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Jan 30, 2019The central conceit of the album is one of growing up. This comes through on a track-by-track basis, like on “All Blacked Out”, an older, folksy demo expanded in its new form into something much richer. But it’s also a sweeping feeling that the arc of the album as a whole supports, as it travels from gritty early tracks like “Lucy’s” and “Pretty”--a lovely, economical introduction to the band’s style--toward more exploratory ventures, like “What Chaos Is Imaginary” and the adventurous development of “Swamp and Bay”.
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Mar 19, 2019Songs like All Blacked Out and Chemical Freeze are suffused with melancholic ambiance, where descending minor chords provide a fullness to their otherwise spare arrangements.
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Feb 4, 2019Folk-rock, synth-pop, and more mature delves into the post-punk spectrum of alternative rock are all explored in What Chaos Is Imaginary. Each song is a new chapter offering insight into the multi-dimensional world that is Girlpool--and every one is more intricate, more complex, more captivating than the last.
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Feb 1, 2019Highlight ‘Swamp And Bay’ offers a rare hook-laden respite with a country-ish radio jangle and scuzz-rock climax, but everything stays consistently true to the core of the record: a very human and honest partnership, in a universe all of their own.
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Feb 1, 2019On What Chaos Is Imaginary, Tucker and Tividad have created an album that find the duo embracing their personal changes while still writing honest and deep lyrics. The harmonies and melodies on the album are far above those on past albums.
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Jan 30, 2019This album offers a view into the minds of a pair of singular artists who might differ in their delivery, but who both understand that a glimpse of truth is a whole lot more intriguing than a disingenuous attempt at the whole thing.
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Jan 30, 2019Tividad's sun-kissed vocals, on top of the slow, dreamy instrumentals all over What Chaos Is Imaginary, makes the record feel cinematic. The drone-like voice complementing the vibration of heavy buzzing bass will make you slip in and out of reality.
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Feb 1, 2019Weaving in and out of concrete, direct, indie-rock songwriting and meditative, impressionistic dream pop, the record takes up more space than any of Girlpool’s previous music.
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Feb 12, 2019Most of their new venture fits this bill and is actually worth the hype.
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Feb 6, 2019What Chaos Is Imaginary serves as an important document of the Girlpool narrative: a juncture in the band’s career that highlights the emotional (and in Tucker’s case, physical) changes its artists are reckoning with as their success grows in the indie community.
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Feb 1, 2019Although willfully murky in a way that occasionally verges on the indecipherable, it's a wondrously open-minded record that treats all experiences, good or bad, as ripe for artistic sublimation.
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Feb 1, 2019Throughout the album, Girlpool illustrate the struggles of navigating expectations amidst the personal and musical changes Tucker and Tividad have undergone in the past few years. The result is an impressive balancing act, a sound grounded in the band’s tradition that is nevertheless constantly pushing forward.
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Jan 30, 2019Tracks like ‘Swamp and Bay’ bring us punchy indie rock, and ‘Hoax and the Shrine’ give us woeful nursery rhyme acoustics befitting to a reflective train ride in a coming-of-age film. A development for Girlpool, and one of sheer enigmatic bliss.
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Feb 8, 2019Girlpool’s trajectory from Before the World Was Big to What Chaos Is Imaginary proves how an album can be many things: a meticulously cohesive monologue delivered by multiple voices, or a notebook stuffed full of intriguing yet somewhat dispersed ideas. What Chaos falls into the latter category, though its title includes a self-referential wink that implies the band both perceives and embraces the work’s disarray.
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Jan 31, 2019It's easy to lose your way here, as there aren't many big choruses to hook onto; and by the time we reach the generic shoegaze of "Roses," the duo seems to have misplaced their own compass. Still, they say not all who wander are lost, and Girlpool have at least tracked several potential paths to pursue on the next overcast journey.
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Q MagazineFeb 4, 2019A collection of jangly guitar pop that struggles to locate a niche within their favoured genre. [Mar 2019, p.116]
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Feb 4, 2019While there are several moments to savour (particularly Pretty and the shoegaze-influenced Minute in Your Mind), the more muscular approach ultimately does them few favours: one is left with the sense that they have traded in what made them different for a stab at fairly unadventurous alt-rock by numbers.
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Feb 1, 2019Whereas their earlier tracks were more simple, now their music is a multidimensional, multi-faceted affair, full of fragile introspection and meandering guitars.
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Jan 31, 2019The album points to the potential of future solo albums from both Girlpool members. Even though some of the huge shake-ups of instrumentation and songwriting styles work well, Tucker and Tividad rarely sound like they're connecting and it makes What Chaos Is Imaginary harder to connect with.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 16
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Mixed: 7 out of 16
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Negative: 0 out of 16
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Mar 11, 2019
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Feb 8, 2019
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Feb 1, 2019