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- Critic score
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Mar 11, 2013These songs, and the album as a darkly moody whole, show the band to be growing into masters of crafting modern psychedelia with dark swirls instead of day-glo, and bad trips instead of sunshine days.
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Feb 20, 2013The result is a stylish, intelligent record that does exactly what it set out to do: Girls Names have reinvented their sound and come up smelling of roses.
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Mar 18, 2013Girls Names does not dwell on the dourness, but conquers and transforms it into a solace--a sound resulting from some hallucinatory fever like a Max Ernst painting, realizing the shadowy dimension parallel to this existence.
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Feb 26, 2013Girls Names reproduce favorite sounds admirably, and they’ve chosen an extremely popular era to recall, but perhaps a little maturation in this New Life will get them to an exciting place equal to the one they’d already reached.
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Feb 26, 2013If Cathal Cully's aim was to leave the past behind then he's succeeded resoundingly, and created one of this year's most ungainly beautiful records in the process.
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Dec 31, 2013The overall tempo has slowed, allowing for more instrumental variation and a chance for the band to explore the new musical terrain (which they thoroughly do).
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Feb 20, 2013In places it’s a bit samey, marred by a shortage of songs. But The New Life is, nonetheless, a must-listen.
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Mar 5, 2013What the band is doing is creating a unique template of dark, post-punk, garage-y rock, often controlled and sometimes unleashed, that marks The New Life as one of the better albums released so far this year.
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Mar 21, 2013For now, Cully's another voice in the crowd in that regard, but his promising talent displayed elsewhere on The New Life suggests that he's one to keep your ears perked up for nonetheless.
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Mar 14, 2013The New Life is enjoyable, and there are times when I listen to it and quite like it. Very much. It’s just hardly groundbreaking.
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Q MagazineMar 12, 2013It's a minor-chord menace, their darker surf-steeped vibe driven by steady percussion and hypnotic basslines. [Apr 2013, p.101]
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Feb 20, 2013Girls Names make sadness moreish and hypnotic.
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Feb 20, 2013Moody. Loveless. One-paced. Monotonous. Dull.
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Mar 8, 2013The New Life is a fully-formed long player that yields rewards over time, not just 50 minutes.