Buy Now
| Buy on |
|
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Apr 5, 2018There’s a Riot Going On probably won’t jump-start any riots and reveals its beauty gradually, but it’s a welcome addition to the group’s vast oeuvre that finds them evolving into yet another new shape.
-
Mar 13, 2018There's a Riot Going On is an exceptional addition to Yo La Tengo's legacy, a timeless classic.
-
Mar 15, 2018For the most part, There’s A Riot Going On succeeds in finding strength in the stillness. Two of its best tracks are also its quietest.
-
Mar 21, 2018Yo La Tengo wants us to absorb their calm serenity, and that it's okay to sit down and distance ourselves from the negativity we encounter from time to time.
-
Mar 19, 2018There’s a Riot Going On is their fifteenth album and, like most of their discography, it carries itself with an unassuming (but powerful) air of quiet confidence.
-
Mar 16, 2018There’s A Riot Going On takes longer to reveal its treasures, but ends up being an enduring and rewarding listen, their best since 2009’s Popular Songs.
-
Mar 16, 2018There are flickers of the old fire on There’s a Riot Going on (which bears no similarity to Sly and the Family Stone, to the surprise of precisely no one).
-
Mar 16, 2018The overall effect is a truly hypnotizing one, a perfect nighttime record if you will.
-
Mar 14, 2018They deliver their apprehensions as gently as they can, turning reckonings into reveries.
-
Q MagazineMar 13, 2018Mostly the pace unfolds with the urgency of a melting icicle, couching expressions of fear, hope and love amid forlorn synth arcs and just enough fuzz to keep things frisky. [May 2018, p.105]
-
UncutMar 12, 2018It's a remarkably immersive and generous album, emotionally as well as musically. [Apr 2018, p.18]
-
MojoMar 12, 2018Any sketchiness only adds to the impressionistic atmospheres that the musicians create. [Apr 2018, p.93]
-
Mar 12, 2018As protest albums go, it’s a strange one, but if this is what the revolution sounds like: sign us up.
-
Mar 12, 2018Given the source material, There’s A Riot Going On was never going to be the sonic revolution that Sly & The Family Stone-referencing title might suggest, but it is an invitingly disparate sound collage that will seduce fanboys and newbies alike.
-
Mar 14, 2018A riot? Hardly. But by combining these trance-like textures in such an incessant way, they’ve created music of a mostly memorable variety regardless.
-
Mar 20, 2018Though it can feel a bit too calm and sedate, the album also reflects the group’s greatest and most instantly recognizable strengths. Their sound might suggest that they’re wound up in nostalgia, but that’s never been the case: They are able to tap into a performative naïvete.
-
MagnetApr 17, 2018Another routinely enchanting, brilliantly exceptional, standard-issue stunner from Hoboken, N.J.'s finest. [No. 150, p.62]
-
Mar 12, 2018On their dense, careworn new LP (their fifteenth studio effort), indie stalwarts/college rock heavyweights Yo La Tengo have shown that can still bring fresh ideas to the table, despite the album being fifteen tracks long, and it being over thirty years since their first album.
-
The WireApr 5, 2018Plushly layered drones and percolating beats nearly bury some of the hardest, saddest words they’ve ever sung. [Apr 2018, p.63]
-
Mar 20, 2018An album to savor, then, or forget.
-
Mar 16, 2018There's a Riot Going On is, in its own subtle way, Yo La Tengo at their most uncompromised; it's an album that's likely to separate their most hardcore fans from more casual admirers, though if you loved "Night Falls on Hoboken" from And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, you'll likely savor it.
-
Mar 15, 2018There are a couple of tonal mis-steps, we’re looking at your ‘Esportes Casual’, and perhaps the running time could be shaved down, but overall this stands as a sweet reminder to take a step back from the madness and breathe.
-
Mar 14, 2018The pulsing, nodding, whisper-y grooves are a kind of accomplishment, too. Subdued, sure, enveloping and lucidly becalmed, you can float on them like warm salt water, no effort required at all.
-
Mar 12, 2018As the word shuffle of the first and last song implies, There's a Riot Going On can be played on loop so smoothly as to go unnoticed. More than most any other Yo La Tengo album, it has a palpable, unflappable mood all of its own.
-
Mar 12, 2018Like Summer Sun, there’s more ambience, more general keyboard and synth blear, more lounge-pad speckles and dots, but the songwriting is rudimentary even by this band’s standards and the tone color doesn’t vary as much as they maybe thought it did.
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 17 out of 20
-
Mixed: 3 out of 20
-
Negative: 0 out of 20
-
Mar 22, 2018