★★★★★
Mathieu Zazzo
Rokia Traoré sings of her native Mali on "Beautiful Africa," produced by John Parish.
Emilie Bailey
Factory Floor, from left: Nik Void, Gabe Gurnsey and Dominic Butler.
Lucy Robinson
The new album from Volcano Choir (from left, Justin Vernon, Chris Rosenau, Thomas Wincek, Matthew Skemp, Daniel Spack and Jon Mueller) is "Repave...
- www.nytimes.com
2013-11-08
★★★★★
The third full-length by 22-year-old Sarah Jarosz reflects not only her growth as a songwriter but her willingness to push the boundaries of country, folk, and Americana to discover connections not necessarily considered before. Build Me Up from Bones reflects years of study in contemporary voice improvisation at the New England Conservatory of Music. She wrote nine of the 11 songs here, and chose two covers: Bob Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate" and Joanna Newsom's "The Book of Right-On...
- www.allmusic.com
2013-11-14
★★★★★
The Sarah Jarosz on her latest record, Build Me Up From Bones, is a romantic and a realist. She sincerely expresses her desire for true love one minute and then conceals the details of her deeper thoughts the next. Jarosz writes, sings, and plays mostly acoustic, traditional-sounding, old-time country and futuristic way-out-there compositions that are almost impossible to define because of their weirdness...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-10-07
★★★★★
Plenty of musicians boast weighty degrees, but for 22-year-old Sarah Jarosz, the intent went deeper. Despite fears that academia might stomp out her fiery bluegrass style, the Austin-born/Wimberley-woodshedded mandolin prodigy enrolled in Boston's New England Conservatory of Music and never looked back.
- www.austinchronicle.com
2013-10-03
★★★★★
Fresh out of high school, Jarosz is young enough that her influences still sit close to the surface on her debut album; you can hear shades of Nickel Creek, Abigail Washburn and Gillian Welch. The remarkable thing is that Jarosz can already do-in her own way-what each of them do. She's mastered guitar, mandolin and clawhammer banjo; she sings in pleasing, even tones, and she's written a clutch of songs as formidable as they are fetching.
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
★★★★★
If her muse is a reflection leading towards her inner self, then Sarah Jarosz is an artist who has found her voice and fully brought it into life. A young talent in the country/bluegrass/folk community, Jarosz, multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter, has recently stepped forward with her second release on Sugar Hill Records entitled, Follow Me Down...
- www.glidemagazine.com
2011-07-11
★★★★★
Sarah Jarosz' Song Up In Her Head was one of my favorite releases of 2009, a loose and inviting bluegrass record with surprisingly good musicianship, a few tasteful covers and the kind of earnest-but-good-hearted songwriting you would expect from a precocious musician still in high school when the album was being cut...
- popdose.com
2011-06-20
★★★★★
Maybe it is just my inbuilt prejudices but when I receive an album from teenage female prodigies, I always expect either sub-Lady Gaga disco toss or bland MoR supermarket fodder. What I don't expect is music of unadulterated beauty sung with the voice of an angel, but that is exactly what you get with this second album from multi-talented, bluegrass/country music-loving Texan, Sarah Jarosz...
- www.themusicfix.co.uk
2011-05-30
★★★★★
As a precocious 17 year old, Sarah Jarosz made a phenomenal first impression on Americana audiences with her debut, Song Up in Her Head, and her sophomore album, Follow Me Down, is an even more impressive and progressive set...
- www.slantmagazine.com
2011-05-23