"Brad Armstrong sings like Richard Buckner at a closed-casket viewing and favors intensely Book of Revelations imagery. 13ghosts continue to reinvent themselves with every song, trying on new sounds and styles to see what fits…The Strangest Colored Lights is a persistently somber, mostly humorless album, but it's so musically vigorous that you wouldn't mind if they dwelt on death for the rest of their lives."
-Pitchfork on “The Strangest Colored Lights” (7.6 Rating)
"'This ain’t a precision rock show,' the lead singer of 13ghosts announced during the band’s set, likening their approach to firing buckshot and seeing what hit. And who’d want it to be? Cloaked in darkness by the Creekside Lounge’s black-draped walls, 13ghosts brought to mind all those not-quite-tight three-guitar rock ‘n’ roll bands you love with their mix of southern rock, boogie, and vigorous guitar squall. I knew them by name only when I walked in, but had three CDs in my pocket by the time I walked out."
-PopMatters on 13ghosts Live @ SXSW 2009
“Cicada is chockablock with ideas, encompassing an impressive breadth of styles and sounds-- sharp Southern rock, drowsy gospel, laidback 1970s pop, buzzing indie lo-fi, Sparklehorse-style self-destructive folk, percolating lounge rhythms, threadbare Americana, a little country, a little blues, a few drum machines and some George Harrison-style guitarwork-- all jammed together in 21 tracks with unusual arrangements, jostling transitions, and abrupt endings that musically enact the lyrics' obsession with untimely death and departure.”
-Pitchfork on “Cicada” (7.8 Rating)
"Authenticity is a word that is often thrown around in music circles, and while it’s hard to pin down exactly what quality it is that makes a band authentic, you know it when you hear it. 13ghosts are a band that possess that indefinable quality. They have been around for a long time, and they sound like it."
-Wireless Bollinger
“…this group displays enough offhand soul and talent to last a half dozen bands a long run. A record worth diving into…”
-Pop Culture Press
"The band may be haunted by the past and by things which are lost, buried, or hidden, but the creativity recorded on The Strangest Colored Lights assures that 13ghosts will not languish unheard and unseen. It’s more than a whisper. It is alive."
-popmatters
“13 Ghosts’s music acknowledges the realness of death but at the same time exposes the wonders of life…Underneath the band’s haunting vocals and incredibly textured, atmospheric sounds, its soul and story creep out of a layer of mourning and beg to be heard.”
- Vice Magazine
“Cicada is a joyous album that has no problem practically punching the mundane boredom of emo with the despair of folk.”
-Skyscraper
”…a haunting, honest, and distinctly American album.”
-SE Performer on “Cicada”
“…its core of sparkling melody rewards listeners with its abounding, unexpected musical twists.”
- The Daily Texan
”Cicada is a ragged, sprawling dumpster of varied visions, a record that haunts, rocks and also entices you to sip whiskey on the rickety front porch.”
- New Haven Advocate
“Whatever 13ghosts is doing at any particular moment, it seems to sound perfectly natural.”
- Orlando Sentinel
“The tunes flow along like a dark folk-rock river, almost silent as it whispers over a bed of mossy pebbles, and aggressively noisy as it waterfalls over a jagged precipice.”
- Miami New Times
“Here’s a record that has a serious identity crisis, but that crisis is the crux.”
-Real Detroit Weekly on “Cicada”
”13 Ghosts' genre-hopping never comes off as forced or desperate. The songs sound natural and perfectly fit into the skin of whatever style they happen to be presented in.”
-Asheville Disclaimer
“Cicada remains a two-part record that at times feels like a pair of separate but harmonious song cycles playing side by side, successfully challenging conventional notions of album cohesion.”
-San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Like the insect the band’s album is named for, perhaps 13ghosts has to wait underground before it emerges and heads for the bright lights.”
-Illinois Entertainer
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"Well I came on one of them in the gutter out front of my house, mewling like a runt piglet with blood coming out of his nose and mouth. And the other one was standing over him with his hamhock fist all clotted up and wet. And one of them was sitting on the curb playing a guitar, and one of them was dead and buried in a nameless cemetery southwest of town, and nobody talked about him much, except he was in everything they said. And one of them was tinkering with a bundle of wires and didn’t say anything at all, about dead boys or nothing else. And one of them was holding two babies and two more were on his back, cavorting and capering all around, slapping him in the side of the face and pulling on his ears. And I said, Christ, ain’t you all some band of miscreants? And the one in the gutter said, What of it, old man?
I came to know of the one dead boy in the following days, when I took these boys in and fed them and cleaned them up. The one with the wires wouldn’t come in the house any and sat outside on the porch, rain or shine, tinkering. And the one with the guitar wouldn’t take anything to drink or eat, he just sat playing and looking down at his fingers with his eyes closed. The two that had been beating on each other calmed down some when I got whiskey in them, and they soon was like best brothers, loving on each other and talking about their record, which they’d made, they told me, in the devil’s studio. I took that to mean Muscle Shoals, where they make big rock records down to the city, but they told me, no, it ain’t there, and the one looked like he’d punch the other one if I said anything to that, so I didn’t.
Now, before you ask, the one with the babies was so sweet and kind that nobody could say any wrong word about him, so I gave him my own bedroom and he didn’t come out again until it was time to go.
That dead one had shot hisself in the face some time before, and I came to understand that he’d left these other boys with something broken in them, and they was like a record player, skipping and skipping over the same song until they got it right. Like being in hell, if you ask me, but they had that record they were talking about, the two fighting ones, and they said they’d put it on if I had any more whiskey, so I got a bottle and my little tape player and we put it on. It was some dark stuff, mind you, and I had more than one drink listening to it, but there was a kind of fierceness to it, and a kind of earnestness, and also a kind of naivety, like maybe they had heard some of those old records from the radio we used to listen to on Sunday evening after we had got home from church, or if they hadn’t you couldn’t hardly tell of it, and they weren’t scared of it any, and it sounded to me like they had got after the idea of this dead one and worried at him and worried at his death like a goddamn dog until they’d finally and at last by Christ gotten to something about it.
Who are you all calling out to? I asked them, for something to say.
Ain’t nobody out there to call to, ain’t you heard that yet old man? one or both of them said, I couldn’t tell which one any more, they seemed to me like they was becoming the same person, and they were just sitting there on my sofa, smiling like the cat that ate the cannibal. And looking one to the other, the both of them had the same eyes, the same cuts and bruises, and in the same places, and they was wearing the same clothes even. And I stood up, that music was strange, it was making my head do something strange, and I staggered over to the front porch and looked out at it, and the one tinkering on the wires looked up at me, and it was the same face, that same goddamn face, smiling up at me like he knew what I didn’t, and the one playing the guitar didn’t look up, he didn’t have to, I could see that same hair hanging down over his face, all streaked and clotted up with blood, and behind me I heard my bedroom door swing open, and that damn old floorboard that has creaked the same way for fifty years just sang out, and I didn’t have to see that clotted up hair on them babies’ heads as they shouted out at me. I didn’t have to at all. Time to go, old man, they said, time to go, and it was, it was that time and I knew of it then, and I laid right down where I stood and didn’t get up anymore."
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