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Car Alarm Image
Metascore
73

Generally favorable reviews - based on 25 Critic Reviews What's this?

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  • Summary: The eigth album for the indie rock band formed in Chicago was recorded in three months.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 19 out of 25
  2. Negative: 0 out of 25
  1. Intricate and ever-changing in style, The Sea and Cake give further proof why they've had such staying power.
  2. The Chicago quartet has been making this kind of music since the '90s, and its eighth album is much in the spirit of past releases.
  3. Car Alarm is essentially Everybody II; an album that subtly stretches the group’s formulaic parameters with rawer production and looser instrumentation but without cementing any concrete boundary-changes.
  4. Car Alarm feels different, though. What’s difficult to figure out, however, is whether that’s merely a feeling or whether there’s something actually, appreciably novel about the album.
  5. It’s at once simple, colorful, and cozy, but, if examined closely enough, can be appreciated on another level entirely--one that’s both casually sophisticated and quietly intelligent.
  6. Filter
    68
    While the album-opener 'Aerial' and 'Weekend' are still easy on the ears, it's the all-too-short 'CMS Sequence' and 'Mirrors' that whet our appetite for the band's experimental side, which is achingly absent here. [Fall 2008, p.94]
  7. Maybe all of Car Alarm is about conflict, but Prekop glides and sighs over every vowel, making it difficult to hear what he’s saying or to detect a hint of tension beneath the gloss.

See all 25 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of
  2. Mixed: 0 out of
  3. Negative: 0 out of