| Heartbeats Accelerating | | |
| Tracks:
| • | Heartbeats Accelerating | | • | I Eat Dinner | | • | Rainbow Ride | | • | Mother Mother | | • | Love Is | | • | DJ Serenade | | • | I'm Losing You | | • | Hit and Run Love | | • | Leave Me Be | | • | St. James Hospital (Cowboys Lament) |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Their previous album, the fine but underappreciated Love Over and Over, had found the McGarrigles nodding cautiously toward more explicit pop and rock accents, but their cult-sized audience was likely hoping for a return to the more acoustic atmosphere of earlier records. At first listen, then, Heartbeats Accelerating is a modest shock, laced with coproducer Pierre Marchand's (Sarah McLachlan) moody synthesizers and a slightly chillier feel to the album's overall sound. Yet those modern elements ultimately work, underlining the songs' more fatalistic perspective, especially on the set's bittersweet zenith, "I Eat Dinner." In her inventory of a divorced mother's solitary meal, Kate McGarrigle captures no less than the death of romance, her very restraint making its dry-eyed contemplation of life after love quietly devastating. --Sam Sutherland
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| Customer Reviews:
 In Their Prime April 23, 2004
James Carragher (New York)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Heartbeats Accelerating (or, considering the content of most of these songs, Heartbreaks Accelerating) dates to Kate and Anna McGarrigle's best years. Their writing draws from memories of youth, experiences as adults and parents, and collisions with mortality. Their harmonies are complex, buoyant or delicate, and backed with quirky arrangements, often featuring strings or liberal use of the accordion, not exactly a front line pop music instrument north of the Rio Grande. The best songs here are Heartbeats (more prominently recorded by Linda Ronstadt), Love Is (covered by Emmylou Harris), I Eat Dinner, and, my personal favorite since our last child just moved out of the house, I'm Losing You. I listen to this CD and the later Matapedia and think it is too bad the sisters have over the last years faded somewhat into the background in their performances, ceding space to their (to my mind) less interesting children.
 A Few More Years Pass November 24, 2003
Marc Ruby™ (Warren, MI USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This album represents a maturing on the part of this team from their original folk roots. This album is tightly conceived, and if it lakes the brightness of their first album, it has gained a great deal of depth and musicality. Also notable is their continued use of material from Phillippe Tatarchef (Rainbow Ride and D.J. Serenade), whose lyrics always surprise and intrigue. There is an intelligence in their musical choices that belies the apparent simplicity of their songs. In a way Heartbeats Accelerating is about the exquisite contrast between the excitement of the title cut and the anguish of I Eat Dinner - both songs that are, at the core about love that is somewhere else, but one talks about anticipation and other about loss and regret. The McGarrigle's use this tension brilliantly right through to the final chorus of St. James Hospital. Love blooms and proceeds inevitably to some final injury. The arrangements are often quite subtle and varied. The two voices, with their nature slightly edgy twang, can move from French chanson styling to pure country without missing a beat. Always though, they are two gentle voices that stand out, even in a storm. This is a sensitive, if somewhat sad album that stand up well to repeated listening.
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