★★★★★
By co-opting the title of John Coltrane's 1965 classic, "A Love Supreme," Bilal is at least hinting at lofty expectations. For the most part he exceeds them. Love songs can be tricky business. At its core, the majority of Soul/R&B music is about falling in and out of love and all the complications it brings. As Bilal quips, "Like grandma used to always say, 'nothin' new under the sun...
- www.hiphopdx.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
It's possible A Love Surreal couldn't have come at a better time (though first-month sales appear to argue otherwise...) as more eyes are on the R&B field than they have been in years thanks to buzz acts Frank Ocean, The Weeknd and Miguel...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
By Ryan B. PatrickIf Bilal's 2010 effort, Airtight's Revenge, functioned as an electro-funk "fuck you!" to the unfortunate neo-soul label that has dogged his career, A Love Surreal is a Salvador Dali-inspired outing that juxtaposes soul, funk and jazz sounds to create an imaginative redefinition of R&B...
- exclaim.ca
2013-04-01
★★★★★
The problem with developing a cult classic is that you develop that product out of a particular set of circumstances and point in your talent and creative life. These circumstances and critical life juncture cannot, and perhaps should not, ever be repeated, and yet the finicky public's appetite for artistic stagnation is unyielding when something they like is placed on their all too picky plate...
- www.soultracks.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
8
Critical Mass
Release Date: February 26, 2013Label: eOne
Frank Ocean resurrected R&B last year. Or reinvented it. Or just rescued it. At least, that's the way many critics saw it. But while his channel ORANGE -- an excellent record, of course -- catalyzed interest in the genre, the frenzy of genuflecting that followed cast a sour light on his immediate predecessors and peers, a.k.a...
- www.spin.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
Bilal's " A Love Surreal...
- www.latimes.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
A Love Surreal is only the third studio album Bilal has managed in 12 years, a remarkable fact that testifies to a career marked primarily by speed bumps and absences...
- pitchfork.com
2013-04-01
★★★★★
This New York-via-Philadelphia singer's third album is a masterful set of mostly low-key modern soul inflected with shades of funk, jazz and psych-rock, featuring a dreamy, atmospheric blend of lush keyboards, gritty guitars, jazz-tinged piano and funky hip hop-influenced beats accompanying Bilal's impressively elastic, deeply soulful vocals and evocative lyrics of love lost and found.
- kexp.org
2013-02-28
★★★★★
Kristin Barlowe
Holly Williams, who plays roots-rock with an Appalachian foundation.
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
Now-Again Records
The Stark Reality, a jazz-rock band from the late 1960s, included, from left, John Abercrombie, Vinne Johnson, Monty Stark and Phil Morrison...
- www.nytimes.com
2013-02-26
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