Eye on the Bat

Pitchfork 7.3/10 Writing with painful exactitude, El Kempner crafts a vividly rendered breakup album that’s always threatening to explode.

The Line of Best Fit 7/10 With Eye on the Bat, it’s as if the 29-year-old Kempner shares the pages of their diary, revealing their reveries, fears, and embarrassments. Kempner may be now-oriented, but they’re also the beneficiary of a newfound and bigger-picture awareness.

Rolling Stone 4/5 Songwriter El Kempner turns pandemic-era stress into great songs.

DIY 4/5 ‘Eye On The Bat’ always has a sense of fun bubbling underneath: as sad as the songs can be they were written by people who enjoy playing them, with the resultant performances marking this as a bonafide rock album.

All Music 4/5 Taken together, it's a keen and catchy, often poetic, always emotionally honest outing that raises the bar on the project's already well-established strengths.

Distorted Sound 8/10 Eye On The Bat feels like a record that should be prescribed to anyone going through difficult life moments and feelings of uncertainty, something to listen to as an assurance that they’re not alone and everything will work itself out in the end.

Loud and Quiet 7/10 Kempner admits that the stress of falling out of love created a side of them they aren’t proud of. With its stark vulnerability, the record is all the more impactful.

Spectrum Culture 75% The subtlety of Palehound’s songwriting is their greatest weapon — their well-crafted songs would play very well on college radio and will certainly not fade from memory, but more importantly, the way they express pain and loneliness is never too overwhelming to relate to.