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Sep 25, 2015The result is a genuinely exceptional and entrancing album, opaque but effective, filled with beautiful, skewed songs, unconventional without ever feeling precious or affected.
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Sep 23, 2015This may well be Holter’s most accessible album to date, but it’s this very approachability that renders it all the more intriguing, drawing you in with open arms. Stately and serene, it’s a wilderness that begs to be inhabited for some time, a country you’ll be reluctant to leave.
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MojoSep 15, 2015This is not a record that wants or needs to be solved, but the clues and traces it leaves behind are so compelling it's difficult to let it alone. [Oct 2015, p.86]
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Feb 22, 2016While the majority of the songs on the album are lush ballads, a playfulness shines through here like never before.
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Sep 30, 2015While it's tempting to say Have You in My Wilderness is her most personal music yet, it might be more accurate to say that it's her most approachable: this time, her brilliance demands a lot from her listeners, but also meets them more than halfway.
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Sep 25, 2015It’s the subversion of the tyranny of the pop song and the aural manifestation of desire’s drift, or trudge, wherever it goes. In the background, throughout, her voice annotates, in stunning polyphony, like Horn’s watery associations, the unknowable trajectory that each song always already takes.
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Sep 23, 2015Have You In My Wilderness finds Holter narrowing her focus a little. In doing so, she gets the best of both worlds, showing off her ability to write warm and breezy pop music while maintaining the complexity, and perplexity, that made her so intriguing to begin with.
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Sep 21, 2015There is a risk that we might take such quality for granted. Just one listen will remove any such complacency.
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UncutSep 15, 2015With Have You In My Wilderness her songs feel brighter, more pop, yet they're also just as lush, as considered and as quietly experimental. [Oct 2015, p.77]
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Sep 15, 2015Superlatives barely do the record's beauty or brilliance justice. [Aug-Sep 2015, p.63]
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Oct 5, 2015Deciphering the message in her words relies on just how much time the listener is willing to devote to the album, but with music this brilliant, the task seems all the more alluring.
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Sep 23, 2015Wilderness is scholarly but not overly-calculated, ornate but not lavish. In a career that has been nothing short of innovative, this arguably marks a creative peak.
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Sep 23, 2015In all, Holter has made an album about blissful, hypnotic escape in many forms, and in listening to it and engaging with it, you'll be overwhelmed by these feelings too.
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Oct 2, 2015Even if Have You In My Wilderness is Holter's most accessible record to date, it's riddled with enough puzzles, lyrical twists and delicate refinement to remain intriguing listen after listen.
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Sep 18, 2015Have You In My Wilderness embraces the specific, rather than the eternal, and in her narrowed focus you can sense a palpable self-confidence and a hard-won precision.
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Sep 28, 2015Depth is a tough thing to accomplish. It can’t merely be present, it also has to be convincing that it’s there and worthwhile. Have You in My Wilderness’ best quality is that it won’t let you down if you get up close and sit with it for a while.
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Sep 21, 2015She doesn’t convey specific messages or exhaustively detail narratives, but to listen to each song on Have You in My Wilderness is to inhabit a feeling in all of its pain and all of its glory.
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Q MagazineOct 1, 2015An album that repeatedly pulls you back in to try and decipher its charms. [Nov 2015, p.111]
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Sep 28, 2015The music can sometimes obscure the words, with only snippets allowing themes of love, loss and solitude to creep into the listener’s consciousness.... Have You in My Wilderness is another arresting album by an equally arresting artist, one who is clearly at the forefront of the global avant-pop scene and will be for some time.
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Sep 28, 2015An ambitious triumph.
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Sep 28, 2015An intense, emotional record.
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Sep 25, 2015Each listener should find their own things to contemplate, relate to and enjoy in these thoughtful, ornamental and fantastic songs, and that’s exactly the way it should be.
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Sep 25, 2015Julia Holter always stood out as a left-field crafter of melody; this album establishes her as a unique lyric voice, too.
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Sep 23, 2015Holter confidently and impressively takes her music wherever she wants.
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MagnetNov 17, 2015An airbrushed return to the imagination hinterlands of an expressive impressionist. [No. 126, p.57]
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Sep 25, 2015All the world's indeed a stage on this enchanting fifth LP.
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The WireSep 15, 2015Production wise, [Have] You In Wilderness is a touch too diaphanous and gauzy, a few tracks in, you start craving something solid to hold on to amid the clouds of billowing strings.... It's a testament to Holter's songwriting ability that this doesn't fatally mar the album, but it would be appreciated if her future work demonstrated a greater sense of its own physicality. [Oct 2015, p.54]
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Sep 18, 2015There’s prodigious ambition here, and moments of great pleasure.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 127 out of 143
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Mixed: 9 out of 143
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Negative: 7 out of 143
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Sep 25, 2015
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Sep 25, 2015
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Oct 3, 2015