- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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Alternative PressAt once daring and danceable, The New Romance is the best Talking Heads record Bikini Kill never made. [Oct 2003, p.120]
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Put Pretty Girls Make Graves on the short list of bands that matter and make sure you get this record.
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OutburnFeel[s] immediate and experimental all at once. [#23, p.98]
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A very special record, indeed.
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The album exists in that scarcely inhabited rock-and-roll world where technical prowess coexists peacefully with clear and simple songcraft, the former never forgoing the latter.
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Entertainment WeeklyHard to resist. [12 Sep 2003, p.153]
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The guitar throughout the album has an unusual approach which certainly helps PGMG stand out from the crowd.
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These are neither wimpy pop songs nor iron-fisted punk songs, but a shimmying amalgamation of DIY attitude and velvety songcraft, not altogether dissimilar to Learning to Crawl-era Pretenders.
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BlenderAmid the fidgety guitars and twitchy rhythms are enough hair-raising hooks to reach far beyond the counters of independent record stores. [Sep 2003, p.128]
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PlanetPretty Girls Make Graves' sound relishes frenetic, funky guitar leads and loping bass lines from which everything (de)generates. [#5, p.105]
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The one-two punch of "Blue Lights" and "Chemical, Chemical" will be making year-end mix CDs like crazy.
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SpinPretty Girls believe in anthems, which would be irritating if they didn't make you believe, too. [Oct 2003, p.107]
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Maintains the urgency of their debut, developing ideas that were only in their infancy on their debut.
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PGMG is at its strongest when trafficking in one particular base emotion: Anger. It's when the band attempts to emote on a frequency dominated by the likes of Bright Eyes and Dashboard Confessional that the group gets into trouble.
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Q MagazineFrequently explodes with ideas. [Oct 2003, p.112]
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MojoThey present a united, often more supple front. [Nov 2003, p.131]
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Throughout The New Romance, the group crafts exciting, layered, tempo-shifting tracks where jolts replace hooks, but Zollo plays ringmaster, whispering and bellowing and enacting the stressed-out characters that populate her stark stage.
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Pretty Girls Make Graves fall slightly short of their ambitions and capabilities, producing songs that are good, even very good, but less than what they’ve proved themselves to be capable of.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 12
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Mixed: 0 out of 12
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Negative: 1 out of 12
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BenDSep 24, 2005
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BrandanCAug 13, 2005MMM
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TheLoveofDerekFudescoFeb 24, 2005