Buy Now
| Buy on |
|
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Feb 16, 2011This music reminds us that subtlety is sometimes worth the time it takes to comprehend it.
-
MojoApr 6, 2011While White Wilderness lacks the edge of Emerald City it's an inspired set of songs decorated by Minna Choi's imaginative orchestrations. [Apr 2011, p.101]
-
Feb 16, 2011It's not that he's become Sinatra, but over the nine songs of the release he brings his ruminative, elegant creative ear to some excellent partners in the Magik Magik Orchestra.
-
Feb 16, 2011Many of the songs here will certainly rank among Vanderslice's best work, and the album as a whole deserves repeated listens, if only to parse out the seemingly infinite layers of nuance.
-
Feb 16, 2011White Wilderness gives Vanderslice's listener something to fixate on other than his often-good lyrics. As a consequence, despite its predictably moderate tempos and unchanging volume, it's a sign of progress, of potentially great things to come, and Vanderslice's most immediately welcoming record in half a decade.
-
Feb 16, 2011All that tweaking really brings out the details of his songwriting, which are sometimes lost in the orchestration and less polished vocals here. Still, these types of projects can help a songwriter refocus and between them Vanderslice and Choi have made a memorable album that successfully adds a new twist to Vanderslice's catalog.
-
Under The RadarMar 9, 2011Though lyrically intimate, White Wilderness is a grand affair. [Feb 2011, p.72]
-
Feb 16, 2011With the orchestra, Vanderslice is able to maintain the best-friend-telling-secrets feel of his previous work, while expanding the sound to make it feel more like an orchestral soundscape of all your best friends telling you the same secret. Or maybe the secret is just much, much grander.
-
Feb 16, 2011Vanderslice's approach may be more direct here, more immediate, but the results resonate just as deeply as anything he could have worried over in the studio, and it ranks right up there near the top of his impressive run of records.
-
Feb 16, 2011Although he has always been most highly touted for his expertise as a producer, White Wilderness is the first of Vanderslice's albums to sound like its production, rather than its songs, is the driving force.
-
Feb 16, 2011Despite its lack of focus, the record's immediacy is also kind of charming, and there's something else about White Wilderness that makes me less inclined to toss it aside; only a few listens in, it's proven to be a grower.
-
Feb 16, 2011White Wilderness feels like a record that could have become a compelling collection of wonky strum-along pop songs with imaginative and colourful instrumentation, but ultimately it's indebted to an over-complication of ideas in a collaboration that struggles to flourish the way it should do on paper.
-
Feb 16, 2011This album simply lacks the impact that Vanderslice's trademark sound usually packs in abundance. The bare bones of his usually excellent songwriting are there, but it's more constrained by the orchestration than set free.