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Feb 19, 2013Total Folklore is not for everybody, and the act of playing junkyard synths through scorching feedback is gimmicky by design, but he's successfully found his own niche in noise, and his creativity and determination to reinvent music is worthy of high praise.
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Mar 1, 2013When taken as a whole, and as an effervescent thumbing of the nose at the noise establishment, Total Folklore goes by like a breeze, even if the last 11 tracks (three of those ambient interludes) feel a bit overshadowed in the wake of “Ulysses”‘s monolithic, alien bliss.
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Apr 12, 2013The result is a collection of great, hard-driving tracks that feel poppier than any of the long-winding snores on that new Justin Timberlake album.
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Apr 4, 2013Total Folklore doesn’t stray far from the scratchy kaleidoscopics established in its first few minutes, but it keeps the madness churning throughout.
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Feb 19, 2013A good portion of Total Folklore finds Friel treading the same murky path, leaving the listener with brazen, barefaced ideas and shambling, barefoot execution.
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Feb 19, 2013The entire subject seems to be instinct, a bombardment from Friel’s own psyche, expressed in a way that words could never do. Being therefore, indescribable. But nevertheless astonishingly glorious.
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Feb 26, 2013Long rows of evenly pulsing notes paired with streaming harmonies make for a low-stakes default mode. But when an album's mild downsides are all relative to its overwhelming strengths, it's hard to complain.
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Feb 20, 2013It’s another solid chapter in Friel’s musical story. In spite of that, it’s also an album that sometimes feels like its missing a layer or two.
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Feb 19, 2013This joyful little geode of an album--a 38-minute pocket of melodies that cluster, sparkle, and spike--has a powerfully anti-cynical energy to it,
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Feb 25, 2013The key is that the melodies are hearty ones in cheerful major keys. They could almost be Celtic pipe tunes, if they weren’t set on stun. It’s a merry onslaught.
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Mar 1, 2013Total Folklore is a captivating release of memorable, “hummable” tunes dressed in the trappings of noise and “difficult listening.”