★★★★★
Alongside his day job playing drums in Wilco, Glenn Kotche spends his time as a composer. Though not classically trained, he's fascinated by exploring the "sound possibilities" of seemingly random objects to fully render his compositions. Among his vast array of makeshift tools, he's used a re-appropriated fruit bowl attached to a contact mic, a "toiletry bag" full of portable instruments, as well as, of course, Delta faucets...
- consequenceofsound.net
2014-04-19
★★★★★
The complete title of this record is Kronos Quartet Plays The Music Of Bryce Dessner. You may not know of the classical vestiges of the Kronos Quartet despite their history spanning some 40 years and their work with the likes of David Bowie and Tom Waits. More likely, you are familiar with the work of Bryce Dessner in his guise as the guitarist for The National...
- www.beat.com.au
2013-12-28
★★★★★
On Aheym, the compositional style of Bryce Dessner is urgent, complicated, difficult and intense - acting in stark contrast to his guitarist role in Ohio band The National. Yet his compositions aren't part of a half-hearted side project, they're expressions of musical talent from someone who has worked with the likes of Sufjan Stevens, Philip Glass and Steve Reich...
- www.theaureview.com
2013-11-23
★★★★★
Bryce Dessner's day job as a guitarist in the National requires him to work in big, sweeping rock-song arcs, but he's also a classical composer, and in his side work--working on commssions for the American Composers Orchestra, collaborating on David Lang records --you can hear a furiously complicated musical mind chattering. Dessner's sensibility as a composer is furtive, urgent, intense--nothing at all, in other words, like his rock band...
- pitchfork.com
2013-11-09
★★★★★
The National guitarist Bryce Dessner was first commissioned by The Kronos Quartet to write something for a 2009 Brooklyn festival. "Aheym" - Yiddish for "Homeward" - was the result, a piece celebrating his immigrant grandparents' settling in the borough decades earlier. Opening with urgent triplets, it settles into an elegant braiding of interlaced lines that push the music forward in waves. The commission led to the three other pieces here...
- www.independent.co.uk
2013-11-07
★★★★★
Perhaps one of the underlying themes of The National' s excellent Trouble Will Find Me is the reality of both the emotional and existential cycles that folks are pretty much doomed to face. The adventurous instruments imply some sort of journey for transcendence, but frontman Matt Berninger's croaks suggest confinement -- a man who's trapped, yet optimistically looks at the outside world through a barred window...
- consequenceofsound.net
2013-11-07
★★★★★
A gripe aimed at pop musicians who take a stab at composing classical music is that they approach it from a pop-minded point of view, i.e., simplistic. In the case of the National guitarist Bryce Dessner, you'd have a hard time making those accusations stick since he was never fully immersed in the pop world to begin with...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-11-07
★★★★★
It's hard to find fault with almost anything the famed Kronos Quartet has touched this decade, a span that has seen them branch out to a vast array musics and cultures in the hopes of breaking down barriers. Floodplain continues their unearthing of lost gems, in this case sounds from regions who prosper from, and have been victims of, the bodies of water that surround or run through them...
- www.hour.ca
2010-11-02
★★★★★
Over their quarter-century ride, the Kronos Quartet have attained chamber-music superstardom while managing to have some serious fun. 25 Years is a highly recommended, no-fluff retrospective, where theserious side rules.
- ew.com
2010-08-27
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