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Dec 18, 2015The record’s lack of organization and resistance to stasis work against its accessibility. Those willing to mine such a dense work will be rewarded in a visceral sense, but may be left groping in the darkness for a specific, externally-fabricated meaning. Either way, the abstractness and wandering abandon of Mutant define not only the album, but Alejandro Ghersi’s approach to music.
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Dec 2, 2015It is undoubtedly made to be heard in one sitting. It may not always be a comfortable listen over the course of its hour, it will unflinchingly show you its grotesque beauty, and each listener's reactions and visions produced in the face of such peculiarities will be unique.
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Nov 20, 2015Fast pacing and fragmentary delivery show how Mutant’s tracks operate as experiments in obsessive dysmorphia, taking flaws and magnifying them to scale drama, affect, and beauty out of digital refuse. Exhilarating moments are found next to tracks that only feature impact tail-ends, panned and swirled around a headspace to suspend spatiality further.
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Nov 19, 2015Its bustling, condensed epics refuse to present a single, easily digestible vision of the world, yet in so doing they end up revealing this world in all its beautifully chaotic truth.
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Nov 18, 2015Mutant is an album of contrasts, and Ghersi has an uncanny ability to let extremes interact with each other to create something new.
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Nov 18, 2015Mutant unfurls like a singular body, and its nuanced empathy with the shame and horror and joy of corporeality makes it an enthralling piece to experience.
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Dec 22, 2015Mutant may be some of his most challenging work yet, but as Arca's music becomes more abstract, the viewpoint behind it comes into focus in ways that embrace strangeness, ugliness, and beauty equally.
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The WireDec 16, 2015Almost every track has a fearsome radiance to its high end and even in those parts without drums or squared off structures, the surges of sound recall collective dancefloor ecstasies. [Dec 2015, p.44]
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Nov 23, 2015Whatever the aural equivalent of a spectacle might be, that's Mutant, which firmly establishes its creator as an auteur.
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Nov 20, 2015As disarmingly brilliant Mutant can be at times, it’s still deliberately obscure.
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Nov 19, 2015Distressing, transcendental and beautiful, it’s a journey so remarkable it could excuse a hundred false starts.
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Nov 19, 2015Mutant, even as it threatens to filibuster itself at over an hour long, feels like the album that Xen was meant to grow into, with every lesson that Vulnicura taught integrated at a molecular level.
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Nov 18, 2015Whereas Xen had the odd, satisfyingly familiar beat pattern, Mutant is even more punk. It dives headlong into an emotional abyss and proceeds with a rhyme or reason that's up to listeners to determine.
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Nov 18, 2015It’s a testament to his cohesive sound and willingness to defy convention that this record, despite a lack of samples or anything really resembling typical electronic music, conveys emotion as well as it does.
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Dec 9, 2015The downside of the now-ness, the resistance against static definition, is lack of resolution. Mutant is hard to listen to, sometimes in a salutary way and sometimes not.
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Dec 1, 2015Somehow, despite the maelstrom of sound and texture, Mutant never topples in to destruction. But perhaps the fact that it does teeter that much closer to the edge is the reason that it never quite matches its predecessor's more solid appeal.
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Nov 18, 2015The result of this endless metamorphosis--it's over an hour long--is an album that is eventually rewarding, but only to those who are determined to follow its scattered pathway to the satisfying, aggregate end.
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Nov 20, 2015The forms are extraordinary and the surfaces dazzling, but it's unclear how to navigate through them. You're impressed but also confused, and you keep an eye out for the exit. Several tracks shine regardless.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 92 out of 104
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Mixed: 4 out of 104
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Negative: 8 out of 104
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Nov 23, 2015
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Jan 19, 2016
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Dec 3, 2015