Send "Sam Roberts Band " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 For Sam Roberts, nostalgia is its own virtue. After three records, the Montreal rocker has by now surely earned the right to self-describe as a “veteran”, but like many of his musical countrymen, Roberts sounded like a grizzled old rock hand even in his impressionable early years. For all of the hooky pop on his 2003 full-length debut We Were Born in a Flame and the occasional, involved descents into jammy psychedelica on its 2006 follow-up, Chemical City, the deep commitment of Roberts and his band to a classic rock framework prematurely aged his songs, like a bottle of wine subjected to some sort of fermentation-speeding chemical mix.This came inescapably to the fore on 2008’s Love at the End of the World, whose first two singles both extolled the virtues of the backwards-gazing approach not only in musical but also in lyrical and visual terms. The peppy “Them Kids” saw Roberts assuming the lecturing generational-gap codger pose so blatantly with both his words (“The kids don’t know how to dance to rock and roll / they’re always on the phone, and they’ve always got to have control”); and his music video (a parody of The Sims that reduces decades of style shifts to the click of a mouse button) that it left you doubting the title’s mild irony. For the rolling piano anthem “Detroit ‘67”, meanwhile, Roberts escaped the decaying titular city for a more vital and exhilarating past, even playing dress-up as a vintage city cop in the video alongside copious archival footage of the once-prosperous Motor City....full text |
| Pastemagazine |
| Several acclaimed albums and an endless tour blur into their career, the members of the Sam Roberts Band have arguably climbed alongside the Tragically Hip on the list of always-rans hiding in plain sight north of the US border. Like the Hip, the band seems all but designed for giant open-air expositions to legions of committed but polite pan-rockist fans, and on Collider, Roberts and company continue to expand the basic sonic range of their offerings. At times, though, this range hampers the would-be vibe of the record, as the Strokes/Stripes-lite crunch of “Sang Froid” harshes the more effortless mellows of “Let It In,” “Without A Map” or “No Arrows.” One can’t help but sense that this would all flow better live, and in some ways the album feels like a slightly under-drawn blueprint for much more dramatic moves in the moment night-by-night. That said, it’s an easy listen, a friendly collection of solid journeyman jams and a decent starting place for the uninitiated....full text |
| Vancouversun |
| The tribal mentality that has served Sam Roberts and his Montreal crew so well is reflected in one of their new song titles: The Band vs. the World. Roberts may be the marquee name, but his group’s electrified fighting spirit could only come from a gang that’s as tight offstage as onstage. So it’s a bit curious that the first album credited to the Sam Roberts Band (instead of to the frontman alone) is their most outward-looking, featuring key contributions from guest players that appear to have changed the quintet’s internal chemistry, at least temporarily. It’s hard to imagine what many of Collider’s tracks would have sounded like without Stuart Bogie (of the Afrobeat collective Antibalas), whose woodwind riffs are woven into the album’s fabric rather than layered on top. Remove him from The Last Crusade, and you’d be left with a skeleton of a song; the Herculean sax in the climax is one of the most immediate thrills on a disc that offers more tension than release....full text |
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