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Jun 1, 2016With The Dreaming Room, Mvula has mined her personal conflicts to yield beautiful, boundary-pushing artistry. It's fearless, meditative, soulful and buoyant all at once.
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Jun 27, 2016Mvula has written a hypnotic record that provides a congenial embrace, but it also isn’t afraid to take bold action. A new star is most definitely born.
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Jun 20, 2016Written in her producer’s garden shed rather than the confines of a studio, Laura Mvula sounds confident and free throughout her second album.
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Jun 20, 2016Laura Mvula has proved emphatically that her debut was no one-off and this highly accomplished return establishes her further as a unique, captivating talent.
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Jun 16, 2016Her songs have the sophistication and idiosyncracy of a singular talent. At times (“Show Me Love”) the ethereal arranging meanders, but mostly (“Bread,” “Kiss My Feet,” “Angel”) it has the authority of a signature.
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Jun 16, 2016Like Joanna Newsom, Mvula pulls the listener along with her through the most serpentine songs: however winding their routes, the melodies are almost always beautiful; however much the musical scenery shifts, it is always striking.
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Jun 15, 2016Many of her songs seem ready-made for some kind of theatrical adaptation. They’re authentically dramatic, built on the swells of brass and strings and percussion, which might suddenly disappear behind some new peak of melody or meaning sung by Ms. Mvula.
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Q MagazineJun 6, 2016It's remarkably poised, perfectly calibrated vocal swells evoking the synthetic English pastoral of XTC or Julia Holter's experimental layering. [#361, p.112]
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Jun 1, 2016With Sing to the Moon, Laura Mvula set a new standard for 21st century soul. With this follow-up, she's raised that standard higher. [Jul 2016, p.89]
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UncutJun 1, 2016Some songs don't quite live up to the arrangements, but the sonic ambition here shames nearly every other major-label release of 2016. [Jul 2016, p.78]
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Jun 24, 2016Track-by-track, it tells a clearer story than her excellent debut and a more sweeping one than many movies.
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Jul 27, 2016The Dreaming Room is an enormously frustrating record, as Mvula clearly has it in her to be an incredible artist. But at this point in her career, she remains a orchestra in need of a conductor.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 24 out of 27
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Mixed: 1 out of 27
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Negative: 2 out of 27
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Jun 18, 2016
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Oct 26, 2016
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Aug 27, 2016