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- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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Feb 21, 2012Fresh and surprisingly accessible despite its quirks, Visions is bewitching.
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Feb 17, 2012Compulsively listenable.
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UncutMar 14, 2012Over the course of an album even dogs will find the whistle register wearing, but taken individually these are sublime cocktails of post-geographical orientalism. [Apr 2012, p.79]
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Feb 21, 2012Visions is an absolute blast. Easy to admire, easy to love.
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MojoMar 23, 2012It take a rare confidence and skill to throw a million (roughly) ideas into an album and make it sound not just coherent but as good as this one. [Apr 2012, p.91]
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Q MagazineMar 14, 2012You'll have to search long and hard for a more original and distinctive album this year. [April 2012, p.100]
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Feb 28, 2012Grimes isn't spooky enough to be "ghostly," and not substantial enough to hold your attention.
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Feb 27, 2012An album that sits comfortably in the 4AD canon of excellence.
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Feb 1, 2012Boucher is still making warped, sparsely-populated electro-pop, and the potential still outweighs the content.
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Mar 8, 2012A smart, funny album, and it's almost impossible not to dance to it.
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Feb 21, 2012The fact that it's both artistically bugged out and immediately rewarding is just the icing on the cake.
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Mar 9, 2012Above all and aside from the frustrations, the album is a well-crafted beast, beautifully constructed.
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Feb 21, 2012On her 4AD debut, Visions, she continues her march toward accessibility, rendering hazy, quixotic sketches into tangible, hook-heavy electro-pop.
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Feb 21, 2012The pervasive sense on Visions is of a young woman carefully pushing out of her own introversion, which makes the moments where she sings from the gut instead of the throat ("Circumambient"), or strives for human-on-human sensuality ("Skin"), all the more thrilling.
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Feb 17, 2012Visions is a remarkable outing for Boucher in that it manages to showcase her knack for spinning bits and pieces from all points on the musical spectrum into crafty, easily digestible pop.
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Mar 7, 2012Some may find 'Visions' consistently eschews the same ground of super slick, layered vocals over chrome digital structures but this reductive palette of sonics hears the album fly towards its peak of 'Nightmusic' - a collaboration with Majical Cloudz that is camouflaged electro pop that'll keep you muttering for months.
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Entertainment WeeklyFeb 24, 2012Dreamy, glitchy art pop. [2 Mar 2012, p.73]
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Feb 17, 2012Visions is a flawed but intimate glimpse into the fantasies of its creator, and while it might not act as a springboard to greater fame for Grimes, it's just as satisfying to hear her take her bedroom music into a darkened basement, away from the prying world.
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Mar 12, 2012An album of shifting, shimmering textures that is both a spaced out exploration and the perfect pop album.
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Feb 21, 2012Though it's well produced and confident, and goes deep into its web of influence, it seems so rooted in this moment that it feels transitory.
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Feb 17, 2012Consistently unique and fascinating.
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Feb 16, 2012While Visions is unmistakably 2012 sonically in its references to R&B and hip-hop, it also fits remarkably gracefully into 4AD's impressive back catalogue of dream pop.
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Mar 26, 2012Visions is beautifully conceived and executed, musically, lyrically and thematically.
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Mar 12, 2012A beguiling decoction of pretty much everything going on in hipster musical circles, sweet and savvy and scary at the same time.
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Feb 1, 2012Visions often feels suspended in the best way possible, both in time and space.
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Mar 12, 2012The meringue-light and snow-bright Visions is a sort of cut-up, laptronica take on the kind of sugary, girly electro-pop confections Prince produced for a succession of female starlets in the late 1980s.
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Feb 23, 2012There's no doubt that Grimes has drawn from a sea of influence to craft her dark, structured, idiosyncratic sound, but those influences have all passed through a filter so thorough, have been pulled so far from context, that the most striking thing left is Claire Boucher's point of view.
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Feb 24, 2012Visions is a more focused album than the spaced-out Halfaxa or the disparate Geidi Primes but one of the key charms of Grimes' sound is its unforcedness.
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Feb 21, 2012It's an album of mixed signals, and while Grimes sounds like she's still sorting out what it all means, her uncertainty is worth sharing.
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Feb 21, 2012Easily Ms. Boucher's best work and one of the most impressive albums of the year so far.
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Mar 5, 2012The Montreal-based artist has again delivered some fascinating and healthily progressive music on Visions, her third album.
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Feb 21, 2012Visions refuses to rest on its laurels.
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Feb 8, 2012Visions is exactly what it sounds like: it's an aesthetic and conceptual vision, one utterly unique to Boucher, and it's both strange and satisfying.
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Feb 21, 2012Where I was expecting a great album, I've instead encountered one that's merely very good.
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Apr 5, 2012Thirteen tracks of exceptional music and a clear-cut success for Boucher.
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Feb 24, 2012Methinks come the end of the year, a lot of people will have adjudged it a keeper.
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Feb 17, 2012Visions is marked by a number of characteristics that make up a broad swathe of forgettable, barely-there music-it sounds distant, cheaply produced, with songs that seem to flutter in and out of earshot rather than command attention-but it's executed with such personality, earnestness, and feeling that it feels so much louder and present than it really is.
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Feb 1, 2012It's a bummer that Visions ended up as a fever dream of a record: unnecessarily oblique, listlessly long (48 minutes!), and painfully shapeless.
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Feb 23, 2012Grimes has come into a cleaner, more distinct version of her IDM self, albeit one still influenced by Aphex Twin, TLC and Enya.
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Feb 27, 2012When it works, it makes for gloriously contradictory pop--it's just a shame that the formula isn't a little more consistent.
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Feb 17, 2012There's no doubt that Visions is an excellent album.
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Mar 7, 2012'Visions' is a cornucopia of Claire Boucher's most vivid waking dreams. Gripping, then, but also as intangible as the prevailing dread of a forgotten nightmare.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 362 out of 394
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Mixed: 11 out of 394
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Negative: 21 out of 394
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May 5, 2012
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Apr 26, 2012
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Mar 10, 2012