| Love's Crushing Diamond | |
| Type: | Studio |
| Artist: | Mutual Benefit |
| Cover: | Love's Crushing Diamond (Front Cover).png |
| Label: | Soft Eyes (re-released by Other Music Recording Company) |
| Next Title: | Skip a Sinking Stone |
| Next Year: | 2016 |
Love's Crushing Diamond is the debut studio album by American band Mutual Benefit. It was originally released as a limited edition 250 LP run by Soft Eyes on October 7, 2013. Other Music Recording Company re-released the album on a larger scale on December 3, 2013. The album was recorded on the road and at Ohm Recording Studio in Austin, TX, Temporary Autonomous Zone in St Louis, MO, and Thee Hallowed Sound Dungeon in Boston, MA.
Love's Crushing Diamond received widespread acclaim from contemporary music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 84, based on 18 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim".
Ian Cohen of Pitchfork Media praised the album, stating, "Love’s Crushing Diamond is not folk in the escapist sense either, though it was recorded during a “year of notable absences” in San Diego, Austin and Boston. Many of these songs take place in mundane, unglamorous locales—city trains, mining towns, cornfields, motel rooms. And in Lee's point of view, you need to discover a little space within those places that you can call your own and then invite some people to share it with. Yeah, it does skew kinda hippie, as Lee’s lyrics detail picking roses by the lake and how a river can’t help but keep on keepin’ on. That’s perfectly fine within the scheme of Love’s Crushing Diamond, which always sounds populated in a way that stresses its central themes of getting your own shit together so you’re better prepared to care for someone else."