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Feb 16, 2018What A Time To Be Alive is the rawest Superchunk album since the band’s 1990 debut and undoubtedly its most ferocious.
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Feb 15, 2018It is desperate, important, and powerful music and it might just be the best album they've ever made.
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Feb 15, 2018It’s not as instantly accessible an album as the band’s relatively recent classics Majesty Shredding (2010) and I Hate Music (2013), but in many ways it’s a more important one. It’s the sound of an essentially middle-aged band firing out a clutch of missile missives directed at the dark heart of modern America (in the absence of many younger bands fulfilling that role) and carrying it off majestically.
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Feb 16, 2018What a Time to be Alive roars.
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Feb 21, 2018What a Time to Be Alive’s rage feels visceral because of age and experience and exhaustion, not despite it.
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May 29, 2018An album flush with both vicissitudes and vitality, What a Time to be Alive resonates with its resolve.
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Feb 20, 2018It’s a hurricane of pop-punk fury with as much ferocity as anything the band recorded 25+ years ago.
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Feb 16, 2018It's immediate. It's powerful. It's political. This time the giant has bared its teeth.
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Feb 15, 2018The best Superchunk album in recent memory.
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Feb 15, 2018The way What a Time to Be Alive zooms by, there are songs you might blink and miss if McCaughan weren’t writing some of the most sharply worded lyrics of his career.
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Feb 14, 2018Another great Superchunk record. What a Time to Be Alive bristles with anxious energy; even by Superchunk’s over-caffeinated standards, it keeps an unrelenting pace.
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Feb 12, 2018Thirty years deep into their career, Superchunk throw yet another left turn into a career full of them, offering up a protest record about the people for the people. What a time to be alive, indeed.
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Feb 12, 2018This infectious record is a timely reminder that punk’s greatest trick has always been to make the isolated feel less alone.
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MojoFeb 7, 2018Not least of the record's triumphs is its vindication of a band at its peak even after all these years. [Mar 2018, p.94]
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UncutFeb 7, 2018It's their angriest, jitteriest and most aggressive album since their early-90s heyday, and on "Reagan Youth" and "All For You" Superchunk sound like a hardcore band half their age. [Mar 2018, p.32]
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Feb 7, 2018An activated rage focuses and elevates the album from standard melodic post-punk to a timely, resonant mission statement.
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Classic Rock MagazineJun 6, 2018The music is taut, compressed and, in places, vulnerable and beautifully resonant. [May 2018, p.90]
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Mar 26, 2018Superchunk do come back full circle with a timeless, uniform body of work, though it also takes them back a few years after their late-career breakthroughs Majesty Shredding and I Hate Music.
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Mar 12, 2018What a Time to Be Alive, the yawp and the yeah and the yowl, is the perfect thesis and pinched nail. It’s the resolution to remain unhampered by despair while excising and atomizing all the moments we have to despair in.
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Feb 16, 2018There are plenty of power-punk melodies to ensure What A Time To Be Alive isn’t condemned to an early shelf life, even if to put it amongst their best work would be a stretch too far.
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Feb 16, 2018All the raucousness of What a Time to Be Alive remains positive and upbeat despite contemplating situations of which so many despair. But the highlight of the album comes at the very end. Slowing to a more mid-tempo and melodically reminiscent of Mac McCaughan's last solo album, "Black Thread" is a lovely pop song in the way only Superchunk can do
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Q MagazineMar 13, 2018Despite the slight air of "tell me something I don't know" hanging over proceedings, both musically and lyrically, there is an earworming swagger here. [May 2018, p.112]
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Feb 16, 2018It takes no prisoners musically or lyrically. And, despite the exasperation which the album channels, the tracks never feel too dark and this is largely, in part to the warmth which hides below the rage in Mac McCaughan’s delivery, along with the guitars which remain defiantly loud.
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Feb 7, 2018This album bristles with anger, desperation and disbelief. Hopeful resilience is occasionally brought to the fore as well, and guest backing vocalists from acts including The Magnetic Fields are on hand to help Superchunk feel less adrift and alone.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 29
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Mixed: 3 out of 29
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Negative: 1 out of 29
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Feb 19, 2018
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Feb 23, 2019
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Sep 1, 2018