I can generally tell an album has merit if my daughter demands that I play the first track on a loop for her. This must seem idiosyncratic to you. From experience, though, I’ll tell you that the rule works; if the first track is listening to forever, then it follows that the rest actually turns out to be pretty damn good, too.
I think I like Long Time Coming more than you might get from reading my review, so let me just be clear: I really like it. I like art that appears at odds with itself, or is made up of parts that in the abstract don’t seem like they’d go well together. This record is a great example of why.
You can read my full review for Paste Magazine.