The Great Divide Review

Aaron Dessner produces and it shows, which is both the appeal and the problem. The arrangements are patient and detailed, all brushed drums, layered acoustics and slow builds that let a chorus arrive twice the size it started, and Kahan's voice has grown into something rougher and more useful than the one on Stick Season. When the writing is specific, and it often is, he remains the best working songwriter about the small town you leave and cannot stop describing: the parents, the winter, the jobs, the friend who stayed.

Reviews split on length rather than on quality. Seventeen songs and more than seventy minutes is a lot of the same tempo and the same emotional register, and the back half returns to images the front half already used, which is where the cooler write ups landed. The warmest reviews called it the fullest statement he has made and the most skeptical called it the one nobody was willing to cut, and both are describing the same record.

Trimmed to eleven tracks it would sit a grade higher. As released it is a very good album that keeps stopping to tell you it is one, and the sequencing never gives the sad songs anywhere to breathe.