★★★★★
Beyonce's fifth studio album BEYONCÉ was probably not made for you. Beyonce is a black woman living in America-- albeit an incredibly rich, beautiful and powerful one--and on this record, more than any others, she has honed in on her personal experience. BEYONCÉ is a blueprint for the struggle and joy she has experienced, but it is also a repurposing of that blueprint...
- thefourohfive.com
2014-01-24
★★★★★
Beyonce's fifth studio album BEYONCÉ was probably not made for you. Beyonce is a black woman living in America-- albeit an incredibly rich, beautiful and powerful one--and on this record, more than any others, she has honed in on her personal experience. BEYONCÉ is a blueprint for the struggle and joy she has experienced, but it is also a repurposing of that blueprint...
- www.thefourohfive.com
2014-02-12
★★★★★
Released with nary a marketing campaign, Beyoncé's self-titled new album exploded on the scene two weeks before Christmas, debuting on iTunes and immediately selling over 600,000 copies in its first week--no small feat in 2013. Sure, Bey's always been a big seller--but for perhaps the first time ever, her album seemed intended to be taken as a cohesive whole, rather than as a vehicle for world-dominating singles. And cohesive it is...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2014-01-18
★★★★★
This is the body of work by which Queen Bey should be remembered. Everything Beyoncé Knowles, Sasha Fierce, Mrs. Carter, whatever you want to call her, has represented and spoken about in the past - female empowerment, self-empowerment, sexiness, class, groove - all coalesce righteously on Beyoncé. Without the visual accompaniments, I think the minimalist grandeur, brazenly honest lyricism and hush-hush leak-proof global release has to be commended...
- www.beat.com.au
2014-01-17
★★★★★
In an era of popstars in which being a sexual edification is as much the goal as a #1 single, it's a bit funny how Beyoncé (sort-of) secretly cuts her first Really Good Album, and then when it appears out of nowhere it immediately displays the contrast between a rich girl plying her wares down by the hacky sack corner at a local community college and a grown woman wrapping a blindfold around the eyes of a man who's seen the world...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-01-10
★★★★★
The pop album's taken a beating by technology. It used to be that progression in the field enabled the furthering of music, facilitated creative evolution - but today's digital culture has dissected the catalogues of pop's greatest into compressed files, into bite-size samples. Ashes riding the westerlies, scattered shorn of the past's sleeves-and-credits context. 'Beyoncé' defiantly rebels against type...
- www.clashmusic.com
2014-01-10
★★★★★
Beyoncé | Beyoncé
(Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia)
Album Review penned by Brent Faulkner
Shock value has played a gargantuan role within the contemporary music arsenal for some time now. The current generation tends to embrace the 'cutting-edge' and blunt, in regards to nearly everything. Artists of various ages, particularly urban artists, have adjusted and assimilated to this edgier style...
- reviews.theurbanmusicscene.com
2014-01-07
★★★★★
Should Beyoncé choose to settle in the world of Adult Contemporary one day, she'll have most of the legwork already done. She's spent the time since 4, an album that playfully extolled the virtues of marriage, crafting a role for herself in that sphere with the ambitious grace of a good politician. Imagine the fun she had requesting the big hair and bigger fur to help President Obama ring in his second term, or in gussying herself up like Marie Antoinette to promote an international arena tour...
- pitchfork.com
2014-01-06
★★★★★
Self-titling an album midway through your career can mean many things. For Fleetwood Mac, it marked the rise of the Buckingham-Nicks axis; for Blur, it signalled a departure from the jovial parochialism that had served them so well; and for Beyoncé, it's a liberation from her Superwoman image but not necessarily from all the confusing gender politics that go along with it...
- www.state.ie
2014-01-07