★★★★★
Life can get you down, no matter how vigorously you love thy neighbor or accentuate the silver lining. Surely, it's a blessing to be alive, but it's a struggle to stay positive in a world of such grim despair. Sometimes, we just need to escape the mundane, to find a personal utopia that remains true, even if for a fleeting moment in time. It seems 'Delicate' Steve Marion harbors similar feelings, if Positive Force is an indication...
- drownedinsound.com
2012-07-16
★★★★★
The whimsical tone and ingratiating melodies of Delicate Steve's Wondervisions made for an endlessly likable debut that was an easier sell than many other instrumental rock albums, which tend to get bogged down in proggy self-indulgences. For Positive Force, man-behind-the-curtain Steve Marion sidelines the outside players who collaborated with him on Wondervisions, composing and performing the album entirely on his own...
- www.slantmagazine.com
2012-07-12
★★★★★
To say electronic music is prominent in today's up-and-coming (or in some cases, came-and-maybe-already-went) scene is an understatement. What's notable about Delicate Steve is not necessarily guitarist Steve Marion's apt electronic contribution, but his songwriting and reference to earlier musicality that could be easily overlooked...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2012-07-05
★★★★★
Wondervisions is an eclectic combination of fuzzy psychedelia and pop sensibility -- think an instrumental, collaborative pairing of Robert Fripp and Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors -- though not the sort of sensibility which would see one inclined to include such norms as 'vocals' and 'structure.' There's structure, but it's all been twisted about and bent out of shape in the best of ways...
- www.adequacy.net
2011-02-14
★★★★★
Every time I put on Wondervisions, the new Delicate Steve album, it sounds different, with each spin bringing new melodies and rhythms to the surface. The album as a whole remains a marvel, but it never seems the same way twice. It's almost like a kaleidoscope, with multiple layers of sound tumbling into and out of brightly-colored patterns. But that's the wrong metaphor -- too mechanical. If anything, the album is full of warm, gentle pleasures. It's sinewy, electric, fluid...
- tinymixtapes.com
2011-02-14
★★★★★
When one of Felix Mendelssohn's friends approached the romantic composer about setting his Songs without Words to text, he refused not because he wanted to protect their abstraction, but because their wordlessness gave them, in his mind, a more powerful immediacy. Indeed, it is the task of the instrumental composer, from the mixing board to the film score, to make her music expressive without the use of concrete meaning made possible by lyrics...
- www.popmatters.com
2011-01-31
★★★★★
The irony of Delicate Steve's name becomes apparent just a few bars into the band's debut, Wondervisions: Their mostly instrumental arrangements may be fussy and multifaceted, but they're built around muscular electric guitar riffs and African tribal rhythms that are anything but delicate. Though the five-piece band immediately invites comparisons to acts like Battles and Holy Fuck, there's a keen pop sensibility to Wondervisions's songs that makes the album accessible and relatively light...
- www.slantmagazine.com
2011-01-31
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