Michael Edwards, Exclaim!- “HONORS is an album that doesn’t have to try hard. It gets by on its ample charm and songs that are hardly obvious, yet creep up slowly on the listener. This is very good stuff.”

David Greenberger, Metroland – “The lyrics are rich with observations, metaphors and introspection, often in slivered and resonant phrases. The whole may make itself apparent later, but at first blush it’s like the facets of a diamond, each one sparkling and reflecting. …The album’s closing title track is a tour de force of anthemic bearing wedded to campfire sing-along.”

Marty Sartini Garner, FILTER – “HONORS is a major set of big-time bedroom pop, grand enough to matter and particular enough to find meaning in the quotidian.”

Tris McCall, Newark Star Ledger – “On ‘HONORS’ and ‘Adult VaCa,’ they sing intervals that aren’t ordinarily heard in pop music, and they do it so sweetly and with so much charm and confidence that they full justify comparisons to Eric Matthews and Magnetic Fields.”

Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork – “. . . impeccably recorded, tender, balanced, and gorgeously organic.”

Matt Fink, Under The Radar – “A largely indefinable mix of somber dream pop, wispy ballads, and laidback psych-pop, the debut of husband and wife duo Ben + Vesper is the intuitive sound of two musical misfits mapping their own internal world in song. . . the album retains a remarkably singular feel, with every melody bending when you least expect it and every arrangement unraveling by its own innate logic.”

Michael Metivier, PopMatters – “Characters, stories, and events express modern joy and anxiety, calm and confusion in relevant and distinct ways. Too nuanced and complex for most one-word descriptors other than “music”, the Stampers’ tunes nonetheless have much to offer. All this could kill you, but it could also make you stronger.”

Kimberly Chun, Magnet Magazine – “. . . music that ebbs and flows with the post-rock rhythms of the Sea and Cake, the sweet and low bossa narcotica of sleepy Brazilian psych/rock and the banjo pluck of forest folk. The Stampers’ lightly entwined vocals drift throughout like earthbound angels, Vesper’s delicately coloring Ben’s with an intimacy that his fellow baritones Stephin Merritt and Scott Walker might blush at, then envy.”

Wendy Roby, Drowned In Sound – “And this brings us to [Sounds Familyre’s] latest bit of wonderful – a Ben + Vesper EP called LuvInIdleness, and though it is a terror to type it is heaven to listen to, with call-and-response vocals you find yourself singing along with before you quite meant to, as if they had you under some sort of choral spell. Also, Ben sure does have a touch of the Jonathan Richmans about him, and it really is heaven to hear a voice so clearly redolent of that sort of bass-addled cheekiness. Brilliant.”