★★★★★
As two-thirds of seminal shoegaze outfit Skywave, Paul Baker and John Fedowitz were partly responsible for creating some extraordinarily sonically challenging records as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries changed hands. The three albums released between 1998 and 2004 culminated in Synthstatic, arguably a precursor for the subsequent rebirth of shoegaze in its present day noise incarnation. The band's implosion led to birth of not one, but two pivotal outfits...
- drownedinsound.com
2012-07-19
★★★★★
Ceremony's previous records showed an increasing interest in breaking the hardcore mold, but Zoo is a total departure from anything resembling traditional punk rock. Zoo isn't Fucked Up's populist bombast or The Men's deliberately unfocused experimentalism; it's an attempt at nailing a specific garage/post-punk hybrid. Specifically, Zoo gestures towards the snotty-yet-emotive bravado of The Hunches, in addition to the repetition and starkness of Wire and their British cohorts...
- dustedmagazine.com
2012-04-05
★★★★★
It's hard to make punk last any longer than a few albums. Its in-the-moment, spontaneous nature make it challenging to repeatedly recreate. Ceremony's Zoo certainly sounds like punk. It's loud, the vocals are untrained and impassioned, the guitars are distorted and at least a little bit sloppy. It should all add up, but it had trouble making me feel anything. If I had to explain to someone what modern-era punk sounds like, I'd play them Zoo...
- www.noripcord.com
2012-03-26
★★★★★
Anytime a band deliberately moves to put a shine on its irreverent, sweat-soaked image, there will inevitably be a critical flogging doled out by the group's most ardent supporters. Indeed, claims of "phoning it in" and "selling out" are prevalent in these circumstances. It's difficult to imagine a fiery hardcore act like San Francisco's Ceremony similarly derided for tidying up its sound a tad and moving to the same record label as indie pop darlings Belle and Sebastian, but here we are...
- www.adequacy.net
2012-03-22
★★★★★
Just under two years ago punk vocalist Ross Farrar spat out the shocking idiom: "Sick of Black Flag. Sick of Cro Mags." The throwaway jibe echoed around basement venues, provoking rapturous hysteria. At that moment, Farrar seemed to have spin-kicked through the door to the third dimension, propelling Ceremony from hardcore impersonators to punk rock libertines...
- thequietus.com
2012-03-19
★★★★★
While Ceremony's new record Zoo features the band's most distanced sound and comments on the space between people and society, it's fitting that in the band's live show, it has become even more intertwined with its audience. During the band's extended set at 924 Gilman in Berkeley, Calif., the band was so often joined by the audience on stage that the two seemed to join into a single tail that failed outwards. The band chose its selection from across its entire career...
- www.punknews.org
2012-03-19
★★★★★
This new (fourth) album by Bay Area five-piece Ceremony has reignited an argument that's been raging for millennia - what is punk? Is this what it sounds like? Shouldn't a real punk album be called Maniacal Holiday or something? All tiresome questions of course. Especially when Zoo is actually an exercise in how to transform from a band whose youthful 13-minute debut was chockablock with eff-you punk-rock platitudes into something else without stinking out the place...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2013-04-23
★★★★★
The last few years have seen traditionally brash and frantic punk and hardcore bands tone down their music and allowed more pop and indie sounds to ease their way into their music. Examples of this include ****ed Up as well as Ceremony with their latest release 'Zoo'. This is not to say this is a bad thing though...
- www.gigwise.com
2012-03-15
★★★★★
Wire's Chairs Missing might very well be the best rock album of all time. It's definitely one of the most influential, foreshadowing a half-dozen or so subgenres of indie rock in just under an hour...
- thephoenix.com
2012-03-15
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