- Record Label: Dead Oceans
- Release Date: Aug 3, 2010
Buy Now
| Buy on |
|
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Alternative PressSeattle's Mt. St. Helen's Vietnam Band make a dramatic leap forward on this meditative follow-up to their eponymous 2009 debut. [Sep 2010, p.112]
-
Dec 21, 2010Each time the album so overtly flips over, the same brief blushes of goosebumps, the same visceral highs, the same infectious, clapping percussion: I straight up have a crush on this album.
-
With its sophomore album, Where The Messengers Meet, the group puts miles between itself and the self-titled debut it released only 18 months ago, and discovers unexpected edge in the process.
-
Where The Messengers Meet might be the best MSHVB can do with their current MO, it's a remarkably compact album of emotionally-swollen, disillusioned folk rock -but you get the feeling that the band might be on the precipice of something much more titanic.
-
The album doesn't quite knit together seamlessly, but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of interesting stuff here. If anything, Where The Messengers Are is an easily measurable improvement over their debut.
-
Where The Messengers Meet subverts all the imagery suggested by the group's very name. It implies something incendiary, something rebellious, something explosive. And though there's evidence of a knowledge of all those things in the record's landscape, the path it takes proves a safer one, a trip to be had in good company.
-
It seems it will take a third record for it to be fully realised, meaning that 'promising' once again seems like the right word, but on Where The Messengers Meet the Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band do a good deal of delivering too.
-
Close-knit is fine, but on Messenger, the band has pulled themselves in too tight.