One of this town’s edgiest and most original solo performers.
He can create an aural atmosphere that’s as densely layered and eloquent as a Jim O’Rourke recording, and he does it right in front of you, with the simplest of gear.
Hit the road in that rusted beater of yours, crack open a
bottle of something reality-shifting, and crank up the homemade
transistor twang of Geoff Reacher.
A sometimes odd blend of country and artful electronica.
Geoff Reacher also likes to swear, and I admit, his cursing gives the song that badass edge it needs.
Landing somewhere between pre-1945 blues'n' country and a sound that owes more to post-1985 Detroit than anything else, the music here (electro-country, if you will) is singular, intense and personal: songs of love and death wrapped up in experimental electronics, a little bit of hip-hop and sequenced beats. An acquired taste? No, we like it very much already.
-- Irish Times
Geoff Reacher makes strange and wonderful music. He filters guitar licks through a sampling keyboard and drum machine, and then warbles country-ish songs over the tracks in a twangy Texas accent.
What do you get when you crossbreed southern folk with hip-hop and electronica? The answer is Geoff Reacher. His Orange Twin Records release, Avec Reacher C'est Plus Sur, is truly an exercise in creativity, bringing folk music to the 21st century. It's peculiar combination of finger picked acoustic guitars, heavily phased keyboards, electronic drumbeats and even occasional horn lines makes for a unique yet enjoyable experience.
-- Daily Texan
It would have been enough for Geoff Reacher to write and play these simple but effective country-blues-inflected songs, but he expands them into softly explosive song experiences, laced with vocal loops and gently loping beats. It's a highly engaging album by a singer/songwriter/producer to watch.
-- CD Universe
He's got
this crazy country vibe mixed perfectly with drum machines and
synthesizers (I think) and a bunch of other electronic stuff. The
songs, I think, could be played straight up, "Dude with an acoustic
guitar and kinda quirky lyrics-style," and they'd be pretty good. But
the things he does with all the mess around him--which apparently he
does mostly on his own with loop machines and whatnot--tie the songs
together in what sounds to me insanely fresh while remaining true to
some country/indie pop/pop song roots. It's also got a little hip-hop
and techno feel. For all the hype Beirut's Gulag Orkestar been getting, this one is doing for me what they said that one was supposed to do. The song I'm hearing right now contains this loop of a customer service
employee answering the phone. Meanwhile, Reacher's singing this country
song on top of it. Awesome. I dare say totally awesome.
He loops guitars, samples, and vocals all through some sort of foot pedal withcraftery to create a hazy, laid-back Summer swarm of sounds that fits the South like a glove.
Reacher's is surely a pop record, like those made by Gnarls Barkley, Beck, and Ladd. It will, nonetheless, strike tender ears oddly: a singer infused with the varied currents of American popular song, trained well (by Dave Van Ronk, of all people!) in the plucking and picking of the strings of the guitar he wields, all melding into the bed of beats, samples, and synths underneath. The ebb and flow of electro-acoustic elements, which - to keep the lines sufficiently blurred - includes the over-dubbed guitar parts interacting with whichever one the listener decides is the primary, as well as, to a lesser extent, manipulation of the voice, gives the record at times a headphones-required complexity. Still, the drama here lies more in how this music grew out of Reacher's approach to live performance ... few artists so completely part of popular-music traditions, as Reacher is, would seem so out-of-place performing in our standard forums; and few experimental artists have an approach as open-ended, likely to fall apart completely, not painting one's self into a corner, as he does.
Geoff Reacher does the near impossible by mixing country and blues sounds with (semi)modern electronics. His song Snarling Wheels Of Sin has basic acoustic guitar strumming as well as distorted sampled vocals and a wild melee of electronic sounds. To get at the sound of Geoff Reacher think Beck deconstructed, imagine his sound as it would be if he was not bent on creating the perfect electropop 3 minute ditty, but instead what would happen if he let the music take him in new unexpected directions.
We walk into the room where he was playing to see this urban-hick looking guy strumming away at an acoustic guitar and singing/rapping blues/country into a microphone while he controls the hip-hopish backbeats with pedals at his feet. We were shaken. We loved it. It was one of the most original live shows I've ever seen.
It’s a testament to the quality of this song, a MIDI-breakbeat-laden pop-country kissoff tune, that the liveness isn’t even an issue. The flourish of strings at the beginning draws you in, the drums tumble over themselves, and if Reacher can’t quite hit the high notes, well, it just serves to nicely undercut his message of ‘you’ll be dead in no time.'
-- Fluxblog
Reacher’s use of sequenced beats isn’t straight up and down; it’s a jarring, stop-and-start, helter-skelter combination. But the overall effect pulls together into a cohesive, funky rhythm.
His best recordings sound like genius songs trapped in a small town – they play mischievously with musical conventions in order to stave off boredom.
-- Arkansas Free Press
The music is innovative and clearly Geoff is creative. The vocals are country love songs in the strictest sense, but backed by a Moog and dance beats his music can hardly be called country. It can hardly be called anything. There is no label for what he does. It’s almost as if you have to see what he does to believe that it’s real, or to believe that it’s really one man that makes the sounds all tie together and seem complete.
-- Athens Exchange