★★★★★
A multi-talented fiddler schooled in Western swing as a whippersnapper member of the Texas Playboys, Amanda Shires nowadays writes and sings dark, deceptively pretty songs as a solo act. Here, she works with Jason Isbell, who she recently married (with songwriter Todd Snider presiding). Her palette has broadened - check the warped Latin groove on "Bulletproof" and the perversely come-hither suicide reverie "Box Cutters...
- www.rollingstone.com
2013-09-06
★★★★★
Nashville by way of Texas fiddler/singer-songwriter Shires has been quietly yet consistently amassing a substantial body of work. Her evocative, often poetic, Southern themed lyrics dovetail with predominantly softly delivered, mid-tempo folk rock and a girlish but mature voice that seems to know more than she's telling us. This follow-up to 2011's well received Carrying Lightning further refines her talents...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-08-08
★★★★★
"April was the last time I think I saw you, you were carrying lightning / The way you walked into the room, if I was a flower I would've opened up and bloomed" ('Swimmer...')Lucid, lyrical and true: Amanda Shires has an impeccable way with words. Her command of language, it's a quiet marvel. Against a backdrop not so radical (country figures, acoustic laments, brushed snare, the swoop of her own violin), the young Texan displays uncommonly sophisticated poetics...
- music.thedigitalfix.com
2012-03-19
★★★★★
A Lubbock native some may remember from the Thrift Store Cowboys, Amanda Shires has delivered a second disc that finds her balancing dusky overtones with occasional buoyancy. In the process, the fiddler and singer-songwriter lands somewhere between the perkiness of Dolly Parton, whom she resembles vocally on occasion, and the disquieting poetry of Richard Buckner. Consider the haunting and dynamic "When You Need a Train It Never Comes" a late candidate for song of the year.
- www.austinchronicle.com
2011-11-24
★★★★★
Silver Knife Records You can thank Jason Isbell. The first time I heard "Codeine" off Isbell and the 400 Unit's new Here We Rest album, I immediately went to the liner notes to see who was singing along with Isbell - and who was playing the fiddle (which ranged from gingham-apron-and-apple-pie sweetness to a weird skwonk that punctuated the "If there's two things that I hate" verse)...
- www.jambands.com
2011-05-11
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