- Record Label: Suicide Squeeze
- Release Date: Oct 10, 2006
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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This mixture of clattering, ramshackle arrangements and smartly put-together tunes... is an intriguing new direction for a band that previously seemed more interested in artsy, diffident post-rock.
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Alternative PressIt's nothing short of their highest point to date. [Nov 2006, p.188]
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MojoIt's both so clever and so very charming. [Nov 2006, p.114]
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A significant leap forward from 2004s We Should Have Never Lived Like Skyscrapers, the sound is richer, warmer and more deeply layered.
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Transcendence has yet to occur, but they have taken the required step in acquiring a broader range of exposure.
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There’s something to be said for rewarding repeated listens, for golden nuggets in every song, never buried but never hollering.
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Harness doesn't deliver many surprises or follow through on the promise of the debut; it simply refines the sounds they explored and digs its heels in a little deeper.
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The overall effect is some formidable, quirky inde-rock.
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There’s really no good reason to seek this out if you already own the... debut album.
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SpinRefreshing, breezy rhythms propel densely intermeshed guitars and Jeremy Bolen's incantatory vocals. [Dec 2006, p.96]
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These songs aren't particularly denser or busier than their predecessors, but their burbles and whines serve less purpose than before; instead of sounding overzealous, they sound affected, voluminous for volume's sake.
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It’s not that this album had to be catchy. But when an uninventive melody is rehashed ten times to the point that you wonder whether literal keys and strings are missing from the band’s instruments, what you get is a diffusion line of a product that wasn’t even selling well in the first place.