Michael Fremer Rated 10/10 Music, 10/10 Sonics in his March 2010 reviews on musicangle.com!
Stereophile Recording of the Month, October 2009! Four stars for Performance and Four stars for Sonics!
Featured in Michael Fremer's Heavy Rotation in the January 2010 Issue of Stereophile!
Breaking loose from self-satisfied exile, Jim O'Rourke returns to pop life with the follow-through to Bad Timing. A musical stretching of limbs, The Visitor sends out classic vibrations, which, hopefully, will be broadcast via radio to speak to Jim's people.
The Visitor is a "Bad Timing"-like trip through ever-changing instrumental pastures. Thats right, you hungry mini-masses: no vocals but instead, the sounds of ORourke capering about from idea to idea, enriching his inspirations by playing every instrument on the record and mixing it all for maximum laughs and maximum tears. Theres a bit of something for everyones ears on The Visitor, a forty-minute fun ride that will appeal to the sentimentalist as well as the futurist.
In 2000, O'Rourke joined Wilco and helped engineer Yankee Hotel Foxtrot then, in 2004, produced their Grammy winning 2004 album "A Ghost Is Born". He then teamed up with Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche to form the group Loose Fur.
"...what is here may be one of the most coherent musical compositions he's recorded. Supposedly the culmination of 200 separate recording tracks, this 38-minute tone poem of sorts moves from moody and ruminative, in its early sections of unaccompanied acoustic guitar, to a layered blossoming, a tingly, shimmering mini-orchestra in full if repetitive flight of jittery cymbals, jaunty snare drum, repeated banjo figures, keyboard flourishes, and electronic flutes and saxophones that rise in a crescendo before falling away to a beautiful yet very simple piano melody backed by electronics. It is one of O'Rourke's least guarded - if not bull-blown sentimental - moments ever captured on tape." - Robert Baird, Stereophile, Vol. 32, No. 11, pg. 129
"...The Visitor is a fine, resonant, genial interlude in a varied career surely destined for more exclusive, unconformable surprise." - Robert Baird, Stereophile, Vol. 32, No. 11, pg. 129
Fremer Rated 10 out of 10 for Music, 9 out of 10 for Sound!
"ORourkes compositional and arranging skills plus the superb sound and packaging make this easily one of last years finest and most rewarding albums. It demands a quiet pressing and even the pressing plant cooperated. Really, dont miss this, I dont care what your musical tastes are." - Michael Fremer, Music Angle, Music 10/10, Sound 10/10
Click Here to read the entire review!
Features:
Vinyl LP
Gatefold jacket
Selections:
1. The Visitor
Stereophile Recording of the Month, October 2009! Four stars for Performance and Four stars for Sonics!
Featured in Michael Fremer's Heavy Rotation in the January 2010 Issue of Stereophile!
Breaking loose from self-satisfied exile, Jim O'Rourke returns to pop life with the follow-through to Bad Timing. A musical stretching of limbs, The Visitor sends out classic vibrations, which, hopefully, will be broadcast via radio to speak to Jim's people.
The Visitor is a "Bad Timing"-like trip through ever-changing instrumental pastures. Thats right, you hungry mini-masses: no vocals but instead, the sounds of ORourke capering about from idea to idea, enriching his inspirations by playing every instrument on the record and mixing it all for maximum laughs and maximum tears. Theres a bit of something for everyones ears on The Visitor, a forty-minute fun ride that will appeal to the sentimentalist as well as the futurist.
In 2000, O'Rourke joined Wilco and helped engineer Yankee Hotel Foxtrot then, in 2004, produced their Grammy winning 2004 album "A Ghost Is Born". He then teamed up with Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche to form the group Loose Fur.
"...what is here may be one of the most coherent musical compositions he's recorded. Supposedly the culmination of 200 separate recording tracks, this 38-minute tone poem of sorts moves from moody and ruminative, in its early sections of unaccompanied acoustic guitar, to a layered blossoming, a tingly, shimmering mini-orchestra in full if repetitive flight of jittery cymbals, jaunty snare drum, repeated banjo figures, keyboard flourishes, and electronic flutes and saxophones that rise in a crescendo before falling away to a beautiful yet very simple piano melody backed by electronics. It is one of O'Rourke's least guarded - if not bull-blown sentimental - moments ever captured on tape." - Robert Baird, Stereophile, Vol. 32, No. 11, pg. 129
"...The Visitor is a fine, resonant, genial interlude in a varied career surely destined for more exclusive, unconformable surprise." - Robert Baird, Stereophile, Vol. 32, No. 11, pg. 129
Fremer Rated 10 out of 10 for Music, 9 out of 10 for Sound!
"ORourkes compositional and arranging skills plus the superb sound and packaging make this easily one of last years finest and most rewarding albums. It demands a quiet pressing and even the pressing plant cooperated. Really, dont miss this, I dont care what your musical tastes are." - Michael Fremer, Music Angle, Music 10/10, Sound 10/10
Click Here to read the entire review!
Features:
Vinyl LP
Gatefold jacket
Selections:
1. The Visitor
