• Record Label: Merge
  • Release Date: Jan 23, 2007
Metascore
72

Generally favorable reviews - based on 13 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 10 out of 13
  2. Negative: 0 out of 13
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Akin to AM era Wilco matched with Big Star's #1 Record.
  5. Magnet
    70
    Mixes equal parts Teenage Fanclub and mid-period Wilco. [#74, p.91]
  6. 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.
  7. After repeated listens, the fact that the end of the album doesn't live up to the beginning really starts to stick out.
  8. 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.
  9. The Broken West sounds like old-style AM pop with muscle and guts.
  10. 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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