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"Momentary Masters" is the third solo studio album by American musician Albert Hammond Jr. released on July 31, 2015 through Vagrant Records in the US and through Infectious Music in the UK.
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 69, based on 15 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
User Album Review
Away from the substances that informed his early solo work, the Strokes man's third album is older, wiser but no less exciting
‘Momentary Masters’ is his most satisfying, cohesive record yet, and, in many ways, his most personal. He’s described lead single ‘Born Slippy’ – bright and ebullient on the outside, but with undercurrents of self-doubt – as a song about what happens “when what has defined you for a long time isn’t there anymore,” and given his well-publicised problems with drugs and the always-ambiguous nature of his day-job, there are any number of ways you can interpret a line like, “Every time you stop, I begin”. Elsewhere, the slower, synth-textured ‘Coming To Getcha’ is styled as a conversation between Hammond and the late friend the album is dedicated to – a conversation which only seems to make sense in snatches (“She never made it back, she’s stuck in transit”) but which is clearly loaded with meaning.
Hammond is still growing into this solo artist thing, and it’s easy to forget that it’s been seven years since his last release, recorded at a time when he was spending thousands of dollars a week on cocaine and heroin. In some respects, ‘Momentary Masters’ is the work of a different person: older and wiser, but still receptive to wonder and capable of naivety. It seems pointless to speculate on how – or if – Hammond’s growth as a songwriter will impact on The Strokes, but for the man himself, this album registers as a significant achievement.
Reviewed by Barry Nicolson for nme.com.
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