Come Upstairs Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Peter Reilly

Critical Essay by Peter Reilly

["Come Upstairs"] is not only filled with risks, some daring and impromptu, others cannily calculated, but also with a wry, grown-up self-awareness that is light years away from the squishy self-absorption of so many of [Carly Simon's] contemporaries. And it is an album that continues the upward arc of a career that's been a success almost from its very beginnings…. She has at least three songs in this new collection that are as good as anything she's done before; they offer further proof that she is the possessor of a dynamic sensibility unerringly in tune with the kind of world we're living in at the moment.

Come Upstairs and The Three of Us in the Dark are both brilliant examples of her ability to explore contemporary sexual tensions in a uniquely ambivalent style. She's moved away from her earlier intellectualized, girlish, even rather angry stance (You're So Vain, Vengeance, We're...
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