Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics

Consumer Guide:
  User's Guide
  Grades 1990-
  Grades 1969-89
  And It Don't Stop
Books:
  Book Reports
  Is It Still Good to Ya?
  Going Into the City
  Consumer Guide: 90s
  Grown Up All Wrong
  Consumer Guide: 80s
  Consumer Guide: 70s
  Any Old Way You Choose It
  Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough
Xgau Sez
Writings:
  And It Don't Stop
  CG Columns
  Rock&Roll& [new]
  Rock&Roll& [old]
  Music Essays
  Music Reviews
  Book Reviews
  NAJP Blog
  Playboy
  Blender
  Rolling Stone
  Billboard
  Video Reviews
  Pazz & Jop
  Recyclables
  Newsprint
  Lists
  Miscellany
Bibliography
NPR
Web Site:
  Home
  Site Map
  Contact
  What's New?
    RSS
Carola Dibbell:
  Carola's Website
  Archive
CG Search:
Google Search:
Twitter:

Jon Hopkins

  • Immunity [Domino, 2013] A-
  • Singularity [Domino, 2018] **

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Immunity [Domino, 2013]
Trailing such dubiously prestigious credits as Coldplay, King Creosote, and the later Brian Eno, U.K. keyboardist Hopkins established his solo name back in 2013 with this album, the kind of conceptual electronica only techno aesthetes expect anyone to dance to. And for most of us, it will function just as nicely now as it did then--as rhythmic mood music that strolls back and forth across the line between the mildly bracing and the casually kind. Notice, for instance, how the sizzly midtempo zips and thwocks of the unhurried 10-minute "Collider" gain volume and texture before they resolve into the brief, string-fed piano etude "Abandon Window." This is the Eno we weren't smart enough to dream of back when all options were open. A-

Singularity [Domino, 2018]
Five years later, the same techno and classical strategies and sonorities less cunningly, therapeutically, and for that matter singularly deployed ("Emerald Rush," "Everything Connected") **