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Mar 31, 2015Meet Carrie & Lowell on its terms and it’s revelatory.
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Mar 30, 2015At every turn he unfolds the fists of self-pity into upturned palms of generosity.
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Mar 27, 2015Haunting anecdotes make Carrie & Lowell consistently compelling and elevate the storytelling from murky religious contemplation to relatable human struggle.
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Mar 26, 2015Carrie & Lowell is a delight in every way, surely one of the albums of the year.
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Mar 24, 2015By forsaking greatness, Stevens has unearthed a wonder altogether more tremendous than the one at the top of those towers he used to stack.
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Mar 30, 2015Carrie & Lowell leaves everything on the table, and as a result it's the most open, transparent and heartfelt record Stevens has made in his career. Sometimes, that's all you need in order to make a masterpiece.
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Mar 31, 2015Carrie & Lowell is a demonstration of why Stevens sings songs, of why we listen to songs: to feel less alone, to make sense of the things that are hardest to make sense of.
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Mar 16, 2015Carrie & Lowell is just the latest in a long line of unimpeachable achievements.
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Mar 30, 2015This record is a return to the spare folk of Seven Swans, but with a decade's worth of honing and exploration packed into it. It already feels like his most classic and pure effort.
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Apr 3, 2015With its quiet meditations on mental illness, God, and death, Carrie is a hauntingly beautiful bummer.
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MagnetApr 15, 2015The bona-fide masterpiece that Stevens' career has culminated in, and likely the one that will come to define his career. [No. 119, p.58]
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Apr 1, 2015It's not certain whether the acre to the desert forest has been crossed, but the feeling that abides is one of compassionate admiration for Stevens, not only for making this beautiful album of unfaltering rawness (and one which may even provide a crutch, a brutal one, for others), but for all of his work that has preceded it, music which frequently transcended the hurt of a life so wounded at its root.
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Mar 31, 2015Carrie & Lowell demonstrates, brilliantly and harrowingly, over and over again, how life’s most valuable lessons can only be gleaned by enduring its worst circumstances.
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Mar 30, 2015It draws a subtle focus and then recedes from the record without resolve. Its tensions remain. If Sufjan is a perfectionist, he is now perfecting the art of stumbling, creating melodies that writhe with uncertainty and voices that echo back on themselves.
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Mar 30, 2015The storytelling in Carrie & Lowell is as vivid as its always been, only that the focus is his.
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Mar 30, 2015The level of emotional proximity, at times, will be enough to make you fight back tears.
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Mar 27, 2015One of Sufjan’s most fat-free and consistently stunning records, but also his darkest.
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Mar 25, 2015He has bravely laid his songwriting gifts bare in their purest form.
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Mar 24, 2015A collection of songs as captivating, poignant and finally, ultimately, redemptive as any that Stevens has produced.
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Mar 20, 2015It's heavy, but so very beautiful.
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Mar 17, 2015If The Age of Adz harnessed Stevens's limpid melodies to crashing electronica, Carrie & Lowell finds that electronic experimentation sublimated, emerging primarily in the album's timing, which, like a click track, is more precise and mechanical than anything on Stevens's purely folk efforts.
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UncutMar 16, 2015A kaleidoscopic trawl through formative memories, cascading with melody and intimate reminiscence. [Apr 2015, p.83]
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Under The RadarApr 16, 2015As always, Stevens' precise details makes his songs ring through with truth. [Apr - May 2015, p.87]
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Mar 27, 2015Still, despite its light-handed approach, Carrie & Lowell strikes with a sort of urgency unparalleled across the composer's 15-year career. Each song feels like a demon Sufjan simply had to face sooner than later.
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May 1, 2015The impeccable music Stevens has created gives shape to the chaos of his emotions.
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Apr 3, 2015He peppers the album with very evocative, specific references that often sound like childhood memories (“The man who taught me to swim couldn’t quite say my first name”), creating an intimacy that many of his previous records have lacked.
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Apr 1, 2015Carrie & Lowell is such a deeply, deeply personal statement from Stevens that its smallness sometimes shows. Though it’s easily his best and most powerful album since 2005’s Illinois, it never quite reaches the same sweeping highs of that epic concept album.
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Mar 31, 2015Stevens strips his sound far enough to reveal his deepest anguish; neither the Disney-style orchestras of 2005's Illinois nor the synth-pop-as-craft-project of 2010's The Age of Adz peek through his acoustic fingerpicking and warm-milk voice.
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Mar 31, 2015Carrie & Lowell is the most harrowingly personal work Stevens has offered us to date; it also ranks with his most skillfully crafted albums despite its spartan approach, and it's a sometimes difficult but profoundly moving work.
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Mar 30, 2015A hushed, intent Sufjan Stevens contemplates death, grief, family and memory on his quietly moving new album.
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Mar 30, 2015As it stands, Stevens’s words drive these songs, and not always in the most linear fashion. Lyrics that meander in unruly metric on the page are parsed into eloquent couplets that, somehow, sound conversational.
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Mar 30, 2015But by going through it all, by exposing all the pain, he’s created something beautiful and vital.
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Mar 30, 2015Carrie & Lowell is so dark and deep, those of a sensitive disposition might need to rehydrate once they remove their headphones. But light pierces the murk.
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Mar 27, 2015That Carrie & Lowell is so rivetingly lovely is no surprise; the difference is that instead of Christianity, the Chinese zodiac or American history, it's Stevens' own life and relationships that he mines here with his trademark deftness and nuance.
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Mar 27, 2015Rarely have his revelations been as direct, or as personal, as on Carrie & Lowell, a cathartic exercise exploring the effect of his estranged mother Carrie’s death on him two years ago.
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Mar 25, 2015It's easily his most personal work yet, and even though the story of his mother's difficult life is hardly universal, the results are deeply moving and richly evocative.
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MojoMar 19, 2015Carrie & Lowell has an air of insecurity underlining the sophistication of the music. [Apr 2015, p.84]
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Q MagazineMar 16, 2015Unquestionably his finest album to date. [Apr 2015, p.113]
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Apr 3, 2015Another cerebral and emotionally compelling trip. It's haunting, moody and contemplative.
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Mar 30, 2015Carrie & Lowell is tough to nail down, but it’s also tough to listen to.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 552 out of 600
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Mixed: 12 out of 600
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Negative: 36 out of 600
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Apr 2, 2015
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Apr 2, 2015
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May 10, 2015