★★★★★
Washington State native Brandi Carlile has released five studio albums, a smattering of EPs, named her horse after her first guitar (it was a Sovereign) and spent time in her teen years as a backup singer for an Elvis impersonator. She's a woman obsessed with music and it shows in her practiced guitar picking ("Save Part of Yourself"), preternaturally strong voice ("Raise Hell") and the perfectly pop-folksy music style she carves out on her latest album, Bear Creek...
- exclaim.ca
2012-07-12
★★★★★
It takes a particular kind of musical craftsman to be able to work within the confines of the country/pop/rock genre whilst simultaneously tweaking each new album to sound stylistically different without betraying the "rules" of the genre. Brandi Carlile has managed this sometimes impossibly difficult feat with her previous three efforts, even though her last, Give Up the Ghost, was just too dark and thick with hard-edged amelodic tendencies to really get behind...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-06-25
★★★★★
There are a number of albums to come out of the last fifty years that are named after recording studios that provided an aura of mystique, a palpable energy, but most importantly a harbor from the frenetic pace of the music industry for their artists. Oftentimes they may not be those musicians' best work (Elton John's 1974 LP Caribou comes to mind), but what they do represent is a moment of connectedness--a moment of artistic growth and expression that is vital to the creative process...
- www.glidemagazine.com
2012-06-18
★★★★★
The beauty of live performances is you take everything as it comes. If an artist flubs a line, misses a chord or hits the wrong key vocally, there's no going back. A lot of "live" albums, however, fall short because they use a number of production tricks to cover over mistakes, or to make the audience sound louder than they really are, so they end up sounding disingenuous and in a way are a waste of time...
- www.glidemagazine.com
2011-05-11
★★★★★
The beauty of live performances is you take everything as it comes. If an artist flubs a line, misses a chord or hits the wrong key vocally, there's no going back. A lot of "live" albums, however, fall short because they use a number of production tricks to cover over mistakes, or to make the audience sound louder than they really are, so they end up sounding disingenuous and in a way are a waste of time...
- glidemagazine.com
2011-05-09
★★★★★
Within certain circles, Brandi Carlile's 2009 album Give Up the Ghost was a cause célèbre - a frequent entry on year end "best of" lists and a source of cult whispers.
For all its apparent craftsmanship, to these ears that album never quite hung together as Carlile's operatic tendencies frequently drowned their musical beds and maybe even the songs, while the star power of Rick Rubin's production and guest turns by a Chili Pepper, a Heartbreaker and a certain Mr...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2011-05-05
★★★★★
Brandi Carlile's third full-length album, Give Up the Ghost, opens with a single strum and then the cuffed chugging of her acoustic guitar as the 28-year-old Seattle native starts singing in her warm alto. The song, "Looking Out", builds to a soaring pre-chorus that shows off Carlile's remarkable power and range...
- www.popmatters.com
2010-09-02
★★★★★
Millions of Grey's Anatomy viewers got a crash course in this Washington State singer-songwriter's work when it was repeatedly featured on the series in 2007. Carlile's third album, Give Up the Ghost, a polished collection of confessional rockers and twangy love songs, should help keep her momentum going. She commands the spotlight with ease throughout, thanks in large part to her distinctive throaty falsetto ? even making Elton John seem like a sideman when he shows up for a duet...
- ew.com
2010-08-27
★★★★★
Two years ago, a lightly-dropped self-titled debut picked up rapid steam behind relentless touring, visceral songwriting and an emotional, heartfelt vocal delivery that left critics grasping at proper descriptions for the weathered rookie known as Brandi Carlile. After all, these were elements properly reserved for industry veterans who had lived enough of a life worth writing about and whose hearts had been rung out enough times along the way to be believably weary...
- www.lostatsea.net
2009-10-30
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