★★★★★
It's been impossible to ignore the recent meteoric rise of EDM juggernaut Skrillex (aka Sunny Moore). Along with other producers like Avicii and Swedish House Mafia, Skrillex is responsible for reigniting America's interest in electronic music and more notably dubstep, a genre that had been relatively unrepresented in the mainstream. Before Moore was irritating parents with his Grammy-winning thunderous bass wobbles, he was the frontman for post-hardcore outfit From First To Last...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-04-04
★★★★★
Skrillex's "Recess."
(Atlantic / March 25, 2014)
...
- www.latimes.com
2014-03-26
★★★★★
After the success of 2010?s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, thousands of bedroom producers spent sleepless nights attempting to become the next Skrillex. By 2011, the entire landscape of electronic music had shifted, the mechanized bass-quake and distorted vocals in half-time infiltrating everything from trance to rave techno...
- consequenceofsound.net
2014-03-26
★★★★★
Add "being in on the joke" to the long list of things that Skrillex does well. The EDM producer kicks off his surprise debut LP "Recess" with a track called "All's Fair in Love and Brostep," winking at the fact that he's responsible for making bass music safe for frat-house jello wrestling pools. The 26-year-old Sonny Moore has always been a lot smarter than that reputation would suggest though, and "Recess" is his most ambitious and varied collection...
- www.latimes.com
2014-05-06
★★★★★
He's a festival-circuit megastar who's already put an indelible sonic imprint on the early stretch of this decade, but it still feels like Sonny Moore got a raw deal. Sure, the fact Skrillex became the face of dubstep did plenty to rile the "purists," but the Tempa-12"-hoarder set wasn't responsible for reducing an unsubtle but genuinely adventurous and accessibly weird artist to a living meme...
- pitchfork.com
2014-03-21
★★★★★
7
Reviews
Release Date: March 18, 2014Label: OWSLA/Big Beat/Atlantic
"Dance like it hurts to stand still," sings Chance the Rapper on "Coast Is Clear," the fifth track on Recess, Skrillex's stealth-released debut album, and a song that is, hands down, the last thing you'd expect to hear on anything bearing Skrillex's name...
- www.spin.com
2014-03-21
★★★★★
Skrillex, Recess
Man, I feel old. Is this what the kids are listening to these days? (I'm 22.) There's something tremendously uninspiring about so-called "brostep," even distasteful - its desecration of the U.K. bass cultures to which it owes its existence, maybe, or a lack of subtlety so pronounced it's almost aggressive...
- prettymuchamazing.com
2014-03-22
★★★★★
Skrillex (aka Sonny Moore) is one of the biggest names in electronic music, but despite stadium-filling shows and six Grammy Awards, Recess is the EDM superstar's first official full-length. The album shows he's progressed since bursting onto the scene four years ago, but it's definitely not going to change the minds of those who think he's ruining dance music...
- nowtoronto.com
2014-03-20
★★★★★
Skrillex got famous by careening recklessly toward the future. The hits that made him dubstep's biggest star, from 2010's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" to 2011's "First of the Year (Equinox)," sounded less like songs and more like a Transformer eating Voltron: He used otherworldly robot noise instead of instruments, sampled viral YouTube snippets instead of classic vinyl, and replaced verse-chorus-verse structure with gigantic drops - tense buildups that led into sudden, inevitable bass...
- www.rollingstone.com
2014-03-21