Each repeat listen reveals new tunnels through the band's complex of melody and sound, and each turn feels new and untrodden.  Full text...

Shapes and Sizes have created an album of on all fours, with fast changeups and a scientific approach to dynamics and texture—pretty much par for the course zeitgeist-wise.  Full text...

Split Lips finds the band wandering even farther off the edge of the map stylistically, and they couldn't be headed in a better direction.   Full text...

Listen to even a few tracks and you’ll find that avoiding resolution is the familiar formula here. People may even accuse the band of subverting their own appeal given how often a wicked moment gives way to, as vocalist Caila Thompson-Hannant suggests in the interlude “Grassy Corner, a Sunset,” “the infinitely abstract.” People may even label this album as “odd,” though it’s worth noting that it’s not the component parts that merit this modifier; it’s the entire brimming exuberant package that ducks and covers whenever something resembling a rock-driven passage surfaces.   Full text...

Split Lips is the kind of record that’s both fun on the road and at home and which all the Architecture In Helsinki and Joggers fans will gobble up. Every song is interesting, but like the latter group, sometimes the songwriting can’t live up to the musical ideas or energy.  Full text...

Shapes + Sizes celebrate spontaneity and restless energy, and though they pause for the occasional melancholy drone, they quickly return to making a trebly, echoing racket, anchored by a rotation of singers so in-the-moment that they often ignore the lyrics in order to improvise impromptu sound effects.  Full text...