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Sep 14, 2012Given all the things Byrne and Clark pack into Love This Giant, it's a remarkably catchy and concise set of songs featuring some of the most vibrant work that either one of them has produced.
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Oct 4, 2012Above all, this is an album of intensely dramatic arrangements, never allowing the listener to settle and continually rewarding anew.
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Sep 6, 2012Byrne and Clark have managed to not only meet but exceed expectations, and created one of the year's smartest albums in doing so.
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Sep 12, 2012Clark and Byrne are never fully on the same page. Instead they ricochet of each other, flying off on miniaturized tangents that never stray far from home.
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Sep 6, 2012A peculiar but pitch perfect partnership.
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Sep 10, 2012David Byrne and Annie Clark (and to an undetermined extent, St. Vincent producer John Congleton) achieve a remarkable symbiosis on Love This Giant.
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Sep 11, 2012They allow the horns to create a foundation for their extensive layers of baroque pop, which only elevates their tracks to something soulfully extraterrestrial or dark deco.
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Sep 21, 2012Pop sensibilities are allowed to swell over, into and around each other; each song blends the seams of the core into a fragmented, disjointed, appropriately-meshing of sounds and in the end, Love this Giant is a magnificent triumph because of it all.
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Sep 6, 2012St. Vincent and David Byrne have brought out the best in each other--they should do this more often.
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Sep 11, 2012Love This Giant is a sprawling behemoth, if not greater than the sum of its parts, then certainly twice as weird.
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Sep 12, 2012In these 12 songs--built on voice and guitar but generously appointed with bright brass arrangements and funky machine beats--Byrne and Clark sound like psychosocial explorers setting out on an open-ended quest.
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MagnetOct 1, 2012Love This Giant fitfully achieves its aim of unlikely, unearthly pop. [No.91 p.56]
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MojoSep 19, 2012This is cerebral yet genial fare. [Oct 2012, p.91]
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Sep 11, 2012Despite the groovy intentions and the unmissable smell of too many cooks in the kitchen, their album often proves to be pretty damn tasty, indeed.
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Sep 10, 2012As it turns out, Love This Giant is completely out of kilter with what's contemporary, and off-the-hook brilliant to boot.
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Sep 13, 2012The two have crafted an album worthy of their names, stylistically bold and also a whole lot of fun.
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Sep 13, 2012The alien textures of St. Vincent's guitar heroics and the crunchy electronic rhythms lurching behind the trombones and sax stabs keep things just on the right side of gleefully weird.
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Sep 11, 2012A deeply weird and deeply lovely record, albeit one that listeners should do their best to listen to with as few preconceptions as possible. A tall order, perhaps, but one that will help avoid disappointment.
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Sep 11, 2012In retrospect, it seems Giant will function less as a career highpoint for either artist, and more as a historical marker of the career trajectories of each participant.
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Sep 14, 2012Although you wouldn't expect anything less from artists of this high a caliber, it still comes as a pleasant surprise how cohesive, complete, and thought through Love This Giant is for a one-off all-star collab
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Sep 10, 2012The duo successfully crosses Clark's talent of romanticizing morbidity through melody and Byrne's knack for eccentric pop by using a prominent horn section both as a bridge between the two and an unfamiliar element that distinguishes this as a partnered effort.
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Q MagazineSep 6, 2012The songs, driven by their charismatic duets, mix inventive brass grooves with playfully indelible melodies. [Oct 2012, 94]
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Sep 11, 2012This LP is like a special-mention science-fair project: two brainy kids speaking in tongues that are fascinating even when they're hard to follow.
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Sep 10, 2012A May-November partnership that results in a spate of interesting moments, but largely dies on the vine.
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Sep 12, 2012Byrne and Clark rarely interact vocally, sometimes suggesting two solo outings spliced together; and the grooves have an anonymous vibe.
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Sep 11, 2012The two musicians' styles fit neatly over each other, sounding mutually rhythmic, arty, and full of hermetic insight.
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Sep 7, 2012We can only hope they soon renew their collaboration; 'Love This Giant''s too big and clever, and Byrne-Vincent too perfect a pairing, to be a once-in-a-lifetime affair.
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Sep 6, 2012By the end, the couple they most resemble is Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, for he is eternally youthful in his restless invention, and while she seems soft and wispy, up close she glints like a razor blade.
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Sep 7, 2012There's a danger of art-rock overload in this alliance of two cerebral music talents, but Love This Giant succeeds remarkably well.
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Sep 10, 2012Love This Giant is a skewed and funky instant classic.
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Sep 10, 2012One of the most striking facts about this record is that it doesn't sound definitively like the work of one or the other, though occasionally you will catch a whiff of something one or the other has created in the past.
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Sep 24, 2012[Their collaboration] makes for a consistently delicious contrast between the unruliness of sound... and the cool affectlessness of both their voices as every song bursts with the interplay of these two eccentrics' ideas.
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Sep 17, 2012It is, of course, a very good album from start to finish--but you would expect that from an elder statesman of American alt-pop and one of the brightest talents of the current NPR-approved indie-rock scene.
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Sep 10, 2012Nothing is excitingly radical nor is anything unpolished or poorly composed.
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UncutSep 28, 2012A collection that feels more art project than album. [Nov 2012, p.71]
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Sep 6, 2012One wishes for Clark to let loose a little more, and allow Byrne to mold his galloping rhythms to her punchy guitar lines. [Aug/Sep 2012, p.109]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 36 out of 42
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Mixed: 5 out of 42
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Negative: 1 out of 42
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Sep 13, 2012
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Oct 5, 2012
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Oct 3, 2012