly coherent. Instead of a big, sprawling mess, the arrangements — which incorporate everything from glockenspiel to Mellotron — offer complex but controlled layers of sound that never seem too thick or unwieldy.
-
The places where the album feels awkward or overdone do not erase the general sense that Kurosky has returned with a sense of determination. As an album, The Desert of Shallow Effects feels not like a lark, but like a mission.
-
It's a precision attack, and as lofty and lovely as these tunes can sound, even their note-perfect nature seems to hold the listener at arm's length. But the real distance in the record is generated by Kurosky's lyrics, a series of clipped phrases and red herrings loosely compiled in the shape of story-songs, rich in imagistic detail but short in the personals department.
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 0 out of
-
Mixed: 0 out of
-
Negative: 0 out of