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Oct 22, 2015Directness is key to her appeal: there are no greys in Carrie's music, only blazing primary colors. Appropriately enough, Storyteller gleams with steely assurance, perhaps the toughest and boldest record yet but one that hardly soft-pedals her softer side.
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Oct 23, 2015On Storyteller, it’s striking to hear her respond to varied musical textures by expanding her repertoire, toying with inflection and phrasing, and bringing new wrinkles to the characters she’s inhabiting.
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Oct 22, 2015There’s plenty on Storyteller that will sound familiar to Underwood fans, and a few filler tracks. But a little stretching goes a long way, and this might be her most interesting album yet.
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Nov 18, 2015Carrie’s never been in better voice, but a little more control in the production would have served her well.
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Oct 22, 2015Story may not tell listeners much about Underwood’s inner life, but she’s never owed or offered that. She makes good songs sound great, and that’s enough.
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Oct 21, 2015Too often, it is more than halfway boring. It isn't uninspired or weakly performed. Rather, it is boring in spite of the overwhelming bombast, the booming bass and pounding drums, the huge vocals, the wailing guitars; it is boring because rather than electrifying you, it distances and anaesthetizes.... The good news is that those songs are, most of them anyway, pretty great.
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Oct 23, 2015As with much high-gloss, high-compression pop, the heavy-handed production gets fatiguing after a while, even when Underwood transcends it (see the corny yet undeniable letter to Daddy "The Girl You Think I Am").
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Nov 3, 2015That’s Storyteller as a whole: expertly arranged, dense without overwhelming the force of its captain.
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Oct 21, 2015She largely picks songs that serve as launch platforms for her ballistic-missile voice, but they don’t cohere into a whole identity.... If Ms. Underwood has developed a thematic specialty, it’s the woman-done-wrong anthem. The ones on this album are some of the better songs here.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 106 out of 167
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Mixed: 3 out of 167
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Negative: 58 out of 167
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Oct 23, 2015
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Oct 23, 2015
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Oct 23, 2015