★★★★★
It's a shame that Matthew Dear's career has continued to stray further and further away from the dancefloor--while his latter-day role as a post punk-informed, ostensibly pop bandleader has yielded some intermittently fantastic results, Dear was arguably at his best when marrying the accessibility of funk and pop to the rhythmic creativity of Detroit techno. As such, the concept of a Matthew Dear remix package, dragging things back in a more club-orientated direction, is always appealing...
- www.xlr8r.com
2013-02-08
★★★★★
After making his name as one of the Midwest's foremost sonic auteurs at microhouse's peak, Matthew Dear's spent the last five years or so reshaping himself into a producer whose electronic-based music pitches toward America's past-rock glories as much as global dance music climes...
- www.residentadvisor.net
2012-10-18
★★★★★
Matthew Dear's CV certainly doesn't give the impression of a shrinking violet. On the contrary, he is well regarded as a talented producer and multi-instrumentalist, not to mention co-founder of pioneering, independent record label Ghostly International, home to a number of other high-profile electronic artists, such as Gold Panda and School Of Seven Bells...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-09-04
★★★★★
Producer/band-leader extraordinaire Matthew Dear long ago distanced himself from the title of "techno wunderkind," and on Beams, his latest for Ghostly International, he moves even further from his roots, embracing the post-punk influences of his youth on his most pop-tinged record to date...
- www.xlr8r.com
2012-08-30
★★★★★
Hand on heart, I don't really know how I feel about Matthew Dear's latest album Beams yet. After a dozen or so plays now, there are days when I fear that Dear has started to outstay his welcome. The insistent and addictive monotony that tied much of Black City and Asa Breed together is here extrapolated to a point where the record seems sparse, at times a husk of his previous work and - more scathingly - the genres he is borrowing from...
- drownedinsound.com
2012-08-30
★★★★★
Matthew Dear has always been a producer first, DJ second, and songwriter third. I'm not sure if he would agree with this assessment, but it's not unreasonable. Birthed under the tutelage of the Detroit techno gods, his productions have run the gamut of electronic genres -- from spatial bleep-laden slow-burners to canonical big-room anthems -- culminating in 2010's swirling masterpiece, Black City...
- thephoenix.com
2012-08-30
★★★★★
Arguably the least Texan-sounding Texan recording artist in musical history, Matthew Dear makes intelligent, almost lugubrious electronic art-pop. Influenced by his college days in Michigan and Detroit's position as the birthplace of techno, Dear initially had more impact as dance act Audion than as the maker of two largely ignored albums back in 2003 and 2004...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2012-08-30
★★★★★
Beams is the fifth album proper released under Matthew Dear's name and is also his least electronic-sounding record to date. Over the course of almost a decade, the Texas-born, Detroit-raised Dear has been pushing the envelope with his pop meets techno sound, but on this album the Ghostly mainstay has reached more into live instrumentation, sampling drums and employing a more typical rock palette...
- exclaim.ca
2012-08-30
★★★★★
The British television network Channel 4 came up with an idea the other day, a tribute to clubbing, a six hour non-stop broadcast of "some of the best DJs from around the world". A surreal experience doesn't do it justice; Grandmaster Flash in a massive empty room sweating over a laptop and turntables while a man in the background wears a gas mask and presses buttons and a woman just stands there, nodding her head a bit...
- www.noripcord.com
2012-08-30
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