★★★★★
There was a lot of love for hometown heroes Braids in the air at the sold out Bar "Le Ritz" P.D.B. last night. Sure, they may come from Calgary, but their adopted home of Montreal has fully embraced them, and like to think of them as some of their own. And that feeling seemed to be mutual. Frontwoman and de facto spokesperson Raphaelle Standell-Preston started the set by chatting up the enthralled crowd, informing them it'd been a year since their last hometown performance, having been cooped...
- exclaim.ca
2015-05-15
★★★★★
Pain is disarming; power is insidious (personally, politically, critically). Deep In The Iris, the third album from Montreal-via-Calgary's BRAIDS, draws from a reservoir of pain and the power that keeps it: Raphael Standell-Preston's lyrics here are plainspokenly autobiographical, her two narrative focuses a devastating breakup and a seemingly abusive relationship with her step-family. There is no misdirecting, little poetry to be wielded...
- www.tinymixtapes.com
2015-05-07
★★★★★
Braids are most definitely a band that are unwilling to stagnate. On their critically acclaimed debut LP 'Native Speaker', the Canadian indie-rockers channelled Bjork and 'Feels' era Animal Collective. Two years later, polarizing follow-up 'Flourish // Perish' all but ditched guitars, sounding like a mix of Portishead and 'Kid A' era Radiohead...
- www.sputnikmusic.com
2015-04-30
★★★★★
What remains of a relationship after it ends? Pictures, text messages, mementos, sure, but the hardest things to hold onto are the fleeting sensations: the taste of a person's mouth, the feeling of first standing naked in front of them, the dent in the pillow where a lover's head once laid. Braids' third album Deep in the Iris plays as a record of all these tiny memories, accrued in the aftermath of losing someone...
- pitchfork.com
2015-04-30
★★★★★
Braids have been no less hesitant to engage directly with their influences than they have been to move beyond them. There were some overt Animal Collective-isms of their debut, Native Speaker, but they were all but entirely put to bed by the time the album was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in 2011. Flourish // Perish was a polar shift in tone and temperature, swapping Native Speaker's sweaty physicality for a presence that summoned every available synonym for ice...
- www.popmatters.com
2015-04-28
★★★★★
?????????? The mantle of "experimental pop" is a pretty heavy one for a band to carry in the year 2015. For one thing, the line between margin and mainstream has been collapsing for at least a decade now, and arguably since grunge broke in the early '90s and "alternative" became another word for "cash cow...
- www.glidemagazine.com
2015-04-29
★★★★★
Raphaelle Standell-Preston is prolific. In 2013, the Canadian artist was a part of two significant releases: Blue Hawaii's debut LP, Untogether , and the sophomore LP with her Montreal-based three-piece Braids ( Flourish // Perish ). While Untogether was a response to writing a record a long distance away from her then-boyfriend and collaborator, Braids has always been her main hang, and for Deep In The Iris , she and bandmates Austin Tufts and Taylor Smith stole away to mountainous retreats to...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2015-04-29
★★★★★
Head here to submit your own review of this album.
"I'm wearing red/and if I am you feel you've the right to touch me" Raphaelle Standell-Preston testifies on the lead single from Braids' third album. In its visceral five minutes, 'Miniskirt' makes abundantly clear a shift has occurred in the Canadian three-piece's energy. Its lyrics rage and rebuke misogyny; from its historical roots to today's slut shaming...
- www.thefourohfive.com
2015-04-28
★★★★★
opinion by SAMUEL TOLZMANN
What's in a feeling? Devoid of scientific logic, conventional wisdom considers emotion among the least quantifiable aspects of human experience. Because the effect of music on our emotions appears to bypass structural logic, we tend to think of music as an emotional medium. Pop, at least, is in subterranean collusion with the notion that feelings are too complicated to consider in their own right...
- prettymuchamazing.com
2015-04-28
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