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Sep 22, 2014With Ritual in Repeat, Tennis have crafted the most affecting record of their short career and purged the emptiness too often lurking behind the facade of similar artists, not to mention their own past work.
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MagnetSep 18, 2014Tennis dances easily into the present with an album that pines for more for modern connection than campy reinventions of someone else's love. [No. 113, p.61]
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Sep 11, 2014When you put together the sympathetic production, the strength of the songs, and the power of the performances, it adds up to another great record by a band whose members are in complete command of their thoughtful, tender, and sneakily hooky sound.
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Sep 9, 2014The performances finally have weight, if not depth.
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Sep 9, 2014Ritual in Repeat is an elegantly constructed and crafted piece of pop music art borne from rigorous, exacting songwriting.
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Sep 9, 2014On Ritual In Repeat, Tennis discovers new capabilities well, and it shows that a record doesn’t necessarily need to have a central theme for it to be an ambitious collection of songs.
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Sep 10, 2014Not every track on Ritual in Repeat reaches the blissed-out fever pitch of “Bad Girls”, a four-and-a-half-minute slow burner that builds to a stunning crescendo, showcasing Moore’s voice to perfection. Even the songs that don’t, however, command their own gravity.
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Sep 11, 2014As with everything Tennis have done to date, it still sounds very light; the percussion, as usual, is kept unobtrusive, and Moore's vocals never threaten to bubble over into a snarl; you can't help but wonder what they might sound like with the shackles off, but perhaps that's to miss the point.
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Sep 11, 2014If you're inclined to Tennis negatively, they look like a group of blank people offering bland sweetness devoid of deeper meaning. While the band might've fit that description at one point, they've since grown past it, so if you're one of the listeners who dismissed their earlier work as banal and bourgeois, know that Tennis has since earned another chance.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 11
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Mixed: 0 out of 11
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Negative: 1 out of 11
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Sep 10, 2014