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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.
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MagnetMixes equal parts Teenage Fanclub and mid-period Wilco. [#74, p.91]
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After repeated listens, the fact that the end of the album doesn't live up to the beginning really starts to stick out.
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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.
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The Broken West sounds like old-style AM pop with muscle and guts.
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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.
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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.
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Akin to AM era Wilco matched with Big Star's #1 Record.
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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.
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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.