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Love And Curses Image
Metascore
79

Generally favorable reviews - based on 11 Critic Reviews What's this?

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  • Summary: This is the latest album for the North Carolina-based band led by Greg Cartwright.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9 out of 11
  2. Negative: 0 out of 11
  1. Love And Curses still generates plenty of highs. Cartwright’s songwriting draws on Stax, Sun, and the Brill Building, combining a classic pop structure--simple and memorable--with a fair amount of only-got-this-studio-booked-for-an-hour immediacy.
  2. Musically invigorating, lyrically exciting, and thematically prescient from start to finish, Love and Curses gets my vote as the best album of 2009.
  3. Love and Curses is filled with great melodies that burrow deep into the skull without being cloying, and offers lyrical sentiments that tug at universal truths without pandering.
  4. Uncut
    80
    The results are impressive: the requisite 1960s garage cover sits happily alongside the band's traditional urgency, and their newfound classicism. [Nov 2009, p.99]
  5. Love and Curses sounds as much a product of the present as of the past, and the new songs attack with goblin force but vampire sophistication, thanks to another new line-up.
  6. Everything is in complete control, which says a lot about their zen-like mastery of the garage rock cubbyhole, but for me half the fun was the audible battle happening right there in the mix: the sweet sound of instruments bucking around, splashing cold water into cold faces.
  7. Mojo
    60
    His nicotine-gritted , hurt-strained voice finds a honeyed foil in Dave Amels' swirling organ, while rhythm section David Wayne Gay and Lance Willie provide R&B warmth and swinging, bar-band stomp. [Dec 2009, p. 96]

See all 11 Critic Reviews

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