Your editor tried to make some sort of pun off this band’s name but he can’t stop thinking about how he never read that Eragon book…
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[5.50]
Alfred Soto: This Estonian folk act knows the music: piano lines and bass runs fall into place, like dust mites settling on a coffee table. Irreproachable and too on the nose.
[6]
Iain Mew: I’m happy to see someone up the ante from the mere one dragon of my 2010 pick! Probably the only ante of any kind they’re upping, but the song’s effect is so relaxed and comfortable that it seems to slip outside of the passing of time, and sometimes that’s just what I want.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: The two dragons must be the bass and the segments of the instrumental that aim for “gorgeous” rather than “ballad,” because they’re the only striking things here.
[4]
Micha Cavaseno: Yeah, just imagine a circle where your life is slowly draining out the bottom like a spigot pooling out any nutrition, joy or whatever from this portentous crud rock. “I’ve seen it all before”; OH WHOOP DE DOO. Yeah, you haven’t seen much, because I think this ballad has been seen before about four hundred times minimum.
[0]
Will Adams: There may well be ten, twenty, a hundred songs out there that sound just like this: quiet rock that layers on its additional instruments gently and patiently. I will never know why I prefer this out of them all; all I can point to is how it hits me in this particular moment, and the personal resonance of a line like “I cannot walk in circles ’til I die.”
[7]
Crystal Leww: I love Coldplay, and I think that they are rightfully famous for this kind of music because they are the best at making this kind of music. Chris Martin is unafraid, especially on those first few albums, to let himself be obvious, saccharine and corny as fuck. Coldplay songs are quotable; their quote-worthy nature makes them the band that corny couples in love or corny loners going through breakups use to soundtrack their great moments. “Circles” has its quotable moments, especially with the chorus: “This is it: a real goodbye / I cannot walk in circles until I die” and the final “I’ve crossed a line I drew so long ago,” but its verses are unimaginative. Martin 1, Ewert 0, I guess.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: Maybe my problem with guitar music this decade is that I just can’t stand listening to people sing it whose first language is English. Restraint seems to be such a lost art.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: The irony, of course, is that Ewert & the Two Dragons have to walk around the same path a bunch to realize they need to get out of this circle. But that’s just how the process goes — you tell yourself “yeah, no more, I’m moving on” but then you find yourself re-entering that orbit, having to will yourself out once again. “Circles” captures this ritual well, and makes the most of repetition.
[7]
Brad Shoup: As I get older, I’m more frequently trying to unburden. I do it to co-workers at Friday happy hour, I did it to my fantasy football commissioner on Sunday, I do it to my wife. That last one makes me think I should write “for”: there’s venting to it, sure, but also the need to be known, to offer worries — so common, so particular — and to have them processed. You see the eyes, you watch the mouth, the eyebrows, the shoulders. I can’t offer any of that to Ewert or his Dragons. I can follow an imagined hike up and down a hill, lopes timed to the acoustic downstroke. I can dive into the descending figure that link the lines of the chorus. And I can feel something of his shrugging note that something’s changed, that he’s finally awoken through no internal mechanism. I dunno if that’s something.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: Personal taste is so arbitrary. Why do I still like the first Coldplay record, when I didn’t like Keane, or Snow Patrol, or the second and third Coldplay records? Some combination of the words, the voice, a beautifully shot video or dumb luck means that you develop an affinity for this band or that band that seems to defy reason. “Circles” isn’t extraordinary but it ticks some of the boxes I believe are determinants for me. I like the song’s modesty — it’s gentle and pensive, if perhaps aimless in the verses — and how it doesn’t try to shoehorn in anthemic, obvious tendencies like a U2 song or be all vague enough so that everyone can relate to a piece of it like early Snow Patrol. But mostly I like the chorus’ gentle soar, like a declaration the singer doesn’t quite believe but wants to. It isn’t for everyone but that makes me feel comfortable with it.
[9]