''Along the Way'' is a solo studio album by
Mark McGuire, a former member of
Emeralds
Emerald is a gemstone and a variety of the mineral beryl (Be3Al2(SiO3)6) colored green by trace amounts of chromium or sometimes vanadium.Hurlbut, Cornelius S. Jr. and Kammerling, Robert C. (1991) ''Gemology'', John Wiley & Sons, New York, p. ...
. It was released on
Dead Oceans
Dead Oceans is an American independent record label formed in 2007 and based in Bloomington, Indiana, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Dead Oceans is part of Secretly Group, which also ...
on February 4, 2014. "The Instinct" was released as a single from the album.
Critical reception
At
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 75, based on 14 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
[
Fred Thomas of ]AllMusic
AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databas ...
gave the album 4 stars out of 5, commenting that "''Along the Way'' represents the most ambitious material from McGuire to date, including deeper production and a plethora of various instruments that never made it into the laser-focused explorations of solo guitar that made up previous albums."[ He added: "It's an incredible feat for an artist to make something so enormous and unfolding without losing himself in the process, but McGuire has done just that, and as a result has turned in his most detailed and soul-searching work."][ Tom Fenwick of '' Under the Radar'' gave the album 7 stars out of 10, writing: "Carving out layers of sound from digital percussion, distant auto-tuned vocals, and washes of synthesized atmospherics, he surrounds them with his virtuosic playing of electric and acoustic guitar."][
]
Track listing
Personnel
Credits adapted from liner notes.
* Mark McGuire – vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, mandolin, santur, piano, keyboards, synthesizer, talkbox, percussion, drum machine, tape samples, electronics, effects, production, arrangement, mixing, photography, design, layout
* James Plotkin – mastering
* Daniel Murphy – design, layout
References
External links
*
{{Authority control
2014 albums
Dead Oceans albums
Indie rock albums by American artists