- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
So many bands confuse being laid-back with being comatose that it's good to hear a band who give their richly layered tunes some heart and soul.
-
MagnetMixes equal parts Teenage Fanclub and mid-period Wilco. [#74, p.91]
-
Even if you tend to avoid the genre of power-pop like some sort of rare disease, I Can’t Go On... provides an undeniably honest display of some quality rock tunes.
-
After repeated listens, the fact that the end of the album doesn't live up to the beginning really starts to stick out.
-
Drunk on ringing guitars, crashing drums, and swooning harmonies, singer Ross Flournoy and crew try to compensate for their shortage of fresh ideas with boundless enthusiasm -- and almost pull it off.
-
It's not a perfect record, but it's perfected, about as good as the debut from a band that traffics in this kind of music can be at this point.
-
The Broken West sounds like old-style AM pop with muscle and guts.
-
Their influences are all immediately recognizable and their songs all hummably predictable, and yet their Merge debut, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On, reveals the band to be confidently inventive and assured in their collective identity.
-
The lyrics are particularly generic, even for a pop band, and they render The Broken West’s mission obsolete.
-
This is an album made for car trips by a band best suited for noisy bars; you’re going to want to play it loud.
-
Akin to AM era Wilco matched with Big Star's #1 Record.
-
Frontman Ross Flournoy and his mates kick up a ramshackle jangle-pop racket that gets its energy from always sounding as if it were on the verge of falling apart.
-
The Broken West's debut sports a big, masculine sound strangely lacking in swagger but with a sensitivity that never devolves into emo self-consciousness.