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Dec 14, 2010Like a lot of these polished indie albums, Return Of The Century is more about the overall vibe than distinct, individual highs.
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Dec 14, 2010Return of the Century is their most impressive record and shows that they were able to turn personal and professional turmoil into a work with great artistic merit.
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Dec 14, 2010A melodic improvement on their 2007 debut, Return of the Century could pass for breezy escapism, thanks to mellow vocalists Edward Anderson, Caroline Donovan, and Jeanine O'Toole; but the songs' unreliable narrators invariably exhibit dismissive, selfish attitudes toward friends and lovers.
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Jan 26, 2011If the sentiments are tough, the music itself is tender, borrowing from Belle & Sebastian and Brill Building pop to create a sound that is both pastoral and urbane, straightforward yet sophisticated.
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Dec 14, 2010Everything feels dead in the desert, but Return is rife with life.
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Dec 14, 2010It's not a simple pleasure, these guys will quietly make you work to figure out the intricacies of, say, the angular chug of "Bmore," but if you set aside the overall effect, and bed down in this album on a moment-to-moment basis, there's plenty of pop music to get lodged in your head on this record.
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Dec 14, 2010This ambiguity ends up being what separates this effort from the sort of average indie pop twinkies that were so abundant at the midpoint of the aughts.
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Dec 14, 2010Century moves the band into the 2000s, while still featuring the occasional nod to '60s songcraft. This change, ironically, strips The 1900s of much of its distinctiveness.