★★★★★
A few summers ago, I traveled up to New York City to see Deerhunter perform live at Webster Hall. After slipping between crowds of beanie-wearing beardos and gangs of art school kids talking up a storm about some nobody in some who-gives-a-shit band from nowhere, I managed to get myself up to the balcony of the venue and hide off in a small corner booth that overlooked the stage. Up to that point, it had been a rough day and I was running on an extremely minimal amount of sleep as-is...
- www.noripcord.com
2013-07-01
★★★★★
Eleanor Friedberger's favorite subject is relationships--and, refreshingly, not just the romantic kind. 2011's Last Summer found her ruminating on a relationship with a city, and all of the smaller emotional pieces to that particular puzzle. Personal Record is, as the title implies, even more focused on the micro. There's not necessarily a uniting theme on this one, though, as the characters in these songs and their dealings with one another are so sharply defined as to be almost painful...
- cokemachineglow.com
2013-06-22
★★★★★
Goto commentsLeave a commentTweetShare No Personality For the most part, we can all agree that old rock n' roll is generally awesome. But you know those hit records from the fifties and sixties that just... aren't so amazing? The ones that good kids and their parents were probably into? Pat Boone, Dinah Shore and several other artists kept spitting out weird, white-bread covers of soul songs...
- www.mxdwn.com
2013-06-20
★★★★★
The sweet, warm June rain of Eleanor Friedberger's debut Last Summer in 2011 represented a leap forward from the sometimes cutesy psych of her sibling, seedling band Fiery Furnaces. Quirkier than Miranda July, as heartfelt as punk-rock and boasting a clutch of songs that tightly focused on one hipster summer in NYC, it was a piece of pop finery only matched by the likes of Ted Leo or Elvis Costello at their most accessible...
- drownedinsound.com
2013-06-12
★★★★★
When Eleanor Friedberger's solo debut Last Summer came out in 2010, it sounded like a skittish, unreliable friend delivering on a long-ago-made promise to be there for you more often. Her work with the Fiery Furnaces - hell, the entire dynamic of the band - was too-often filtered through the the kaleidoscopic ramblings of her brother Matt, and Eleanor's sultry Dylanesque purr had to fight to be heard over whatever restlessness went on underneath it...
- www.thelineofbestfit.com
2013-06-12
★★★★★
It's hard not to think of Eleanor Friedberger as a friend. The most approachable member of Fiery Furnaces, her sophomore solo release Personal Record follows in her 2011 debut's footsteps; songs sprinkled with intimate fragments of the singer's life. However, Friedberger has managed to pull a neat trick: even when decorated with specific details ("She was wearing a pair of overalls/So I sang 'Come On Eileen'"), songs cut straight to the universal emotion behind the action...
- filtermagazine.com
2013-06-08
★★★★★
There's a moment in Noah Baumbach's new film Frances Ha where the movie's frantic, mischievous star Greta Gerwig takes flight. She's running down the street as David Bowie's "Modern Love" plays on the soundtrack (in a homage to a similar scene in Leos Carax's 1986 film Mauvais Sang) and as the song builds her dance moves grow more daring, her legs kicking out, her body leaving the ground as it might just ascend to the top of the Empire State Building and onto the stars...
- www.cmj.com
2013-06-09
★★★★★
8
Critical Mass
Release Date: June 4, 2013Label: Merge
If Eleanor Friedberger's nostalgia-minded 2011 solo debut was "a Polaroid slide show", it's no stretch to call her sophomore effort, Personal Record, a very well-maintained Instagram account...
- www.spin.com
2013-06-06
★★★★★
As one half of proggy brother-sister duo the Fiery Furnaces, the songs Eleanor Friedberger used to sing sounded like pop music as imagined by Thomas Pynchon, or maybe Carmen Sandiego: tirelessly globe-trotting, breathlessly complex, and just a little cartoony. In a voice that sounds like a perfect cross between Patti Smith, Stephen Malkmus, and a 19th century diction coach, Friedberger spun elaborate, wildly fictional travelogues (usually written by her brother, Matthew); in one Fiery Furnaces...
- pitchfork.com
2013-06-05