AMG Review of Bull, The Balloon and The Family

Charles Spano
All Music Guide

Like the Weakerthans southerly, desert-bound (Phoenix, to be specific) cousins, Reubens Accomplice play angular and smart pop songs built on a sunny outlook to tweaker trailer park culture, strip malls majesty, and spacious adolescent plains. The band is markedly stronger on their more propulsive numbers -- take "Big Apple, Small Heart," for instance, which crunches power pop, Jimmy Eat World bombast, emo-psychedelia (points for new genre) and waves of noise all into the same song. The country-pop twang of "Underneath the Golden Grain" sounds like Limbeck, and "All Chorus" recalls the more McCartney-inspired moments of Saves the Day's In Reverie, but with an epic grandeur that band never really aims for. The Bull, the Balloon and the Family is not a perfect album, but Reubens Accomplice has made good on the promise of their debut, and created a record that is not only as melodic and moving as the average emo fare, but more rocking and more true to themselves and their experiences.