★★★★★
"I'm putting this album out at a time when there's so much competition to be heard," notes Afie Jurvanen in the press materials surrounding Barchords, his second album as Bahamas, before going on to consider the difficulty of forging and maintaining connections in the digital age...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2012-05-07
★★★★★
Summer has come a bit early this year and I'm not talking about the unseasonably warm weather. Bahamas' new album Barchords is perfect summer-time listening; if Jack Johnson and M. Ward were spooning on the couch, Bahamas would be the warm damp area between the skin on skin contact. Everything about the album makes you want to sit in the sun with a cold beer. Initially, I was tempted to find this album after hearing a perfectly pleasant song called Lost In The Light...
- www.syffal.com
2012-04-19
★★★★★
Afie Jurvanen (aka Bahamas) revels in laconic and languid bittersweet, part tongue-in-cheek, part dead-serious desperation. The charm lies in not knowing exactly from which perspective he's driving, which made the Toronto songwriter's debut, Pink Strat, one of last year's undervalued gems. Barchords wrangles a similar ambivalence, with slightly more ambition in arrangement while still remaining understated...
- www.austinchronicle.com
2012-03-15
★★★★★
Brushfire Canadian native Alfie Jurvanen--aka Bahamas--doesn't disappoint on Bar Chords, the follow-up to 2009's Pink Strat. Like the songs on Bahamas' debut, the record is powered by his strong vocal delivery and thoughtful lyrics. Proving that he's landed on a fitting album, the indie folk rocker sounds a lot like his Brushfire brethren--at times echoing Jack Johnson and Mason Jennings...
- www.relix.com
2012-03-15
★★★★★
If you expect a guy called Bahamas to make laid-back, tropical music, you'd be half-right. On Barchords, Bahamas (or Afie Jurvanen, as his mamma calls him) crafts a collection of light, sometimes even breezy tracks infused with blues ("Lost in the Light"), pop ("Your Sweet Touch") and country ("Any Other Way"). Oddly, one of the most notable things about Barchords is how much silence it contains...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2012-02-16
★★★★★
Since 2005, Afie Jurvanen has been popping up on albums by his fellow Canadians. That's him playing guitar with the Stills and Jason Collett, and more recently he manned the piano and sang back-up on Feist's Metals and Kathleen Edwards' Voyageur. Like most sidemen, he has dreams of graduating to frontman. Unlike most sidemen, however, he actually has the singing and songwriting chops--not to mention the personality and presence--to make that happen...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2012-02-13
★★★★★
Toronto-based Afie Jurvanen, the singing, songwriting instrumentalist behind Bahamas, likes his folksy melodies strong but subtly executed, muted by Wilco-like flange and bolstered by his resonating vocals and gently spare-yet-complex guitar passages. At least that was the case on 2009's debut full-length Pink Strat...
- filtermagazine.com
2012-02-13
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