by
Patrick Wolf
- Record Label: Junketboy-Consignment
- Release Date: Sep 25, 2012
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- Critic score
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Oct 18, 2012He's an outsider and the best thing about this marvellous compilation, however lush the sound and however catchy the melodies, is that it does absolutely nothing to change that.
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Feb 13, 2013Sundark and Riverlight is an enchanting and heartfelt experience from beginning to end.
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Oct 12, 2012One day the mainstream is going to claim him and he'll lose a little something, but for now he's still the prince of the misfits and the martyrs, the waifs and the strays, Sundark and Riverlight is him at his distilled best, tears in his eyes, glitter on his cheeks, tragic, magnificent, ours.
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Oct 12, 2012The album excels, featuring some of the artist's finest work, despite being mostly retreaded material. Do not let this be a deterrent, though, for there is something here for the devoted members of his "Wolf Pack" as well as his fiercest detractors.
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Oct 15, 2012In drawing together all his disparate styles in to one distinct context, [Wolf] might have created his most accomplished album yet: albeit one that is a little too long, and rather in love with itself.
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Oct 15, 2012Sundark and Riverlight is thankfully more chamber pop than chamber pot. It's an elegant collection, but an acquired taste.
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Oct 11, 2012Sundark and Riverlight is like the thumbnail version: everything compressed, details lost.
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MagnetDec 4, 2012When the melodies are too thin to support their own emotional weight, all the string quartets in the world can't rescue them, and I find myself missing that old pulsing bass, those swirling drums and the sheer fabulousness that made the original versions so liberating. [No. 93, p.61]
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Nov 7, 2012He's an artist who thrives on crashing ambitions, and has undertaken his most over the top project to date with Sundark and Riverlight.
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UncutOct 26, 2012Stripped of the usual bells and whistles, and backed by unplugged instruments, it's left to his voice to do the work and, given the length of the thing, it soon starts to grate. [Dec 2012, p.79]
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MojoOct 22, 2012As an experiment in revisionism, the results are mixed. [Nov 2012, p.85]
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Oct 15, 2012A sharper edit and this would have made a great EP.
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Oct 11, 2012It's hard to shake the feeling, though, that it's all a bit self-indulgent. These rewrites, though confident, are as much a curiosity as anything else, more an exercise in shape and form than an improvement.
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Oct 19, 2012He's re-released a handful of already beloved songs in a version that rarely match their initial power.
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Jan 3, 2013Like other such endeavors-acoustic re-imaginings, that is-the results aren't that poor. They're just boring.
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Oct 16, 2012The album neither works on its own merits nor captures what's made Wolf one of today's most compelling musical talents. Sundark and Riverlight takes one of the most captivating, progressive catalogues in contemporary pop and makes it sound like a Picnic with the Pops concert.
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Oct 11, 2012When it works – as on the heartbreaking 'Together' and a barrelling 'The Magic Position' – it highlights his gifts as a songwriter, but on the dreary 'Bitten' and a seemingly endless 'Vulture' it makes you long for something simpler to mark his brilliance.