Critical Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | (61/100) |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Mojo | |
| The Guardian | |
| PopMatters | (6/10) |
| Q Magazine | |
| Entertainment Weekly | (B) |
| Pitchfork Media | (2.8/10) |
| NME | (7/10) |
| SputnikMusic | (4.5/5) |
Hopes and Fears received generally favorable reviews from critics. Review aggregating website Metacritic reports a normalized score of 61/100, based on 18 reviews, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
Playlouder was very positive, calling it "one of the best albums you'll hear this year", as was Q Magazine, which gave it four out of five stars and said that "as a debut album, its confidence is right up there with Definitely Maybe." Allmusic, giving the album three and a half out of five stars, praised its "beautiful, emotive dalliance of instrumentation", singer Tom Chaplin's "rich vocals" and the band's "open-hearted ambition...audible on every song", while Rolling Stone said that the album "contains more hooks than most pop groups manage in their careers."
In a mixed 3-star review, The Guardian criticised the first half the album for "rely too heavily on Chaplin's show-stopping vocals" and for the "radio-friendly simplicity of the lyrics", while praising 'Can't Stop Now' as a "swooning, epic pop song" and 'Untitled 1's "booming drum and bass" on the second half. Drowned in Sound gave it 5 out of 10, accusing Keane of excessively imitating Coldplay (specifically comparing 'Your Eyes Open' and 'On a Day Like Today' with, respectively, 'Daylight' and 'Politik' on the band's album A Rush of Blood to the Head), criticising the album as being "stylistically all over the place" and its lyrics as being "immature" and "cringe-worthy". However, it gave credit to the album's "fine moments", praising lead single 'Somewhere Only We Know', for example, as "breathtaking".
Read more about this topic: On A Day Like Today (Keane Song)
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)