| Rollingstones |
 He looks like an Allman brother, sings like Beck and suffers the dating travails of George Costanza. But on his sprawling double-CD debut, Benji Hughes is unmistakably — and always hilariously — his own man. The North Carolina-and-Tennessee-reared artist specializes in laugh-out-loud vignettes about hipster culture, with catchy, eccentrically arranged songs that straddle folk, lounge, electro, synth rock and a half-dozen other styles. There are tales of concertgoing and shrooming ("I Went With Some Friends to See the Flaming Lips") and starry-eyed odes to unattainable hotties ("Tight Tee Shirt"). Hughes sings in the drowsy voice of a slacker, but he has a poet's ear for telling details, and his mountain-man beard hides a wry smile. When Hughes' drolleries and hopeless romanticism combine, the effect can be sublime. In the stately "All You've Got to Do Is Fall in Love," he croons, "Wouldn't it be sweet if you could be in love with me/The way that I'm in love with you?/It's so easy to do/All you've got to do is fall in love with me." Hughes' logic — like his tunes and his wit — is unimpeachable....full text |
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| Yahoo |
Benji Hughes' beard is not listed once on the inlay for his debut album "A Love Extreme", nor can we find reference to it as a fully paid up member of his band anywhere else, yet it's worth stopping to dwell over its importance. Like Grandaddy, pre-sexy Kings Of Leon or ZZ Top, acts whose whiskers have literally preceded them - and which you can take as a seal of authenticity if you like, for the music that festers beneath - Benji Hughes deserves kudos both for his bulky face foliage, which must surely be vast enough to thatch a medium sized townhouse, and the accordingly extraordinary girth of his songwriting.
As if following a fated lineage, those three aforementioned peers all feature in his tapestry of influence, whether through a constant cross-eyed relationship with melody (Grandaddy), an awestruck relationship with the ladies (ZZ Top) or because he veers their way on one of his many style detours (coarse-voiced Kings vim pepping up "The Mummy"). But if that's so, it's like they've all been stitched together by the Jim Henson workshop into an oversized fuzzy, crooning caricature; dishevelled, lovable and with a stuffed felt heart of some significance....full text |
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| Yahoo |
Benji Hughes' beard is not listed once on the inlay for his debut album "A Love Extreme", nor can we find reference to it as a fully paid up member of his band anywhere else, yet it's worth stopping to dwell over its importance. Like Grandaddy, pre-sexy Kings Of Leon or ZZ Top, acts whose whiskers have literally preceded them - and which you can take as a seal of authenticity if you like, for the music that festers beneath - Benji Hughes deserves kudos both for his bulky face foliage, which must surely be vast enough to thatch a medium sized townhouse, and the accordingly extraordinary girth of his songwriting.
As if following a fated lineage, those three aforementioned peers all feature in his tapestry of influence, whether through a constant cross-eyed relationship with melody (Grandaddy), an awestruck relationship with the ladies (ZZ Top) or because he veers their way on one of his many style detours (coarse-voiced Kings vim pepping up "The Mummy"). But if that's so, it's like they've all been stitched together by the Jim Henson workshop into an oversized fuzzy, crooning caricature; dishevelled, lovable and with a stuffed felt heart of some significance....full text |
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| Prefixmag |
| A boozeblasted and chunky double LP of sly, crooned come-ons drifting above music that pinballs wildly from dirty folk to playful blues, A Love Extreme finds Benji Hughes’ laconic drawl and hotpants genre splits reminding you of a time when Beck was tossing off spinning, funk-sweat classics like Midnite Vultures with a freewheeling and smirky ease. From the skipping and headbobbed lilt of the skeletal crunch of “Tight Tee Shirt” to the falsetto psuedo-soul of “You Stood Me Up” to the strange electromash of noise, beats and laments that is “Even If,” Hughes’ greatest gift is that while he might remind you Mr. Hanson, he doesn’t make you miss him, either. A Love Extreme giddily steals from and collides with a kaleidoscope of genres, all without a trace of modern guilt....full text |
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