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Feb 24, 2016The album's greatest strength lies in its cinematic quality. Every song feels like a scene in the bigger dream The Ridge represents as a whole.
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Mar 17, 2016[The final track is] less antic and virtuoso than the earlier tracks, but a good deal more touching. Elsewhere Neufeld jets off for the stratosphere, technical dexterity gleaming in a rarified, surgically clean space. Here she sinks into a rich, loamy here and now, luxuriating in slow exploration of certainties.
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Mar 7, 2016The talent, confident and imagination on display throughout this album makes it a must-listen, a chance to let your mind wander and to lose yourself in an incredible plangency of strings.
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Mar 3, 2016The strength of The Ridge isn’t really in how it evokes emotions, or even to showcase Neufeld’s maturing skills, though it accomplishes both. Moreso, it succeeds in how it makes an indeterminate landscape worth trekking.
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Feb 24, 2016The Ridge continuously strikes a fine balance between the heady grandeur of classical music and the restless creative exploration of the current indie scene, striking a similar resonant chord with music fans who either came across the album due to their interest in Arcade Fire or Mozart.
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Feb 22, 2016An exciting work that matches that minimal solo sound with drums, vocals (often wordless), and other instrumentation. [Jan/Feb 2016, p.57]
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Mar 1, 2016There’s no doubting that The Ridge is a good album, but sometimes the supporting players don’t quite compliment Neufeld’s compositions as well as they might.
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Feb 26, 2016Concerned at least as much with timbre as with rhythm, structure, or emotional tone--and none of these is neglected here--the composite is perpetually stimulating, exploiting repetition and expectation, both in time and texture. Album structure is carefully considered as well, with the drums vanishing for the final two tracks.
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Feb 24, 2016What Neufeld shows again in The Ridge is that the violin and her superbly expressive playing is more than enough to make for a great record but it shows this at the expense of making the other elements thrown in occasionally feel superfluous or underdeveloped by contrast.
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Mar 4, 2016Though compositionally The Ridge feels less exploratory that Neufield’s previous work, it is still a moving document of her engaging, virtuosic playing.
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Feb 26, 2016It’d be thrilling to hear Neufeld compose a score that emulated this new fusion, yet paced in more easily traceable narrative arcs. In the meantime, this intriguing album more than suffices.
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MojoFeb 22, 2016[The Ridge] finds the Montrealer's signature esoteric bow-work allied to song structures that err, at least vaguely, toward the orthodox. [Apr 2016, p.93]
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Feb 22, 2016The presence of Jeremy Gara on drums peppers the record with a likeable melodrama that’ll seem familiar to fans of Funeral or Neon Bible, although this particular record requires much closer listening to fully appreciate its charms.
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UncutFeb 22, 2016A mildly Enya-fied take on the kind of astringent orchestral punk pumped out by Montreal's Constellation label, it has its moments. [Mar 2016, p.77]
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Feb 26, 2016The Ridge proves to be a competent, technically accomplished piece of work, one that is aimed at sound designers mostly.