★★★★★
Chilly Gonzales doesn't play by your rules. He makes crude, politically incorrect jokes about colonization. He dresses in a bulky bathrobe on stage. He puts out rap albums, solo piano albums, produces fellow artists' Juno-award winning albums, and then writes a batch of pop music for string quartet. All from a self-described "musical genius." Historic Theatre Outremont in Montréal was sold out for Chilly's first night back in his hometown...
- exclaim.ca
2015-04-27
★★★★★
Chilly Gonzales is one of those musicians you know for his sheer tenacity rather than any breakthrough moment; he's perfected the art of sticking around. His discography is overshadowed by the names he has worked with--Jamie Lidell, Daft Punk, and many musicians from Canada's indie and electro circles, such as Peaches and Feist (he was a key contributor to the Grammy-nominated The Reminder)...
- pitchfork.com
2015-03-26
★★★★★
Classical music is proving a source of inspiration in some unlikely corners. After Adamski's reinvention of the German waltz for his first album in 15 years, and Ólafur Arnalds' concept album around the music of Chopin with Alice Sara Ott, Chilly Gonzales returns with a reimagining of Romantic-era chamber music for today's listeners...
- www.musicomh.com
2015-03-26
★★★★★
refers to himself as a musical genius; reasonably - and amusingly - so. He knows his eggs, knows more about the history of musical composition that most (combined). He's well schooled and so he breaks the rules... as you'd hope. New piano and string quartet album (ie, chamber music) is another set of rules broken, beautifully, and another road sign to his own place in musical history...
- www.drownedinsound.com
2015-03-19
★★★★★
Old rappers are like old heavyweight pugilists; inevitably having retired at their peak, they begin to miss the ring. Back they come for more blows to the head, their speech slowing and their hunger fading, with punchdrunk performances tarnishing a glorious career. To call Chilly Gonzales old at 42 is embroidering it a little, and he's certainly managed to circumnavigate the pitfalls, maintaining a full and varied existence since the days of electroclash when he emerged from Berlin, keeping...
- thequietus.com
2015-03-07
★★★★★
This is Chilly Gonzales' second long playing foray in to the world of the solo piano, eight years after the first. The keyboard maverick, more commonly found with an arsenal of electronic sounds at his fingertips, has an intimate relationship with the instrument, expressing for the second time some private asides for moments of contemplation. For this is an area of Gonzales' work that takes him far away from the public eye...
- www.musicomh.com
2012-09-04
★★★★★
Though he's best known for his mischievous, multiple redefinitions of hip hop - including his last release (The Unspeakable...) which, he claimed, was the world's first orchestral rap album - Chilly Gonzales is far from the wag he sometimes likes to portray himself as...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2012-08-30
★★★★★
At almost three centuries old and five to nine feet in length, the piano flies in the face of musical progress. In today's world, grubby 16-year olds etch together sounds from the bowels of their bedrooms. It doesn't matter what they play or how they play it, all they need is a knack for GarageBand and an ear for a bit-mapped beat. There's little room for the piano in this get-the-hits-out-quick blueprint...
- drownedinsound.com
2012-08-30
★★★★★
If you've never listened to Chilly Gonsalez before, this might notbe the best place to start. Not that it's bad, but as a showcase of Chilly's talents The Unspeakable... is not the most comprehensive, and neither is it all that accessible. Never one to stick rigidly to convention, on The Unspeakable... theCanadian has aimed to create something pretty rare. Over a nine-song,sub-30 minute runtime there are no beats and not much bass to speakof...
- drownedinsound.com
2011-07-11